Resumo. ABSTRACT This article relates gender identity and sports and contextualizes narratives of women who play sports known to be traditionally and predominantly masculine, based on the memory of their sports journeys in childhood, in School Physical Education, and in the otherness experienced while playing sports in adulthood. From a methodological point of view, the study is designed as a participant observation carried out with young women playing team contact sports at a public sports center in the suburb of Rio de Janeiro. The results describe processes involving the insertion, confrontation, identification and permanence experienced by these women in sports, which, in the studied place, are predominantly masculine, as well as the relationship of these processes with their memories of childhood and School Physical Education. As a conclusion, this investigation presents the importance of School Physical Education in building strategies and identity narratives that support the permanence of these women in sports known to be a men’s space.