July 28, 2022 • 49 mins
This is the final episode in our series. In Act 1, Shapeshifters, we look at the generations of women who had no pro league to play in: what’s it like to be a 22-year-old who has to completely start over? They go on to become rocket scientists, CEOs, and big-time music supervisors. In Act 2, Side-Hustlers, we look at the early generations who did have a pro league to play in, but had to scrap and hustle at side jobs to make it work. In Act 3, we finish with today's generation – the New Guard – when the field of opportunity is wide open.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
I'm Hannah Waddingham and this is Hustle Rule, an audio
docuseries featuring the untold stories of women's soccer players around
the world, based on the book Under the Lights and
in the Dark, written by Gwendolen Oxenham in South London,
where I grew up, I didn't know there were women's footballers.
(00:20):
In my twenties. I'd go to the pub to watch
Liverpool play, but I never thought of the sport as
an option for myself. You know, I'm six ft tall
and my build definitely lends itself to sport. But I
think my mom bless her, was just like, oh no, no, no,
don't do that. You might hurt yourself. That's a boy thing,
so it kind of infiltrated. I mean, of course, in
(00:42):
England we are football mad and when the Men's World
Cup comes on, the whole country is gripped by fever.
But only recently has the women's team hit the country's
collective consciousness. A turning point was the Women's World Cup.
England got to the semi final but lost a heartbreaker
on an own goal. The pictures of a devastated Laura
(01:06):
Bassett consoled by her teammates spread far and wide, and
suddenly the country was caught up in the emotion. The
Lionesses had arrived. In the United States. That turning point
happened much earlier when the national team won the World Cup.
But while a generation of girls watching Julie Foudy and
(01:27):
Mia Hamm and Christine Lily imagined wearing the jersey themselves,
that dream had nothing to do with a salary or
a career. A professional league didn't exist. Thanks to Title nine,
American girls new soccer was a way to get a
college scholarship. The game equalled academic possibilities. The popular National
(01:49):
Collegiate Athletic Association commercial told them that nearly all n
c A athletes go professional in something else, and girls
knew it was talking to them. In the United States.
From early on, soccer was always a route, not a destination.
But in the past twenty years, there's been a trajectory
(02:11):
of change. This episode is Shape Shifters, Side Hustlers and
the New Guard The Three at Special, the last in
our series featuring the voices of players around the world,
from the players of the past to the new stars
of Olympic lion A, Manchester, United, Angel City FC, and
the US national team here to tell you just what
(02:32):
this game has meant and how it will forever shape
their lives for nobody. In Act one shape Shifters, we
(02:55):
talked to the women who had no pro league to
play in. What's it like to be a twin two
year old husband, to be the best at what you
do and then have to completely start over kicked out
of their sport. They shape shifted and went on to
chase dreams in entirely different fields. Today, before we take
you into anyone else's story, we want you to hear Quin's.
(03:23):
When I was twelve years old, I tried out for
the Florida Olympic Development team. I remember sitting in the
grass as they called out the numbers of the players
who had been chosen, aching for them to call my number.
They did not call it. When I went up to
the coach to find out what I'd done wrong, he
told me You're just too awkward for this level awkwardness.
(03:48):
That didn't even sound like something I could work on,
But I just remember feeling this sort of click of no,
this is the one place I am not awkward. This
is the place in my life where I belong, and
you're wrong, and I'm going to show you that you're wrong.
After that, I trained with my team, my brother's team,
(04:10):
and I called up the high school team and asked
if I could train with them too. Every day after
those practices, I dribbled around trash cans in the street.
The days I doubled up on practice, I dragged the
trash cans under the street light and dribbled in the dark.
Soccer was always my escape. My brother, who I love
(04:31):
very much, was in trouble a lot. The police would
be at our house. He went to prison. Things weren't easy,
but I had soccer. The game was what I could
turn to, and I think that's true for so many
of us. When I was sixteen years old, I skipped
my senior of high school and got a scholarship to
Duke University, my dream school. I was the youngest d
(04:54):
one athlete in the history of n C double A.
I scored two goals my first game, and I thought
was on my way. I wanted to be mia Ham.
I even wrote her a letter and told her that.
But by my senior year, I was not the best
player in the country. The national team was not knocking
at my door. When my senior season ended, they handed
(05:15):
us plaques that showed our span two thousand through two
thousand and four. An underclassman kind of nailed how we
felt when she compared the plaque to a tombstone. It
looks like you guys died. I would have tried out
for the U S Pro League, but it folded right
before I graduated. I was twenty years old and my
(05:37):
career was over, which meant I had to find a
new life. Suddenly, I wondered if maybe I devoted too
much time to dribbling around trash cans. That summer, I
got a job as a deckhand, scrubbing toilets on a
boat in Mexico. I was really excited to plunge into
(05:57):
a new world. The people that I was working with, um,
you know, they used to be bakers in a cake shop,
and they had astronomy degrees, and they treated me like
I was a freak, Like you mean, you've only played
soccer your whole life. I loved this perspective of oh, like,
the world is large and I've only been focused on
one part. Let's see what else is out there? And
(06:19):
I thought to myself, Um, you know, I'm going to
eat sashimi on the deck with other deck hands from
all over the world. I told myself, I'm so excited
to live this soccer free life. Ah. And this I
soon discovered was a lie. We anchored off this island
that served as an outpost for the Mexican Army. On
the dock, I could see soldiers with machetes and machine guns,
(06:43):
and right behind them I could see a makeshift soccer
field with driftwood goalposts. I diding eat over there, and
I made kicking gestures, and within five minutes I'm sharing
goal celebrations. They're picking me up. It's monsoon rain, and
I just remember thinking, who am I getting? Nothing is
better than this. But the summer ended and I began
(07:05):
my new life. I went to graduate school in creative writing.
Those n c A commercials talk about the values sports
and still determination, perseverance, But all I felt was insecurity.
It took me fifteen years to get good at soccer,
and now I was supposed to just go be good
at something else. Yet it was true that I knew
(07:25):
how to work hard, and all the effort I'd put
towards playing I now transferred over to learning how to write.
But I never forgot that game in Mexico. It always
just kind of sat in the back of my brain,
and I went to the Duke library with a former
teammate and we sat there with a legal pad, brainstorming
about how we could keep the game. You know, if
(07:48):
I can't plan the national team, then what could I do?
And pick up has always been what I loved the most.
I loved playing pickup. So we made a documentary PAYLTA
about pick up soccer around the world. We went to
twenty five countries, playing with prisoners in Bolivia and moonshine
burrs and Kenya and old men in Brazil who just
(08:09):
beat the heck out of each other every Sunday morning.
Seeing all of these people who love this game, the
same game that we're all playing, and none of them
made it either. I didn't really care about not making
the national team anymore. The film was at the beginning
of my life as a storyteller, leading me to the
stories I'm telling today. Because of the game, I get
(08:30):
to talk with players all over the world and hear
about their experiences and what their life is like. And
I wouldn't trade that. I love love what I do.
My Duke teammates also shape shifted our ambition funneled into
new directions. They became doctor scientists CEOs. Crystal Presley, a
(08:50):
defender on our team, helped discover a gene that causes obesity.
She's now a surgeon. Our captain, Casey Truman, who used
to make our whole team burnt CDs, became one of
Hollywood's most sought after music supervisors. The songs you hear
during the heart wrenching scenes on some of the most
popular TV shows like Mad Men, Gray's Anatomy Scandal. She's
(09:15):
the one who picks them out. You know, when pro
soccer was no longer an option for me, I had
to find a new dream. And I don't think I
realized that I was looking for a new dream. It
was just a music was my passion, and I just
went after it like there was nothing else. You can't
deny what you love. My other Casey at Duke, Casey McCleskey,
(09:39):
was one year behind me. She became a litigator. When
I met her, I knew I would never be the best.
No amount of practice would ever get me to her level.
I never saw her lose a single drill at practice.
That's not hyperbole. She was our leading scorer and a
CC Offensive Player of the Year into the was in
(10:00):
in five. She had an astonishing gift. Being on the
women's national team was always my goal. But in my
junior year the league folded. I remember very vividly when
we had our last game. It was against U C.
L A, you know, the whistle blue, and it was like,
now what you know? There was no league here and
(10:20):
is this the end? And for something that I had,
I'd poured everything into, you know, like my whole life.
I was a soccer player, every extra minute I had.
It was pretty devastating. I think at the time, I
just felt like I needed to grow up and be
an adult and stopped kind of chasing the silly dream.
And so I came home and I took the l
(10:42):
sad and I went to law school, and then like
halfway through law school, the league came back. But I
just said, you know, this is the path I've taken,
and I need to go through with law school and
just kind of forget about soccer. So I think part
of it is just like the nostalgia and the missing
that version of myself that never be. It's hard for
me to wrap my mind around the idea that Casey's
(11:04):
husband and her three sons never even knew this part
of her. I kind of wish I had maybe like
a highlight taber or something to show them. And you know,
it's like if I was like an artist and I
had like these paintings I did, and then my husband
never saw my paintings and I can't paint anymore. You know,
it's kind of a weird thing to not be able
(11:24):
to share that with him. And I'm also not like,
I don't sound like I'm going to talk about it
all the time like I was. You know, it was
so good when when twenty years ago, you know, but
I'm glad, you know, you know, all the things that
made me who I am. I learned playing soccer act
(11:51):
two side hustlers, the generation that did have a league
to play and still knew their livelihood was tenuous to you.
Leagues w USA and the WPS had folded. In sixteen,
a third attempt at a pro league began, the NWSL.
The starting salary for the NWSL professional player was just
(12:12):
seven thousand, two hundred dollars. Players often lived with host families.
A couple even roomed at a retirement home, and these
college educated players are having to choose this lifestyle over
much higher paying career routes. Alie Riley, a Stanford grad
on the New Zealand national team who's followed the game
all over the world, had this to say. You know,
(12:35):
my mom, we had had these conversations from high school
because she wanted me to go to Harvard or Yale
or Princeton, and I, you know, I was very very
dedicated to to my academics and I had good grades,
but I just I wanted to play soccer and I
wanted to play at at a top school. But those
(12:57):
conversations started pretty early where she's like, you've got to
be a doctor, You've got to be a lawyer. Her
parents came from China, raised four daughters, They made their
own clothes, you know, never had had any money, and
I think she just wanted me to have so much
more than that and and to feel secure. But it
just was so perfect that the league came back right
(13:19):
when I, you know, the year before I was graduating,
I was just blindly, you know, going to follow my dream.
I think it wasn't until two years later when the
league folded that I kind of realized, um, I have
no job and no home. But Ali and many others
around the world found a way to keep playing anyway.
(13:39):
In Ali's case, she took off for Sweden playing for
FC Malma. She made a yearly income, but not everybody did.
These were athletes willing to do anything to play, even
if it meant playing for no salary in front of
empty stands in countries far away from their homes. No
matter where they were from or how they did or
(14:00):
did not make, they were playing because they loved to play.
But to make it everybody had a side hustle. My
name then you all. I've had the opportunity to play
for the Argentinian National Policia. I'm a police officer. I
actually board eight hours a day, every single day so
(14:22):
that I can go and play soccer in the afternoon.
My name is is Love Brown. I played for BIGA
national women's team for sixteen years and I am fifty
two years right now. To survive as a soccer player
in Trinidad, you had to have a job. So my
(14:42):
job what did we find you was process contrivil that
deals with all the little gudgets that measure time flu
pressure in a temperature stuff like that, so that they
don't blow up and cause a catastrophe. I'm for a
Alcobolter and I played for Iceland for seventeen years and
I played professionally for six That's the CFO for DHL Iceland,
(15:07):
working crazy hours at the same time, and I was
still on the national team. Nowadays, Flora runs the Central
Bank of Iceland. Hi, welcome to stars. My name is Coco.
Like my very nice, like friendly voice. I would work
at Starbucks starting at five o'clock in the morning and
(15:29):
then work till about two. My sister used to work
at that store. She would come in and be like, guys,
you know that she has a Wikipedia page and that
you're actually working with the super star. And I'm just like,
oh my gosh, Savannah, please stop. After Coco Goodson retired
from soccer, she joined the military. So I am a
(15:50):
first lieutenant, I am stationed at Fort Bragg and I
am a field artillery officer. So like the Big Cannons,
we we shoo the Big Cannons. English footballer Bethmeade was
also a flarer tender for a local pub while she
played for Sunderland, Cameroon's gale In Ganimuit used her football
(16:10):
paycheck to buy Umoto, a taxi motorcycle, which grew into
a family taxi business in Unde that she ran on
the side while playing professionally in Sweden. So often athletes
are treated as one dimensional, good at kicking a ball only,
but you can't say that about any of these women.
(16:31):
They had a whole other life beyond the game side, hustling,
doing whatever it takes in order to keep playing. And
these women are also in a constant state of hatching
plans and pursuing alternate lives. They are big picture thinkers.
Everybody's got a backup plan, an idea for what's next.
(16:52):
Spain Celia Jimenez, who currently plays for the Orlando Pride,
has a degree in aeronautical engineering. She's planning to become
a rocket scientist. For others, the answer isn't moving on
from soccer, but finding a way to stay. Mammy Amagucci
is a Japanese national team player who played professionally in Sweden,
(17:15):
the US, and Japan, and she wants to pass her
love of the game onto others. Some weekends, she coaches
as many as eleven games in two days. If you
get coached by you know, great coach, the kids just
change totally. It's kind of like a magic I love
(17:36):
the game more than anybody probably, so that kind of
spread my love to the players. I have to from
the star. Okay, we're going to dominate the game the book.
Are we going to pay style? Right? Yeah, let's go
ye like Mammy. A lot of former players give back
(17:58):
to the game. Is here the Trinidadian who worked in
the oil factory. She went on to coach national teams
in Trinidad, the Virgin Islands, Suriname, in Antigua. Other former
players become owners or gms. Take any Aluco, who played
over a hundred games for the English national team. She
readied herself for a life after the game, but she
(18:19):
could never quite tear herself away from football, which has
had her heart since she was a kid growing up
in public housing in the British city of Birmingham. I
was the only girl in the area, so like, my
quickest way of feeling accepted was to play football with
the boys. So every time the boys knocked on my
door and said can any come and play? The joy
(18:42):
I used to feel, at like five six years old,
I just was like, yes, I just want to play.
I just want to play. I want to play. So
coming from a traditional sort of Nigerian family, education is
everything right, It's like non negotiable. So my mom was like, yeah, cool,
like you you play, you do your thing, but you know,
(19:02):
you do have to focus on your school, particularly because
there was just no professional pathway in football. So you know,
I really focused in on getting my grades, the good
grades letter to a large degree. But despite getting a first,
the very top grade and equivalent of Magna kum Lada,
she was met with rejection letter after rejection letter from
(19:24):
the law firm she applied to. It was so bad
that my mom started hiding the letters because she just
didn't want me to feel so discouraged. And then I
got an offer out of the blue to play in America.
So in the WPS, the previous league, the kicker was
that the owner of the professional team also offered her
a job in his law firm during the off season.
(19:45):
For good five years, I was working as a lawyer
whilst I was playing semi pro. And then Chelsea offered
me a full time professional contract and then I was
like okay, cool, like I'm going to commit to football now,
and you know I can be a lawyer when I'm sixty.
Women players definitely loved the game because we definitely don't
do it for the money, right, I would have earned
more as a lawyer than if I played for a
(20:08):
long time. I was happy to earn less because I
just wanted to play, whereas in the men's game, obviously,
you know you have just ridiculous amounts of money being
talked about nowadays. Any is helping to create the culture
at the National Women's Soccer League's hottest new team, Angels
City FC, which was founded by probably the most high
(20:29):
profile ownership group any team has ever had anywhere in
the world, Hollywood powerhouse Natalie Portmant is one of its founders,
and its investors include Serena Williams, Eva Longoria, Jennifer Garner,
Becky g Abbey Womback, Mia Hamm and Gabrielle Union. I'm
the sporting director. Effectively, it's a general managers this team,
(20:51):
and this role feel all the more important in light
of the previous nw SELL season in which five male
head coaches and a general manager we're fired for abuse allegations,
so to have any managing and Freya kumb coaching both women,
both former players. It feels like, you know, I was
(21:14):
player for over fifteen years, so understanding what players want
and what makes players take and the environment, the professional
high performance environments that you need to build. It's not
something that's like alien to me or something that we
have to have to read a book to understand. Like,
I just get it. I've been in it. I'm passionate
about female players feeling like they have control over their
(21:37):
own destiny. So when it comes to my job, when
it comes to making trades and sort of the business
end of this job, I will always have that human
element in the back of my mind. Ultimately, now the
game is moved on and there is more money, there
is more investment, but it's also making sure that we
(21:58):
don't lose that really pure element of women's sports. In
the past decade, the women's professional game has grown by
leaps and bounds. The storied European clubs like FC Barcelona
and CHELSEAFC have poured money into the women's game. In
(22:20):
South America, football Confederation Conno BAL has mandated that all
men's teams that compete in the Continents Championship Coppa Liberta
Torres must have a women's team. Audiences worldwide have exploded,
attendance records getting shattered. New records bring new fans, and
(22:40):
new fans bring new momentum, which brings us to Act three,
in which we introduce you to the new Guard. The
momentum generation change is still ongoing, but there has never
been so much hope. Here's Gwen. At the Africa Cup
of Nations and Cameroon in two thousand and seventeen, forty
(23:02):
thousand filled the stadium five hours before kickoff. That same year,
at the UEFA European Championship, the Netherlands sold out every
game and one quarter of the Dutch population four point
one million people watched the final on television. And it
(23:25):
isn't just the national teams drawing these kinds of crowds,
so are the professional teams. On a club team level.
The Portland Thorns of the NWSL can draw twenty tho
plus fans to a midweek game in Boguta. In two
thousand and seventeen, a crowd of thirty three thousand watched
Santa Fe win Columbia's first ever women's professional League final.
(23:51):
It was a goose bump moment for all the players
who have spent years being told by naysayers that there
weren't fans for the women's game. Here's oor Velasquez, who
has played on the Colombia national team for fifteen years.
They say nobody watched a woman's sucker. So we got
to the final and it was almost full of the stadium.
(24:13):
I was like, okay, now tell me how this is
the first time I've felt professional in my in my country.
So it was amazing because we went out and they
would just splew like all that emotion. Records keep getting broken.
(24:38):
In two thousand and eighteen, more than fifty two thousand
fans packed a Stadio as Teca in Mexico City for
a woman's final between Tigris and Monterey. In more than
nine thousand fans showed up to see Real Madrid played Barcelona.
And with new attendance records and new fans, come new
(24:59):
salary eas In Norway, New Zealand, England, Australia, Brazil and
as of the United States, men's and women's players are
to be paid equal salaries for their national team appearances,
and on May eight, as US Soccer confirmed the terms
(25:20):
of its new contracts, it announced a global first, the
US Soccer Federation will pool World Cup prize money, which
is a portion to national teams by FIFA based on
where they place. The grand total of what the women's
and men's national team win will be shared equally between them.
(25:41):
And considering that the total men's prize money at stake
in Qatar four hundred and forty million is more than
seven times the women's prize money in Australia next year,
that's a gigantic change. On the professional club level, there
was also finally major progress. Here is Norway's Ada Haggerberg.
(26:07):
She's the all time leading goal scorer in UEFA's Champions
League and the start forward for Olympic Leon. I remember
it like it was yesterday. The first summer when I
came to Leon, I felt like I was leaving a
childhood dream. To be honest, I came from a very
tough regime in Germany and I came to a super
(26:28):
super professional club, Olmpic Leone. Now today we train at
the same ground as the men's do. We have the
same training center and kind of like we have top
conditions in order to also perform at a high level.
We've managed to win the Champions League seven times. I
think the people of Leon are very proud of the
women's team. I can feel that mutual respect from the
(26:50):
men's players as well. They see that we bring something
to the table as well. So by being given these conditions,
were actually in a place to deliver as well, and
that I think that's been very very important. Jackie grown
In is a Dutch midfielder who plays for Manchester United.
Like Ada, she makes a six figure salary, but she
studied law anyway because of the Netherlands women's soccer explosion.
(27:15):
Classmates weren't just classmates, they were also fans. When Tilburg
University went online due to the pandemic, she joined the
zoom classes from home. And here's what happened. When covid started,
I kind of saw my way to do classes with
other people because everyone has to do it online, so
(27:37):
it's kind of like, Okay, I can do everything now
everyone else is doing. So. Then after one of the
first classes, one of the teachers prode me if I
could sign in in a different name because people kept
writing things in the chat about football, like when the
next game was, so she asked if I could use
a different name and turn that on camera, no longer
(27:57):
as a player like Jackie, just an anonymous ace. And
it's not just the professional athletes who have an opportunity
to make money nowadays, thanks to one of the most
dramatic changes in a generation of American sport, the n
c double as June policy shift. In the past, while
colleges made massive amounts from their sports teams, the athletes
(28:20):
themselves were not allowed to cash in. Now, college athletes
are allowed to sign endorsement deals and make money from
their own name, image and likeness or an I L.
The first Nike signing under these new rules American football basketball. No,
it was a women's soccer player. I'm Rayland Turner. I
(28:46):
play soccer for u C l A, and I'm nike
us first n I L athlete. Obviously they chose a
female athlete, which for some people's very surprising. But in
my opinion, I think that women's soccer is on the
rise right now and it's making its way up to
men's football, men's basketball. I think that it has a
(29:08):
lot of publicity now more than ever, and I think
that it's a big step in the sports community that
women are finally getting the recognition that they deserve. Growing up,
my biggest role models were Abby Wambach and Michelle Acres
because their game was just so passionate and roofless. And
(29:31):
I always looked up to college athletes, so it's it's
really cool to be a college athlete now. I feel
like a lot of the times people's roller bottles are
people who are at the top, and I'm on my
way there, So I feel like I'm in more of
a relatable position than those who have already made it.
I just hope to be someone who a little girl
(29:53):
looks up to. And another huge change for US soccer,
a handful of women's soccer play ys have begun to
either leap frog college sports altogether, or, like men's basketball
players commonly, do leave college early to go pro. I'm
Sophia Smith and I was the first teenager to be
(30:14):
drafted into the NWSL. And I played two great seasons
at Stanford and loved every second of it, and I think,
you know, after winning the national Championship, I was just
ready for something new. When I entered the draft. It
was very rare that someone would leave college early to
become a professional soccer player, um specifically a female professional
(30:38):
soccer player, and there was a lot of mixed opinions
on my decision, but my heart was telling me I
was ready and to just take that jump. And I've
just loved it. I feel like this is the life
that I was supposed to live. Heroes are multiplying a
much wider range of kids watching today have a chance
(31:00):
to recognize themselves in today's new stars. Hi. My name
is Madison Hammond and I'm a professional soccer player. I
became the first Native American soccer player to play in
the End of us L, which at the time I
never I did not think about it. I wasn't conscious
(31:21):
of it. That wasn't the goal, but I didn't realize
how freaking dope that is to be someone that people
can look to and see in a space that wasn't
there before. I mean, I can't really put in towards
like what that feels like, because in the moment, I
was like, Oh, I'm just another girl trying to make
(31:43):
it in the league. But then it was like, no,
you represent so much more. The daughter of Ethiopian immigrants,
was the number one pick of the NWSL draft. Hi.
I'm Naomi Grama. I'm a defender for Wave FC, and
I started in Maloda soccer um. My dad pretty much
(32:04):
started it in the Bay Area, and it was really
just a way for the Ethiopian community to come together
on the weekends. It was just a big group of
us who were kind of like figuring out for the
first time how to live in the US, so all
first generation Americans because our parents hadn't done it, and
it was great to kind of have that community like
(32:27):
within the kids to lead on and people going through
similar experiences where we're speaking a language at home and
we're going to school speaking a different language, and just
like having the cultural difference between home and school is
something that I think can be hard to balance, especially
when you're younger. None of my success would be possible
without the community around me. Naomi went on to become
(32:47):
valedictorian of our high school and then captain of the
Stanford soccer team. She remembers trying to help her parents
watch the draft, which had gone remote due to the pandemic,
Like two minutes before the draft starting. I was like
trying to tell them how to turn it on and
how to get onto the right the right channel, which
is very typical for our family. But yeah, they were
(33:09):
really excited. My dad and my mom just started crying.
You know, it's really cool, I think to see them
also have that moment of like wow, like we helped
our daughter get here, and you know, like she's one
step closer to her dream. There's never been a better
(33:30):
time to pursue that dream. The NWSLS players Union negotiated
its first ever collective bargaining agreement. It increases players salaries
across the board and raises the minimum yearly salary to
thirty dollars. While modest in comparison to the men, it's
still more than five times what it was in the beginning.
(33:53):
The agreement will also provide free housing, transportation, fully vested
four oh one K contributions, health life and disability insurance,
eight weeks of paternal leave, and up to six months
of mental health leave. Playing circumstances are better than they
have ever been, but the changed environment doesn't mean the
players today are no longer hustling. They're just hustling in
(34:16):
a different kind of way. They're hustling for change, picking
up the fight not just within sports but for the
world as a whole. Meet Midge Purse, the first Harvard
graduate on the women's national team. In the past few years,
she's taken on fossil fuels, racial inequality, and gender inequality.
(34:37):
At one point, when I wanted to be a really
great soccer player, I felt like I couldn't do anything else.
I felt like very guilty for expanding in different directions,
And now when I think about that, it sounds like
the stupidest thing I've ever heard. I ran for the
Harvard Board of overseers Um, which is the highest democratically
(34:58):
elected board at Harvard. I ran for the board for
two reasons. One, I think or I thought that the
board needed to be more inclusive in terms of its governance.
It didn't have anyone who had graduated from the school
within the past ten years, and that a voice of
(35:18):
someone who had been there within like this type of generation,
would be really important to be included when making decisions.
And the second reason was I ran on a climate
crisis based platform to push Harvard to divest from fossil fields,
which they have committed to. Not only was Midge invested
in saving the planet, in Mitch felt compelled to create
(35:42):
the Black Women's Player Collective, a nonprofit organization who stated
goal is to advance opportunities for black girls in sport
and beyond. I experienced early on that being a black
player at times was different than being a white player
(36:04):
when you're playing woman soccer. They are just subtleties and
not so subtle things that people say, coaches do and
um ways that people react to you that are very accepted.
I once had a coach tell me that I scored
really ugly goals. I was the the leading scorer at
(36:28):
the time on the team, but he wouldn't start me.
And I used to get in the car after practice
and I was so upset and my dad he just
told me you had to be twice as good. And
I remember saying, I am twice as good. I scored
more goal than everyone else. And he said, no, you're
not twice as good. It has to be undeniable. And then, um,
(36:49):
I wanted my dad to talk to the coach and
he said, no, you talked to the coach um, And
I asked him. I was like, why aren't you playing me?
And he said, you score ugly goals? And I go,
but I'm scoring and he goes, being fast and athletic
isn't enough. And at the time it really struck me
because I had never been reduced to being just fast
(37:12):
and athletic. It was very strange and in my experience
and in the way that it happened, it was because
I was black. And I know some people will hear
that and say, well, you don't know, you don't know.
I know, you don't know, and that's fine, like we
can agree to disagree. But it's things like that that
are subtle and like it happens. Yeah, truthfully, I haven't
(37:36):
spoken about it in a long time, and even speaking
about it right now, I kind of just got like
thrown back into it and how angry I was. I was.
I was so upset, and I remember my dad being
so upset because it was just very clear to me
that he didn't want me to have that type of experience,
but I was having it anyway. I started the Black
(38:04):
Woman's Player Collective with a couple of other players in
the league. During the Challenge Cup, we were in a bubble.
It was a pandemic and the country, you know, the
world truly was um pretty much in turmoil about racial
justice and it was a really really difficult time because
(38:27):
players were dealing with the decision of whether or not
to kneel during the anthem, and you know, on the surface,
it's a very personal choice. It's you know, up to you.
You have the right to do whatever you want, um.
But behind closed doors, people felt very judged for whatever
(38:47):
their decision was. And we were having so many conversations
about what people's decisions meant and what they meant by
their decisions, and um, what their perspectives and thoughts on
the country, the status of Black Americans were and hurtful
things were set. You know, it was in shocking things
(39:10):
were said, and it was a very exhausting time, I
think for all the black players in the league, not
exclusively at all, UM, but the Black Man's Player Collective
was made to support those players. The league has been
doing different things in an effort to protect some players
(39:31):
but not others. And when I say that, I'm referencing UM.
They wanted to take the anthem away, but the reason
they wanted to take the anthem away was to protect
players who were standing from any backlash. We were like,
that's really that's very targeted audience you have to protect.
Mitch also took on gender inequality, going to the White
(39:52):
House alongside Soccer Icon Megan Rappino. It was a really
funny day because I drove from Jersey home that morning
and my dad took me to the White House and
then just parked on the side of the road and
waited for me to come back out, as if it
was just soccer practice. The point of what I said
(40:14):
was to highlight the fact that when we're talking about
equal pay, people don't really understand we're talking about equal investment.
There's just this entire history of cross industry support forcing
men's sports to become what it is today. So many
different organizations and groups, including like the government and government subsidies,
(40:38):
pushed really hard to make men's sports so amazing, and
we are constantly compared to what they have produced with
all that investment, without the same investment anything near it
um So I just the point was that you can't
really compare the two until you invest the same amount
in the two. While this push for investment is a
(41:01):
continuous process, the emergence of social media has opened up
a path for women athletes to invest in themselves, just
like the other influencers of their generation. Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube.
It changes everything. All the coverage and airtime and exposure
(41:21):
you weren't given. Social media allows you to take it
for yourself to be seen, to be followed, to be appreciated,
and suddenly your league, your sport is a thing, and you,
yourself can become a monetize herbal brand with only your
cell phone. It's a second stream of income for a
(41:41):
lot of people, and I think that's absolutely amazing. I
know players who make more off of their social media
than they do from actually playing. There are ripple effects,
ground swells where one tweet becomes one million tweets. Gabrielle Union,
a former collegiate athlete, an Angel City FC investor, and
(42:02):
an actress with twenty million followers, tweeted at Sophia Smith
the day she played her first game for the national team.
Union wrote, growing up playing soccer in the eighties and nineties,
seeing other black girls out there was extremely rare. Today,
I'm so full of pride watching these strong young women
(42:22):
have so much success on and off the field. I mean,
when I got the notification on my phone that she
tweeted about me, I had to click on it and
like make sure it was actually her. I couldn't, I
couldn't believe it was real that first game. Soccer star
Abby Wamback also tweeted to congratulate her. Smith replied posting
(42:44):
a childhood pick. In the picture, you see a postgame
Abbey Wamback bending down, putting her arm around Sophia, who
was six or seven years old, her big brown eyes
looking absolutely wowed by the woman beside her. So I
replied to the tweet with the picture and and just
told her that she's a huge reason why this has
(43:06):
happened to me, why I'm in this position getting my
my hopefully first cap of many with the with the
U S national team. So it was a really cool
moment just to kind of see how it comes full circle.
You have to see it, to to dream it, and
to be it. This kind of intergenerational support is one
of the awesome things about social media, but all that connectivity,
(43:30):
the ease with which a fan can speak directly to
a player can also be intensely difficult. In the past,
the athlete waved the crowd at the end of the
game and said goodbye. Now it can feel like the
audience stays with you always. Like other athletes, including Naomi Osaka,
(43:51):
who have posted about mental health, Sofia recently made an
impassioned tweet to fans to remind them that athletes are human.
You know, I think sometimes people might show up to
sporting events and think that we athletes are there just
to entertain them and that we you know, don't have
(44:13):
feelings or things that they yell or things that they
comment on social media. They think maybe we don't see
them or hear them, but we do. We're people before
we're athletes. Yeah, we are strong, and we maybe put
up a front out on the field that we can
handle anything, but it's not always the case. Um. And
I think mental health is just recently being more and
(44:36):
more talked about. Even for me, I've never really you know,
given it the time of day because I personally haven't
felt like I've struggled with it. But just you know, recently,
my good friend at Stanford passed away, um from suicide.
So I think I'm starting to become more aware of
(44:58):
that and maybe specifically more with athletes in the way
that we handle it, um or lack thereof handle it,
because you know, we're expected to be strong and nothing's
supposed to bother us and this and that, and I
think it's just it can almost be a toxic way
to handle things. So I think the more we can
(45:19):
talk about it, the more you know, athletes feel like
they can open up about it and be vulnerable about
it um And I just think that's a huge thing
that we need to, you know, take a big step forward.
If I have an opportunity to spread some sort of good,
I will do that, and I will use the platform
(45:40):
that I have to do that. Each generation wants to
make the game better for the next And that same
quality that pushed these athletes to be the best is
also what made them strong enough to fight for change.
There's audacity to be both strong and vulnerable, to keep pushing,
(46:01):
to speak up, to drag and pull and left and
dream your sport forward. This series took you inside the
dreams of women from all over the world, from Lagos
to Melbourne. From Queen's debuguitar. They found the game when
they were young and hung on for all they were worth.
(46:23):
Their dreams had nothing to do with fame. It was
really only ever about love. It didn't matter if they
were nobody's or somebody's, if they were playing in the
shadows or in the spotlight. Here's what they knew. The
feeling they had while they were playing, it was the
best thing they had found. No matter how far they
(46:45):
did or didn't get, they'd all tell you, playing this
game it gave us so so much. The highs, the
winds and the crowds are undoubtedly special. But when your
career is over, the smaller, quieter moments of how you
got there, I mean every bit as much. Running sprints
(47:08):
in the sun, hopping fences, sneaking onto fields, fetching forgotten
balls from the patch of the trees beside the refugee
can sleeping in the clids you bought from the second
hand store, doing your homemark on the subway home from
practice at eleven pm in Tokyo, not making a guy
(47:29):
at a gym and an underground league, and Queen's the
scout standing up to carrogated in during legals, saying you've
got what it takes to make it. Your father's face
as it relent. He says, yes, my daughter, you can't
play hitchhiking to professional football practice on a dirt road
in Brazil. We're in Jersey the middle of days. The
(47:50):
number of your country gives to the gods. Can't watch
it that Jersey in a cement s inc in the
back alley, juggling until wait with your mom standing to
the street light, just so we could see waking up
in the middle of the night because you tried to
shoot in your dreams. It's about want, It's about effort.
(48:11):
In the end, the hustle you bring rules the outcome
mostaff for no bad hustle. Rule is a production of
(48:33):
Waffle Iron Entertainment, Range Media Partners, Observatory Audio, UP Media,
and I Heart Radio, written and directed by Gwendolyn oxen Um,
hosted by me Hannah Wadding Him and is based on
the book Under the Lights and in the Dark, written
by Gwendolyn oxen Um. The executive producers are Justin Biskun
from Waffle Iron Entertainment, Bob Alligan from Range Media Partners,
(48:55):
and Sean Titan from I Heart Radio. Co written by
Ruth Hilton, Produced by Lynn Oxenham, Ruth Hilton and Jordana
Glick Franszheim. Co produced by Jimmy Jelinek and Jared Goodstad,
Edited by Carry Caulfield, Eric sound design and mixing by
Jeremiah's Immerman. Music by Jeff Peters and Bill mart Theme
song performed by A one Laflair. You'll find more podcasts
(49:17):
from iHeart Radio on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts. Good Body Clop
I'm Hannah Waddingham and this is Hustle Rule, an audio
docuseries featuring the untold stories of women's soccer players around
the world, based on the book Under the Lights and
in the Dark, written by Gwendolen Oxenham in South London,
where I grew up, I didn't know there were women's footballers.
(00:20):
In my twenties. I'd go to the pub to watch
Liverpool play, but I never thought of the sport as
an option for myself. You know, I'm six ft tall
and my build definitely lends itself to sport. But I
think my mom bless her, was just like, oh no, no, no,
don't do that. You might hurt yourself. That's a boy thing,
so it kind of infiltrated. I mean, of course, in
(00:42):
England we are football mad and when the Men's World
Cup comes on, the whole country is gripped by fever.
But only recently has the women's team hit the country's
collective consciousness. A turning point was the Women's World Cup.
England got to the semi final but lost a heartbreaker
on an own goal. The pictures of a devastated Laura
(01:06):
Bassett consoled by her teammates spread far and wide, and
suddenly the country was caught up in the emotion. The
Lionesses had arrived. In the United States. That turning point
happened much earlier when the national team won the World Cup.
But while a generation of girls watching Julie Foudy and
(01:27):
Mia Hamm and Christine Lily imagined wearing the jersey themselves,
that dream had nothing to do with a salary or
a career. A professional league didn't exist. Thanks to Title nine,
American girls new soccer was a way to get a
college scholarship. The game equalled academic possibilities. The popular National
(01:49):
Collegiate Athletic Association commercial told them that nearly all n
c A athletes go professional in something else, and girls
knew it was talking to them. In the United States.
From early on, soccer was always a route, not a destination.
But in the past twenty years, there's been a trajectory
(02:11):
of change. This episode is Shape Shifters, Side Hustlers and
the New Guard The Three at Special, the last in
our series featuring the voices of players around the world,
from the players of the past to the new stars
of Olympic lion A, Manchester, United, Angel City FC, and
the US national team here to tell you just what
(02:32):
this game has meant and how it will forever shape
their lives for nobody. In Act one shape Shifters, we
(02:55):
talked to the women who had no pro league to
play in. What's it like to be a twin two
year old husband, to be the best at what you
do and then have to completely start over kicked out
of their sport. They shape shifted and went on to
chase dreams in entirely different fields. Today, before we take
you into anyone else's story, we want you to hear Quin's.
(03:23):
When I was twelve years old, I tried out for
the Florida Olympic Development team. I remember sitting in the
grass as they called out the numbers of the players
who had been chosen, aching for them to call my number.
They did not call it. When I went up to
the coach to find out what I'd done wrong, he
told me You're just too awkward for this level awkwardness.
(03:48):
That didn't even sound like something I could work on,
But I just remember feeling this sort of click of no,
this is the one place I am not awkward. This
is the place in my life where I belong, and
you're wrong, and I'm going to show you that you're wrong.
After that, I trained with my team, my brother's team,
(04:10):
and I called up the high school team and asked
if I could train with them too. Every day after
those practices, I dribbled around trash cans in the street.
The days I doubled up on practice, I dragged the
trash cans under the street light and dribbled in the dark.
Soccer was always my escape. My brother, who I love
(04:31):
very much, was in trouble a lot. The police would
be at our house. He went to prison. Things weren't easy,
but I had soccer. The game was what I could
turn to, and I think that's true for so many
of us. When I was sixteen years old, I skipped
my senior of high school and got a scholarship to
Duke University, my dream school. I was the youngest d
(04:54):
one athlete in the history of n C double A.
I scored two goals my first game, and I thought
was on my way. I wanted to be mia Ham.
I even wrote her a letter and told her that.
But by my senior year, I was not the best
player in the country. The national team was not knocking
at my door. When my senior season ended, they handed
(05:15):
us plaques that showed our span two thousand through two
thousand and four. An underclassman kind of nailed how we
felt when she compared the plaque to a tombstone. It
looks like you guys died. I would have tried out
for the U S Pro League, but it folded right
before I graduated. I was twenty years old and my
(05:37):
career was over, which meant I had to find a
new life. Suddenly, I wondered if maybe I devoted too
much time to dribbling around trash cans. That summer, I
got a job as a deckhand, scrubbing toilets on a
boat in Mexico. I was really excited to plunge into
(05:57):
a new world. The people that I was working with, um,
you know, they used to be bakers in a cake shop,
and they had astronomy degrees, and they treated me like
I was a freak, Like you mean, you've only played
soccer your whole life. I loved this perspective of oh, like,
the world is large and I've only been focused on
one part. Let's see what else is out there? And
(06:19):
I thought to myself, Um, you know, I'm going to
eat sashimi on the deck with other deck hands from
all over the world. I told myself, I'm so excited
to live this soccer free life. Ah. And this I
soon discovered was a lie. We anchored off this island
that served as an outpost for the Mexican Army. On
the dock, I could see soldiers with machetes and machine guns,
(06:43):
and right behind them I could see a makeshift soccer
field with driftwood goalposts. I diding eat over there, and
I made kicking gestures, and within five minutes I'm sharing
goal celebrations. They're picking me up. It's monsoon rain, and
I just remember thinking, who am I getting? Nothing is
better than this. But the summer ended and I began
(07:05):
my new life. I went to graduate school in creative writing.
Those n c A commercials talk about the values sports
and still determination, perseverance, But all I felt was insecurity.
It took me fifteen years to get good at soccer,
and now I was supposed to just go be good
at something else. Yet it was true that I knew
(07:25):
how to work hard, and all the effort I'd put
towards playing I now transferred over to learning how to write.
But I never forgot that game in Mexico. It always
just kind of sat in the back of my brain,
and I went to the Duke library with a former
teammate and we sat there with a legal pad, brainstorming
about how we could keep the game. You know, if
(07:48):
I can't plan the national team, then what could I do?
And pick up has always been what I loved the most.
I loved playing pickup. So we made a documentary PAYLTA
about pick up soccer around the world. We went to
twenty five countries, playing with prisoners in Bolivia and moonshine
burrs and Kenya and old men in Brazil who just
(08:09):
beat the heck out of each other every Sunday morning.
Seeing all of these people who love this game, the
same game that we're all playing, and none of them
made it either. I didn't really care about not making
the national team anymore. The film was at the beginning
of my life as a storyteller, leading me to the
stories I'm telling today. Because of the game, I get
(08:30):
to talk with players all over the world and hear
about their experiences and what their life is like. And
I wouldn't trade that. I love love what I do.
My Duke teammates also shape shifted our ambition funneled into
new directions. They became doctor scientists CEOs. Crystal Presley, a
(08:50):
defender on our team, helped discover a gene that causes obesity.
She's now a surgeon. Our captain, Casey Truman, who used
to make our whole team burnt CDs, became one of
Hollywood's most sought after music supervisors. The songs you hear
during the heart wrenching scenes on some of the most
popular TV shows like Mad Men, Gray's Anatomy Scandal. She's
(09:15):
the one who picks them out. You know, when pro
soccer was no longer an option for me, I had
to find a new dream. And I don't think I
realized that I was looking for a new dream. It
was just a music was my passion, and I just
went after it like there was nothing else. You can't
deny what you love. My other Casey at Duke, Casey McCleskey,
(09:39):
was one year behind me. She became a litigator. When
I met her, I knew I would never be the best.
No amount of practice would ever get me to her level.
I never saw her lose a single drill at practice.
That's not hyperbole. She was our leading scorer and a
CC Offensive Player of the Year into the was in
(10:00):
in five. She had an astonishing gift. Being on the
women's national team was always my goal. But in my
junior year the league folded. I remember very vividly when
we had our last game. It was against U C.
L A, you know, the whistle blue, and it was like,
now what you know? There was no league here and
(10:20):
is this the end? And for something that I had,
I'd poured everything into, you know, like my whole life.
I was a soccer player, every extra minute I had.
It was pretty devastating. I think at the time, I
just felt like I needed to grow up and be
an adult and stopped kind of chasing the silly dream.
And so I came home and I took the l
(10:42):
sad and I went to law school, and then like
halfway through law school, the league came back. But I
just said, you know, this is the path I've taken,
and I need to go through with law school and
just kind of forget about soccer. So I think part
of it is just like the nostalgia and the missing
that version of myself that never be. It's hard for
me to wrap my mind around the idea that Casey's
(11:04):
husband and her three sons never even knew this part
of her. I kind of wish I had maybe like
a highlight taber or something to show them. And you know,
it's like if I was like an artist and I
had like these paintings I did, and then my husband
never saw my paintings and I can't paint anymore. You know,
it's kind of a weird thing to not be able
(11:24):
to share that with him. And I'm also not like,
I don't sound like I'm going to talk about it
all the time like I was. You know, it was
so good when when twenty years ago, you know, but
I'm glad, you know, you know, all the things that
made me who I am. I learned playing soccer act
(11:51):
two side hustlers, the generation that did have a league
to play and still knew their livelihood was tenuous to you.
Leagues w USA and the WPS had folded. In sixteen,
a third attempt at a pro league began, the NWSL.
The starting salary for the NWSL professional player was just
(12:12):
seven thousand, two hundred dollars. Players often lived with host families.
A couple even roomed at a retirement home, and these
college educated players are having to choose this lifestyle over
much higher paying career routes. Alie Riley, a Stanford grad
on the New Zealand national team who's followed the game
all over the world, had this to say. You know,
(12:35):
my mom, we had had these conversations from high school
because she wanted me to go to Harvard or Yale
or Princeton, and I, you know, I was very very
dedicated to to my academics and I had good grades,
but I just I wanted to play soccer and I
wanted to play at at a top school. But those
(12:57):
conversations started pretty early where she's like, you've got to
be a doctor, You've got to be a lawyer. Her
parents came from China, raised four daughters, They made their
own clothes, you know, never had had any money, and
I think she just wanted me to have so much
more than that and and to feel secure. But it
just was so perfect that the league came back right
(13:19):
when I, you know, the year before I was graduating,
I was just blindly, you know, going to follow my dream.
I think it wasn't until two years later when the
league folded that I kind of realized, um, I have
no job and no home. But Ali and many others
around the world found a way to keep playing anyway.
(13:39):
In Ali's case, she took off for Sweden playing for
FC Malma. She made a yearly income, but not everybody did.
These were athletes willing to do anything to play, even
if it meant playing for no salary in front of
empty stands in countries far away from their homes. No
matter where they were from or how they did or
(14:00):
did not make, they were playing because they loved to play.
But to make it everybody had a side hustle. My
name then you all. I've had the opportunity to play
for the Argentinian National Policia. I'm a police officer. I
actually board eight hours a day, every single day so
(14:22):
that I can go and play soccer in the afternoon.
My name is is Love Brown. I played for BIGA
national women's team for sixteen years and I am fifty
two years right now. To survive as a soccer player
in Trinidad, you had to have a job. So my
(14:42):
job what did we find you was process contrivil that
deals with all the little gudgets that measure time flu
pressure in a temperature stuff like that, so that they
don't blow up and cause a catastrophe. I'm for a
Alcobolter and I played for Iceland for seventeen years and
I played professionally for six That's the CFO for DHL Iceland,
(15:07):
working crazy hours at the same time, and I was
still on the national team. Nowadays, Flora runs the Central
Bank of Iceland. Hi, welcome to stars. My name is Coco.
Like my very nice, like friendly voice. I would work
at Starbucks starting at five o'clock in the morning and
(15:29):
then work till about two. My sister used to work
at that store. She would come in and be like, guys,
you know that she has a Wikipedia page and that
you're actually working with the super star. And I'm just like,
oh my gosh, Savannah, please stop. After Coco Goodson retired
from soccer, she joined the military. So I am a
(15:50):
first lieutenant, I am stationed at Fort Bragg and I
am a field artillery officer. So like the Big Cannons,
we we shoo the Big Cannons. English footballer Bethmeade was
also a flarer tender for a local pub while she
played for Sunderland, Cameroon's gale In Ganimuit used her football
(16:10):
paycheck to buy Umoto, a taxi motorcycle, which grew into
a family taxi business in Unde that she ran on
the side while playing professionally in Sweden. So often athletes
are treated as one dimensional, good at kicking a ball only,
but you can't say that about any of these women.
(16:31):
They had a whole other life beyond the game side, hustling,
doing whatever it takes in order to keep playing. And
these women are also in a constant state of hatching
plans and pursuing alternate lives. They are big picture thinkers.
Everybody's got a backup plan, an idea for what's next.
(16:52):
Spain Celia Jimenez, who currently plays for the Orlando Pride,
has a degree in aeronautical engineering. She's planning to become
a rocket scientist. For others, the answer isn't moving on
from soccer, but finding a way to stay. Mammy Amagucci
is a Japanese national team player who played professionally in Sweden,
(17:15):
the US, and Japan, and she wants to pass her
love of the game onto others. Some weekends, she coaches
as many as eleven games in two days. If you
get coached by you know, great coach, the kids just
change totally. It's kind of like a magic I love
(17:36):
the game more than anybody probably, so that kind of
spread my love to the players. I have to from
the star. Okay, we're going to dominate the game the book.
Are we going to pay style? Right? Yeah, let's go
ye like Mammy. A lot of former players give back
(17:58):
to the game. Is here the Trinidadian who worked in
the oil factory. She went on to coach national teams
in Trinidad, the Virgin Islands, Suriname, in Antigua. Other former
players become owners or gms. Take any Aluco, who played
over a hundred games for the English national team. She
readied herself for a life after the game, but she
(18:19):
could never quite tear herself away from football, which has
had her heart since she was a kid growing up
in public housing in the British city of Birmingham. I
was the only girl in the area, so like, my
quickest way of feeling accepted was to play football with
the boys. So every time the boys knocked on my
door and said can any come and play? The joy
(18:42):
I used to feel, at like five six years old,
I just was like, yes, I just want to play.
I just want to play. I want to play. So
coming from a traditional sort of Nigerian family, education is
everything right, It's like non negotiable. So my mom was like, yeah, cool,
like you you play, you do your thing, but you know,
(19:02):
you do have to focus on your school, particularly because
there was just no professional pathway in football. So you know,
I really focused in on getting my grades, the good
grades letter to a large degree. But despite getting a first,
the very top grade and equivalent of Magna kum Lada,
she was met with rejection letter after rejection letter from
(19:24):
the law firm she applied to. It was so bad
that my mom started hiding the letters because she just
didn't want me to feel so discouraged. And then I
got an offer out of the blue to play in America.
So in the WPS, the previous league, the kicker was
that the owner of the professional team also offered her
a job in his law firm during the off season.
(19:45):
For good five years, I was working as a lawyer
whilst I was playing semi pro. And then Chelsea offered
me a full time professional contract and then I was
like okay, cool, like I'm going to commit to football now,
and you know I can be a lawyer when I'm sixty.
Women players definitely loved the game because we definitely don't
do it for the money, right, I would have earned
more as a lawyer than if I played for a
(20:08):
long time. I was happy to earn less because I
just wanted to play, whereas in the men's game, obviously,
you know you have just ridiculous amounts of money being
talked about nowadays. Any is helping to create the culture
at the National Women's Soccer League's hottest new team, Angels
City FC, which was founded by probably the most high
(20:29):
profile ownership group any team has ever had anywhere in
the world, Hollywood powerhouse Natalie Portmant is one of its founders,
and its investors include Serena Williams, Eva Longoria, Jennifer Garner,
Becky g Abbey Womback, Mia Hamm and Gabrielle Union. I'm
the sporting director. Effectively, it's a general managers this team,
(20:51):
and this role feel all the more important in light
of the previous nw SELL season in which five male
head coaches and a general manager we're fired for abuse allegations,
so to have any managing and Freya kumb coaching both women,
both former players. It feels like, you know, I was
(21:14):
player for over fifteen years, so understanding what players want
and what makes players take and the environment, the professional
high performance environments that you need to build. It's not
something that's like alien to me or something that we
have to have to read a book to understand. Like,
I just get it. I've been in it. I'm passionate
about female players feeling like they have control over their
(21:37):
own destiny. So when it comes to my job, when
it comes to making trades and sort of the business
end of this job, I will always have that human
element in the back of my mind. Ultimately, now the
game is moved on and there is more money, there
is more investment, but it's also making sure that we
(21:58):
don't lose that really pure element of women's sports. In
the past decade, the women's professional game has grown by
leaps and bounds. The storied European clubs like FC Barcelona
and CHELSEAFC have poured money into the women's game. In
(22:20):
South America, football Confederation Conno BAL has mandated that all
men's teams that compete in the Continents Championship Coppa Liberta
Torres must have a women's team. Audiences worldwide have exploded,
attendance records getting shattered. New records bring new fans, and
(22:40):
new fans bring new momentum, which brings us to Act three,
in which we introduce you to the new Guard. The
momentum generation change is still ongoing, but there has never
been so much hope. Here's Gwen. At the Africa Cup
of Nations and Cameroon in two thousand and seventeen, forty
(23:02):
thousand filled the stadium five hours before kickoff. That same year,
at the UEFA European Championship, the Netherlands sold out every
game and one quarter of the Dutch population four point
one million people watched the final on television. And it
(23:25):
isn't just the national teams drawing these kinds of crowds,
so are the professional teams. On a club team level.
The Portland Thorns of the NWSL can draw twenty tho
plus fans to a midweek game in Boguta. In two
thousand and seventeen, a crowd of thirty three thousand watched
Santa Fe win Columbia's first ever women's professional League final.
(23:51):
It was a goose bump moment for all the players
who have spent years being told by naysayers that there
weren't fans for the women's game. Here's oor Velasquez, who
has played on the Colombia national team for fifteen years.
They say nobody watched a woman's sucker. So we got
to the final and it was almost full of the stadium.
(24:13):
I was like, okay, now tell me how this is
the first time I've felt professional in my in my country.
So it was amazing because we went out and they
would just splew like all that emotion. Records keep getting broken.
(24:38):
In two thousand and eighteen, more than fifty two thousand
fans packed a Stadio as Teca in Mexico City for
a woman's final between Tigris and Monterey. In more than
nine thousand fans showed up to see Real Madrid played Barcelona.
And with new attendance records and new fans, come new
(24:59):
salary eas In Norway, New Zealand, England, Australia, Brazil and
as of the United States, men's and women's players are
to be paid equal salaries for their national team appearances,
and on May eight, as US Soccer confirmed the terms
(25:20):
of its new contracts, it announced a global first, the
US Soccer Federation will pool World Cup prize money, which
is a portion to national teams by FIFA based on
where they place. The grand total of what the women's
and men's national team win will be shared equally between them.
(25:41):
And considering that the total men's prize money at stake
in Qatar four hundred and forty million is more than
seven times the women's prize money in Australia next year,
that's a gigantic change. On the professional club level, there
was also finally major progress. Here is Norway's Ada Haggerberg.
(26:07):
She's the all time leading goal scorer in UEFA's Champions
League and the start forward for Olympic Leon. I remember
it like it was yesterday. The first summer when I
came to Leon, I felt like I was leaving a
childhood dream. To be honest, I came from a very
tough regime in Germany and I came to a super
(26:28):
super professional club, Olmpic Leone. Now today we train at
the same ground as the men's do. We have the
same training center and kind of like we have top
conditions in order to also perform at a high level.
We've managed to win the Champions League seven times. I
think the people of Leon are very proud of the
women's team. I can feel that mutual respect from the
(26:50):
men's players as well. They see that we bring something
to the table as well. So by being given these conditions,
were actually in a place to deliver as well, and
that I think that's been very very important. Jackie grown
In is a Dutch midfielder who plays for Manchester United.
Like Ada, she makes a six figure salary, but she
studied law anyway because of the Netherlands women's soccer explosion.
(27:15):
Classmates weren't just classmates, they were also fans. When Tilburg
University went online due to the pandemic, she joined the
zoom classes from home. And here's what happened. When covid started,
I kind of saw my way to do classes with
other people because everyone has to do it online, so
(27:37):
it's kind of like, Okay, I can do everything now
everyone else is doing. So. Then after one of the
first classes, one of the teachers prode me if I
could sign in in a different name because people kept
writing things in the chat about football, like when the
next game was, so she asked if I could use
a different name and turn that on camera, no longer
(27:57):
as a player like Jackie, just an anonymous ace. And
it's not just the professional athletes who have an opportunity
to make money nowadays, thanks to one of the most
dramatic changes in a generation of American sport, the n
c double as June policy shift. In the past, while
colleges made massive amounts from their sports teams, the athletes
(28:20):
themselves were not allowed to cash in. Now, college athletes
are allowed to sign endorsement deals and make money from
their own name, image and likeness or an I L.
The first Nike signing under these new rules American football basketball. No,
it was a women's soccer player. I'm Rayland Turner. I
(28:46):
play soccer for u C l A, and I'm nike
us first n I L athlete. Obviously they chose a
female athlete, which for some people's very surprising. But in
my opinion, I think that women's soccer is on the
rise right now and it's making its way up to
men's football, men's basketball. I think that it has a
(29:08):
lot of publicity now more than ever, and I think
that it's a big step in the sports community that
women are finally getting the recognition that they deserve. Growing up,
my biggest role models were Abby Wambach and Michelle Acres
because their game was just so passionate and roofless. And
(29:31):
I always looked up to college athletes, so it's it's
really cool to be a college athlete now. I feel
like a lot of the times people's roller bottles are
people who are at the top, and I'm on my
way there, So I feel like I'm in more of
a relatable position than those who have already made it.
I just hope to be someone who a little girl
(29:53):
looks up to. And another huge change for US soccer,
a handful of women's soccer play ys have begun to
either leap frog college sports altogether, or, like men's basketball
players commonly, do leave college early to go pro. I'm
Sophia Smith and I was the first teenager to be
(30:14):
drafted into the NWSL. And I played two great seasons
at Stanford and loved every second of it, and I think,
you know, after winning the national Championship, I was just
ready for something new. When I entered the draft. It
was very rare that someone would leave college early to
become a professional soccer player, um specifically a female professional
(30:38):
soccer player, and there was a lot of mixed opinions
on my decision, but my heart was telling me I
was ready and to just take that jump. And I've
just loved it. I feel like this is the life
that I was supposed to live. Heroes are multiplying a
much wider range of kids watching today have a chance
(31:00):
to recognize themselves in today's new stars. Hi. My name
is Madison Hammond and I'm a professional soccer player. I
became the first Native American soccer player to play in
the End of us L, which at the time I
never I did not think about it. I wasn't conscious
(31:21):
of it. That wasn't the goal, but I didn't realize
how freaking dope that is to be someone that people
can look to and see in a space that wasn't
there before. I mean, I can't really put in towards
like what that feels like, because in the moment, I
was like, Oh, I'm just another girl trying to make
(31:43):
it in the league. But then it was like, no,
you represent so much more. The daughter of Ethiopian immigrants,
was the number one pick of the NWSL draft. Hi.
I'm Naomi Grama. I'm a defender for Wave FC, and
I started in Maloda soccer um. My dad pretty much
(32:04):
started it in the Bay Area, and it was really
just a way for the Ethiopian community to come together
on the weekends. It was just a big group of
us who were kind of like figuring out for the
first time how to live in the US, so all
first generation Americans because our parents hadn't done it, and
it was great to kind of have that community like
(32:27):
within the kids to lead on and people going through
similar experiences where we're speaking a language at home and
we're going to school speaking a different language, and just
like having the cultural difference between home and school is
something that I think can be hard to balance, especially
when you're younger. None of my success would be possible
without the community around me. Naomi went on to become
(32:47):
valedictorian of our high school and then captain of the
Stanford soccer team. She remembers trying to help her parents
watch the draft, which had gone remote due to the pandemic,
Like two minutes before the draft starting. I was like
trying to tell them how to turn it on and
how to get onto the right the right channel, which
is very typical for our family. But yeah, they were
(33:09):
really excited. My dad and my mom just started crying.
You know, it's really cool, I think to see them
also have that moment of like wow, like we helped
our daughter get here, and you know, like she's one
step closer to her dream. There's never been a better
(33:30):
time to pursue that dream. The NWSLS players Union negotiated
its first ever collective bargaining agreement. It increases players salaries
across the board and raises the minimum yearly salary to
thirty dollars. While modest in comparison to the men, it's
still more than five times what it was in the beginning.
(33:53):
The agreement will also provide free housing, transportation, fully vested
four oh one K contributions, health life and disability insurance,
eight weeks of paternal leave, and up to six months
of mental health leave. Playing circumstances are better than they
have ever been, but the changed environment doesn't mean the
players today are no longer hustling. They're just hustling in
(34:16):
a different kind of way. They're hustling for change, picking
up the fight not just within sports but for the
world as a whole. Meet Midge Purse, the first Harvard
graduate on the women's national team. In the past few years,
she's taken on fossil fuels, racial inequality, and gender inequality.
(34:37):
At one point, when I wanted to be a really
great soccer player, I felt like I couldn't do anything else.
I felt like very guilty for expanding in different directions,
And now when I think about that, it sounds like
the stupidest thing I've ever heard. I ran for the
Harvard Board of overseers Um, which is the highest democratically
(34:58):
elected board at Harvard. I ran for the board for
two reasons. One, I think or I thought that the
board needed to be more inclusive in terms of its governance.
It didn't have anyone who had graduated from the school
within the past ten years, and that a voice of
(35:18):
someone who had been there within like this type of generation,
would be really important to be included when making decisions.
And the second reason was I ran on a climate
crisis based platform to push Harvard to divest from fossil fields,
which they have committed to. Not only was Midge invested
in saving the planet, in Mitch felt compelled to create
(35:42):
the Black Women's Player Collective, a nonprofit organization who stated
goal is to advance opportunities for black girls in sport
and beyond. I experienced early on that being a black
player at times was different than being a white player
(36:04):
when you're playing woman soccer. They are just subtleties and
not so subtle things that people say, coaches do and
um ways that people react to you that are very accepted.
I once had a coach tell me that I scored
really ugly goals. I was the the leading scorer at
(36:28):
the time on the team, but he wouldn't start me.
And I used to get in the car after practice
and I was so upset and my dad he just
told me you had to be twice as good. And
I remember saying, I am twice as good. I scored
more goal than everyone else. And he said, no, you're
not twice as good. It has to be undeniable. And then, um,
(36:49):
I wanted my dad to talk to the coach and
he said, no, you talked to the coach um, And
I asked him. I was like, why aren't you playing me?
And he said, you score ugly goals? And I go,
but I'm scoring and he goes, being fast and athletic
isn't enough. And at the time it really struck me
because I had never been reduced to being just fast
(37:12):
and athletic. It was very strange and in my experience
and in the way that it happened, it was because
I was black. And I know some people will hear
that and say, well, you don't know, you don't know.
I know, you don't know, and that's fine, like we
can agree to disagree. But it's things like that that
are subtle and like it happens. Yeah, truthfully, I haven't
(37:36):
spoken about it in a long time, and even speaking
about it right now, I kind of just got like
thrown back into it and how angry I was. I was.
I was so upset, and I remember my dad being
so upset because it was just very clear to me
that he didn't want me to have that type of experience,
but I was having it anyway. I started the Black
(38:04):
Woman's Player Collective with a couple of other players in
the league. During the Challenge Cup, we were in a bubble.
It was a pandemic and the country, you know, the
world truly was um pretty much in turmoil about racial
justice and it was a really really difficult time because
(38:27):
players were dealing with the decision of whether or not
to kneel during the anthem, and you know, on the surface,
it's a very personal choice. It's you know, up to you.
You have the right to do whatever you want, um.
But behind closed doors, people felt very judged for whatever
(38:47):
their decision was. And we were having so many conversations
about what people's decisions meant and what they meant by
their decisions, and um, what their perspectives and thoughts on
the country, the status of Black Americans were and hurtful
things were set. You know, it was in shocking things
(39:10):
were said, and it was a very exhausting time, I
think for all the black players in the league, not
exclusively at all, UM, but the Black Man's Player Collective
was made to support those players. The league has been
doing different things in an effort to protect some players
(39:31):
but not others. And when I say that, I'm referencing UM.
They wanted to take the anthem away, but the reason
they wanted to take the anthem away was to protect
players who were standing from any backlash. We were like,
that's really that's very targeted audience you have to protect.
Mitch also took on gender inequality, going to the White
(39:52):
House alongside Soccer Icon Megan Rappino. It was a really
funny day because I drove from Jersey home that morning
and my dad took me to the White House and
then just parked on the side of the road and
waited for me to come back out, as if it
was just soccer practice. The point of what I said
(40:14):
was to highlight the fact that when we're talking about
equal pay, people don't really understand we're talking about equal investment.
There's just this entire history of cross industry support forcing
men's sports to become what it is today. So many
different organizations and groups, including like the government and government subsidies,
(40:38):
pushed really hard to make men's sports so amazing, and
we are constantly compared to what they have produced with
all that investment, without the same investment anything near it
um So I just the point was that you can't
really compare the two until you invest the same amount
in the two. While this push for investment is a
(41:01):
continuous process, the emergence of social media has opened up
a path for women athletes to invest in themselves, just
like the other influencers of their generation. Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube.
It changes everything. All the coverage and airtime and exposure
(41:21):
you weren't given. Social media allows you to take it
for yourself to be seen, to be followed, to be appreciated,
and suddenly your league, your sport is a thing, and you,
yourself can become a monetize herbal brand with only your
cell phone. It's a second stream of income for a
(41:41):
lot of people, and I think that's absolutely amazing. I
know players who make more off of their social media
than they do from actually playing. There are ripple effects,
ground swells where one tweet becomes one million tweets. Gabrielle Union,
a former collegiate athlete, an Angel City FC investor, and
(42:02):
an actress with twenty million followers, tweeted at Sophia Smith
the day she played her first game for the national team.
Union wrote, growing up playing soccer in the eighties and nineties,
seeing other black girls out there was extremely rare. Today,
I'm so full of pride watching these strong young women
(42:22):
have so much success on and off the field. I mean,
when I got the notification on my phone that she
tweeted about me, I had to click on it and
like make sure it was actually her. I couldn't, I
couldn't believe it was real that first game. Soccer star
Abby Wamback also tweeted to congratulate her. Smith replied posting
(42:44):
a childhood pick. In the picture, you see a postgame
Abbey Wamback bending down, putting her arm around Sophia, who
was six or seven years old, her big brown eyes
looking absolutely wowed by the woman beside her. So I
replied to the tweet with the picture and and just
told her that she's a huge reason why this has
(43:06):
happened to me, why I'm in this position getting my
my hopefully first cap of many with the with the
U S national team. So it was a really cool
moment just to kind of see how it comes full circle.
You have to see it, to to dream it, and
to be it. This kind of intergenerational support is one
of the awesome things about social media, but all that connectivity,
(43:30):
the ease with which a fan can speak directly to
a player can also be intensely difficult. In the past,
the athlete waved the crowd at the end of the
game and said goodbye. Now it can feel like the
audience stays with you always. Like other athletes, including Naomi Osaka,
(43:51):
who have posted about mental health, Sofia recently made an
impassioned tweet to fans to remind them that athletes are human.
You know, I think sometimes people might show up to
sporting events and think that we athletes are there just
to entertain them and that we you know, don't have
(44:13):
feelings or things that they yell or things that they
comment on social media. They think maybe we don't see
them or hear them, but we do. We're people before
we're athletes. Yeah, we are strong, and we maybe put
up a front out on the field that we can
handle anything, but it's not always the case. Um. And
I think mental health is just recently being more and
(44:36):
more talked about. Even for me, I've never really you know,
given it the time of day because I personally haven't
felt like I've struggled with it. But just you know, recently,
my good friend at Stanford passed away, um from suicide.
So I think I'm starting to become more aware of
(44:58):
that and maybe specifically more with athletes in the way
that we handle it, um or lack thereof handle it,
because you know, we're expected to be strong and nothing's
supposed to bother us and this and that, and I
think it's just it can almost be a toxic way
to handle things. So I think the more we can
(45:19):
talk about it, the more you know, athletes feel like
they can open up about it and be vulnerable about
it um And I just think that's a huge thing
that we need to, you know, take a big step forward.
If I have an opportunity to spread some sort of good,
I will do that, and I will use the platform
(45:40):
that I have to do that. Each generation wants to
make the game better for the next And that same
quality that pushed these athletes to be the best is
also what made them strong enough to fight for change.
There's audacity to be both strong and vulnerable, to keep pushing,
(46:01):
to speak up, to drag and pull and left and
dream your sport forward. This series took you inside the
dreams of women from all over the world, from Lagos
to Melbourne. From Queen's debuguitar. They found the game when
they were young and hung on for all they were worth.
(46:23):
Their dreams had nothing to do with fame. It was
really only ever about love. It didn't matter if they
were nobody's or somebody's, if they were playing in the
shadows or in the spotlight. Here's what they knew. The
feeling they had while they were playing, it was the
best thing they had found. No matter how far they
(46:45):
did or didn't get, they'd all tell you, playing this
game it gave us so so much. The highs, the
winds and the crowds are undoubtedly special. But when your
career is over, the smaller, quieter moments of how you
got there, I mean every bit as much. Running sprints
(47:08):
in the sun, hopping fences, sneaking onto fields, fetching forgotten
balls from the patch of the trees beside the refugee
can sleeping in the clids you bought from the second
hand store, doing your homemark on the subway home from
practice at eleven pm in Tokyo, not making a guy
(47:29):
at a gym and an underground league, and Queen's the
scout standing up to carrogated in during legals, saying you've
got what it takes to make it. Your father's face
as it relent. He says, yes, my daughter, you can't
play hitchhiking to professional football practice on a dirt road
in Brazil. We're in Jersey the middle of days. The
(47:50):
number of your country gives to the gods. Can't watch
it that Jersey in a cement s inc in the
back alley, juggling until wait with your mom standing to
the street light, just so we could see waking up
in the middle of the night because you tried to
shoot in your dreams. It's about want, It's about effort.
(48:11):
In the end, the hustle you bring rules the outcome
mostaff for no bad hustle. Rule is a production of
(48:33):
Waffle Iron Entertainment, Range Media Partners, Observatory Audio, UP Media,
and I Heart Radio, written and directed by Gwendolyn oxen Um,
hosted by me Hannah Wadding Him and is based on
the book Under the Lights and in the Dark, written
by Gwendolyn oxen Um. The executive producers are Justin Biskun
from Waffle Iron Entertainment, Bob Alligan from Range Media Partners,
(48:55):
and Sean Titan from I Heart Radio. Co written by
Ruth Hilton, Produced by Lynn Oxenham, Ruth Hilton and Jordana
Glick Franszheim. Co produced by Jimmy Jelinek and Jared Goodstad,
Edited by Carry Caulfield, Eric sound design and mixing by
Jeremiah's Immerman. Music by Jeff Peters and Bill mart Theme
song performed by A one Laflair. You'll find more podcasts
(49:17):
from iHeart Radio on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts. Good Body Clop
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