My Soccer Dreams Came True
Just not in the way I ever expected
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.
