The 2020 Tokyo Olympics are over, but there’s one league that isn’t quite finished yet. Shooting Stars, the TV show and SBS’s first women’s soccer league, is in the middle of a tournament. The program, the pilot for which aired during the Korean New Year holiday in February, saw the dream of becoming a regular series come true after achieving the highest viewer rating for the timeslot, and has since seen an enthusiastic response to every one of its games since the season kicked off. Sports entertainment was essentially a men’s exclusive just one or two years ago, with programs like SBS’s Handsome Tigers and JTBC’s We Kick Together. However, with the success of Sporty Sisters—E Channel’s show starring legendary female players from several sports, including Pak Se-ri—and the cascading effect from the web series Athletic Fat from Today, which unearthed Kim Min Kyoung’s unexpected aptitude for exercise, the foundation has been set for a new era of women’s team sports entertainment.

The idea behind Shooting Stars is simple: Women come together and play soccer. But every part of that short sentence is important. There are many women who watch the show enthusiastically but also express regret that they rarely had any opportunity to play or even learn team sports while they were growing up. With unspoken rules in elementary school, like “soccer is for boys, dodgeball (or kickball) is for girls,” the wide-open world of the school field naturally ends up belonging to the boys, while the girls, afraid of the ball or unable to find enjoyment from physical activity, grow further and further from team sports. It only becomes more difficult to get into an unfamiliar sport with other people once you become an adult, while some prefer individual sports because they consider the time they have to exercise to be a precious break from their busy lives when they can focus on themselves.

When it comes to strengthening the bond between women and building a sense of responsibility, though, few experiences are as effective, or as appealing, as team sports. The book Regular Women, Regular Exercise, compiled and written by author Lee Minhui, documents the experiences that 10 different working women have had with sports. One of the women, an office worker under the pseudonym Ellen Page who plays for a queer women’s futsal team, says that there’s something special about communal sports, unlike swimming, another of her passions. It’s for that sense of communality that they follow the teams they play against on social media and even make it a point to train together later on. “We only play together for an hour at most, but I feel like we have a super strong exchange of emotions when we do, because we play intense games together,” she says. “I think the physical activity we all do gets shared through our emotions.”

The primary reason Shooting Stars has been so successful is that it doesn’t objectify women who play “intense games together,” instead openly showing them at their most chaotic. Six teams have competed in the regular league—FC Gavengers (comedians), FC Giants (models), FC Fire Moths (single celebrities from SBS’s The Fab Singles), FC National Team Family (national athletes and their family), FC Actionistas (actors who enjoy sports), and FC World Class (foreign women who live in Korea)—and are made up of 30 players who all have different jobs, ages and styles. With women whose ages range from their 20s to 50s, who live different lives and who are all in different shape, they chase the ball for just one reason: to win.

And each has their own reason they need to win. Cho Hyeryun—aka Spiderhands—admired a play by Park Sun Young—worthy of the name Ace—saying, “We’re both 51, but she’s amazing,” and is herself a boost to morale. Lee Chun-Soo’s wife, Sim Haeun, who played her first match while still recovering from a C-section, boasts of having formed a soccer team with local mothers because she had fallen in love with the sport. Model Han Hyejin is the captain and heart of her team and has been waiting for the regular season despite suffering the loss of a toenail after numerous violent impacts and being stepped on repeatedly. She scores a goal at every critical moment like her life depends on it, and even though she doesn’t know the rules very well and makes mistakes, she shows how passionately and surprisingly someone who’s at the very peak of their field can perform when they fall for something unfamiliar. Kim Min Kyoung’s unstoppable cannon-like shot; Nam Hyunhee’s impressive concentration- and reflex-fueled triumph over high-pressure penalty kicks; Shin Bong Seon’s tears as she affirmed her burning love for soccer even while wearing a cast on her leg—all these moments demonstrate why sports are sometimes called unscripted theater.

Good theater proves its worth by capturing the changes and growth that its characters go through over time. Formerly a flight attendant, Myeong Seohyeon, now a member of the FC National Team Family, said she was living life simply as “someone’s wife” and “someone’s mother” after marrying soccer player Chong Tese, but after coming to play soccer herself and falling in love with it, made the dramatic goal that tied up her team’s match against the FC Giants—the result of pouring blood, sweat and tears into practicing. Having now developed a taste for scoring goals, the way she confessed to feeling “more nervous than during [the World Cup hosted by Korea and Japan in] 2002” as she watched the match between her rival teams, the FC Giants and FC World Class, highlights why female viewers laugh and cry together watching Shooting Stars: Whereas in the past Myeong was stuck watching men’s soccer as a spectator, she now has a league of her own, a uniform bearing her name and teammates who can rely on one another as they play together. And, seeing all this, some number of women feel encouraged enough to take their first steps onto the field.

In her essay “The Elegance and Excitement of Women’s Soccer”, author Kim Honpi discusses when the sports she and her teammates play became “sports.” “The act of an individual playing an everyday sport against biased expectations can itself be a part of the fight in reducing the number of prejudices,” Kim says. “Akin to reducing the number of words that fill the blank in the sentence, ‘Can women _____?’ I, and our team, and the players on the many female soccer teams are all essentially working to remove the word ‘soccer’ from that list.” Surely Shooting Stars does the same for the word “sports.”