Once we told her she could play soccer, she really got into the idea. Then, this summer, she became captivated by the Olympics, and every day begged to watch the girl athletes. She loved the swimmers, the gymnasts, and the soccer players, especially.
She began soccer two weeks ago. She plays on Saturdays in the morning, and since she is in the K-2 group, they only have six sessions, but she has loved it. There are girls with more skill than her, but no one can match her will. She scored three goals in her first four-on-four game, and five in her second.
At the same time, our adoptive 17-year-old daughter Maria (she’s an exchange student from Italy, in case you didn’t read last week’s blog) is also playing JV soccer for EO Smith High School. She played soccer as a little girl, but not since, so no one—including her—has unrealistic expectations about her performance, but she has enjoyed playing, and even got to participate in her first game earlier this week. She played defense for ten minutes. When I asked her about the game on the car ride home, she was excited they won, but did not recall the score, and when I asked her what school they played, she could only tell me their uniforms were blue. But that wasn’t the point, anyway. Maria was just happy to be playing soccer with the other girls.
All this made me think about my freshman year at UConn when I covered the women’s soccer team for the Daily Campus. I didn’t know, little yet appreciate at the time, that we were only fifteen years from the passage of Title IX, and that these girls I was watching and interviewing were the first generation to benefit from the new law. All of them, like me, were no older than seven when the law was passed.
That team started five freshmen, including Beth Grecco, who would become an All-American, Kristin Janosky, who used to throw in the ball by doing a flip that would propel the ball farther than she could throw it (I believe she was one of the first girls in the nation to use this technique), Britton Arico, who is still one of the all-time leading scorers, and Angela Gibbons, whose family had sued her school district to allow her to play on the all-boys soccer team, and then went on to be co-captain and leading scorer. They also had a goalie named Bonnie Miller who is still the all-time saves leader, and who had achieved a certain degree of fame for saving two men from drowning the summer before her senior year. However, perhaps the most impressive athlete on that team was midfielder Kim Prutting, who would go on to be a three time All-American and play on the US National Team. That team lost in the NCAA quarterfinals to UMass, and the biggest reason was probably a thigh injury to Kim Prutting that severely limited her mobility.
At that time, women’s sports was still very second class, despite Title IX, and I had an uncommonly high level of access to the coaches and the players. The Daily Campus used to print an annual Fall Sports special issue, and I interviewed several of the girls for feature articles, just talking with them in their dorm rooms. I also traveled with them on the team bus to the NCAA Tournament. The night before the quarterfinal game, head coach Len Tsantiris invited me out to dinner with him, his assistant coaches, and the UMass head coach. After the girls lost 3-1 the following day, seniors Bonnie Miller and Jen Kennedy invited me out to dinner with the team, and all the girls thanked me for the good coverage I had given them all season. They weren’t accustomed to it, and they wanted to show their appreciation.
That was 25 years ago this fall, and I’d like to thank all those young women for making it possible for Maria to use soccer as a means to make friends and for Elsa to score eight goals on a co-ed team.
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