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My Soccer Dreams Came True

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › ideas › archive › 2023 › 07 › womens-world-cup-soccer › 674831

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When I started playing soccer, it felt like I’d joined a secret club. At age 7, I signed up for a boys’ team; the first girls’ league didn’t arrive in my New Jersey town until the following year. In the 1980s, the sport was just taking off in the United States. As I grew older and many of the girls on my youth teams stopped playing, I drew closer to the small group that had stuck with the sport. We wore Umbro shorts and Adidas Samba sneakers and jewelry adorned with soccer balls to clearly demarcate our tribe.

By high school, I was all-in. I lived for games under the Wednesday-night lights, where I might receive the ball at the perfect moment with the green expanse of the field before me, knowing that with two quick touches and a burst of speed, maybe, just maybe, I could break away and find myself alone, facing the goalkeeper illuminated against the black sky. In the winter, we played indoors. But the only game during the indoor season I can really remember happened some 7,000 miles away in China.

Sitting in the players’ box ahead of my own game, I stared at the story clipped from The Washington Post: “U.S. Women Capture World Soccer Title.” It wasn’t even the top headline in the sports section that day, and the only photo ran inside, showing the winning goal—no photo of Brandi Chastain on her knees, clutching her jersey in a warrior prayer to the soccer gods; no elated Alex Morgan piggybacking a Megan Rapinoe in her signature victory stance. It’s hard to fathom now.

[Read: The two players who tell the story of U.S. women’s soccer]

The player I most admired wasn’t mentioned. In just two years, Mia Hamm had gone from playing on the Virginia state-championship-winning team in high school to starring at the University of North Carolina and then to winning the first-ever Women’s World Cup. I was 15 at the time, and living in Northern Virginia. Hamm was 19, mathematical proof that soccer could lead somewhere. I took to the field that day confident that a girl playing soccer was no longer something novel or strange, an eccentricity to be tolerated by reproachful aunts, uncles, and high-school counselors.

What I hadn’t quite grasped was that the small tribe of ponytailed players with soccer-ball necklaces and folded newspaper clippings was about to give way to an army of girls. Today, in any midsize town in America, a school-age girl can choose between a recreational team or a club team, and, in many cases, among competing teams in those categories. When I started playing high-school soccer in 1989, slightly more than 100,000 girls were playing at that level. Over the next three decades, the number nearly quadrupled.

Hamm and other stars, including Julie Foudy, Michelle Akers, and Kristine Lilly, built on the triumph of that first World Cup. Their efforts and those of the women who followed behind them helped to create a flourishing U.S. women’s professional league, to secure pay equity, and to construct a pipeline of talented young players. The women’s national team has mounted the champions' stand at half of the World Cup tournaments to date. But just as I once watched girls’ soccer spread through the United States, the U.S. women are watching it spread through the world.

In 2019, FIFA estimated that 13 million girls and women were playing organized soccer worldwide. The first Women’s World Cup, in 1991, had only 12 contenders. Since then, FIFA has steadily increased the pool. Today, the Women’s World Cup includes 32 nations, the same number of countries that vie for the men’s title. It’s no longer just perennially strong teams such as Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, and England that the U.S. has to fight off, but also Spain, France, Brazil, Canada, Australia, and others. These programs aren’t growing; they’re fully grown. And the larger pool includes nations competing for the first time on this global stage, including Haiti, Morocco, Panama, the Philippines, Portugal, the Republic of Ireland, Vietnam, and Zambia. Nearly every columnist writing on the 2023 World Cup has observed that the U.S. team will have to work much harder to win this go-round.

I was 17 when I realized my dreams of soccer glory were over. It started with a skiing accident. I remember the bindings not releasing, my friend's dad rushing me home early, the doctor hinging the bottom part of my leg open like a cabinet door, the surgery, the wheelchair. But in my teenage brain, none of it quite clicked until the moment I rolled into the high-school cafeteria for the team meeting and was greeted by our new head coach. “Please tell me you're not Claudine,” he said.

[Read: The women’s world cup is about more than soccer]

Now I watch soccer from the sidelines, or on the screen, cheering for the U.S. women. It’s not my secret little club anymore—millions of fans do the same—and I’ve made my peace with that. I’m thrilled to see new generations of players take the field, players who have grown up never doubting the possibility of competing on the world stage. And I like to imagine that the players on the U.S. women’s team feel the same way, as they’ve watched the women’s game spread around the world. There’s glory in being the best, but there’s glory too in paving the way for others.

During the 2019 World Cup finals, as Rose Lavelle took the shot that solidified a 2–0 victory over the Netherlands, I wasn’t watching the screen. Instead, I was looking at my daughter. The elation and admiration on her face seemed like a three-decade-old reflection of what I had once felt. She was watching the U.S. women clinch the World Cup, knowing that the whole world was watching too. And she doesn’t pay homage to her sport by clipping newspaper stories; she frames magazine covers showing the champions.