The girls in my youth were NOT thugs or particularly hard......BUT, I do know that there was hardly a Netball or Rounders game that passed without at least 2 girls scrapping on the field of play or back in the dressing room.
A girl called Karen that I went out with, was regularly at the forefront of these fights simply because she played in the Goal Attack position (or was it Goal Shooter?.....) in the Netball team and because of this was the focus of any annoyance from the other team.
She was not bothered by this and relished the chance to get into a fight.....sometimes instigating them herself.
Because of the ages of the 'combatants' I can't go into detail on a public forum, but I do know of some of her fights, both one on one and group fights.
There is one that has NEVER left my memory after she recalled the fight to me.
It involved Karen and her 'marker' on the Netball court getting into two fights during the game, with them both being sent off following the second one.
They were taken to the changing room by the teacher from the opposition school and repremanded in no uncertain terms about the consequences of their behavior. The teacher then told them to get showered and wait quietly for the game to finish. She then went back to the game.......WHAT WAS SHE THINKING?

As soon as she left Karen and the other girl basically said, we are going to get punished for being sent off anyway.....let's finish it right now.
Which they did!..........NAKED!
You can see why the mental picture has never left me.
Also one that I actually saw for myself was a team v team fight between the girls from my school and the girls from a very nearby school.
Local rivalry had sparked (to my memory) 4 separate one v one fights on the court during the game.
As a consequence, the two teams arranged to meet after the game when the teachers had gone to have a 'gang fight'.
Their ages would have been 10 years old as it was when I was at my Junior School.
The fight was quite a spectacle for a 10 year old boy to witness!
I already knew that watching girls fight excited me.....BUT this was as if all of my birthdays had come at once.

Anyway.....the point is: Girls fought more in inter school sports than the boys ever did in my knowledge (I played football [soccer] at both junior and senior school).
I never thought of them as trouble makers or thuggish at all.....on the contrary.....they were mostly very sweet. BUT when they came into competition with another school, it seemed like it was the done thing to fight.
Strange really, I suppose......but I wasn't complaining whenever I managed to get a ringside seat!
