Headscratchers / She's the Man

• Viola can kick a ball through a life buoy from a respectable distance, and is said to be better than half the guys (admittedly by her boyfriend while flirting). Yet she doesn't make the Illyria team initially. This would ordinarily imply that the Illyria is much better than the Corwall team, but in the final match, they are almost equal.
  • IIRC, the soccer try-outs were the day she arrived at Illyria—and even if it wasn't, it still wasn't too long after she arrived.. As a result, she had just started wearing the disguise, which involved chest binding. When someone binds their chest, it can restrict breathing (hence why you're not supposed to while doing athletics), and soccer is a very physical sport that requires a lot of running. The coach probably noticed this and put her on second string because he couldn't have a player whose body couldn't handle the game. By the time she's promoted to first string, she's been in the disguise for quite a while and has been practicing a lot, so she's figured out how to breathe "properly" with the binding.
  • There's also her weaseling excuse about being "allergic to the sun" (to ensure she goes with the "shirts" in a shirts/skin practice match) to consider. To any coach, including Illyria's tough-but-fair-minded one, such a vulnerability would have to be considered a potentially crippling weakness. That's a strike against "him" right from the start.
  • Her disguise was giving her issues. When Viola confesses, she takes off her sideburns, eyebrows and wig. She now looks like she did at the kissing booth. She also just recovered her skills being temporarily terrible. Yet Duke thinks she may still be male. So she has to flash.
• How did Viola even survive Illyria for a week? She was clearly shown binding with Ace bandages, which any trans person who binds can tell you is incredibly dangerous, especially when exercising. Ace bandages are meant to compress, and so shrink and tighten to properly compress whatever they are wrapped around. When someone binding with them breathes, they expand and then contract their lungs, and the bandages compress to that new size. This constant tightening can eventually lead to cracked ribs and pierced lungs. Yet Viola plays high-level high school soccer while binding without a problem. Forget suspension of disbelief, she should've passed out within ten minutes of tryouts.
  • Which does add credence to the question above about why her soccer skills suck so badly.