Sporting memories: A European girl qualifies for the boys team in my high school

When I was in high school, football of the soccer variety was my primary sport. I was good at the other sports except for baseball but it was determined by me as well as my coaches that this was the sport I should focus on. By my sophomore (2nd year, or 10th grade) I had dropped all other sports other than soccer, and the teams I was on regularly qualified for tournaments and placed well in the state. We won our conference every year I played for them except for one. The best we ever did was 2nd place in the state.

So needless to say our team was considered one of the best to play for in the state. The thing about high-school teams though is that outside of special circumstances, you can't just join a particular team because you feel like it, you have to live in a certain proximity to that school to be on any of their teams. When I was around 15 years old a foreign exchange student from Denmark, named Maya, started at my school.

At that point in time my high school didn't have a girls soccer team due to lack of interest and a lack of coaches in the entire region, so if girls wanted to play they had to try their hand at qualifying for the boys team. Needless to say very few girls ever even bothered to try out, and only one ever made it onto the team outside of a purely ceremonial sense.

Maya was an exception and I believe a lot of this has to do with her European roots.

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This is not Maya. Digital cameras didn't exist in the early 90's and we didn't think to take a bunch of photos. There probably are some of them out there but I can't find any of them so you'll just have to take my word for it that I am not fabricating this entire story.

At the age of 15-16 years old, this is when the physical differences between boys and girls start to really show up and it can be a really difficult task for girls to be able to compete with boys in most sports, especially team sports. I'm not trying to make some sort of feminist/misogynist point here folks, so take it easy. It was also a very different time in the 90s and the girls were not going to get put on the team if they didn't deserve it, especially a team like mine that was expected to perform really well out of the hundreds of teams in the state.

Maya was good. I mean she was really good. I say that her "European roots" probably helped her and while this may have changed in the past 30 years, back then American coaches tended to not know a great deal about the sport they were coaching. Football is absolutely massive in Europe and children are encouraged to play it constantly, boys and girls. Maya could juggle the ball, she could keep possession, and most importantly she could play, cross, and shoot with her off foot which for most people is their left. I am capable of both as well but my right is definitely better than my left, Maya was equally talented with both and claimed to not have a "favored side." This was evidenced in her playing and while she was not as quick nor as powerful as most of the boys on the team, her ability to keep control of the ball and her field vision, as well as being a true team player, made her a rather integral part of our team.

Maya of course felt a lot more pressure than the rest of us to perform well, because fair or not, she was always going to be judged using a different set of criteria than the rest of us were. Maya had the "misfortune" of also being a rather pretty 110 lb blonde, so there was a lot of harassment from other players. We protected Maya though and I think this sort of harassment made her try even harder.

I could tell throughout the season that Maya was afraid to take on scoring opportunities on her own and was often looking for an assist, which she was excellent at, especially from the left, and she was the driving force behind many-a-goal throughout the season. She rarely played an entire game though, because once the other team started realizing that she was better than most of the boys in the state, she became a target. She handled this very well though and she ended up making the papers a lot more frequently than other people did because what she was doing was not a handout, she earned it and was one of the better players on our team.

The coach never gave her anything she didn't deserve and if she wasn't effective in a game, he would pull her out just like he would for the rest of us. He informed her before he put her on the team that she was NOT going to receive any preferential treatment, just because she was a girl. This might result in a lawsuit today, but we were a lot less sensitive back then and the coach wasn't being mean to her, he was being realistic.

Maya ended up scoring a goal here and there throughout the season but mostly she was a supporting midfielder that could draw opponents in, probably because they thought that they could easily dis-possess her, only to arrive at her legs and realize that she is likely a better ball-handler than 90% of the people in the state. Her size was always going to be a limitation on her though, but this didn't hold her back.

Maya only played with us for a single year, and this was the year that we were eliminated in the round of 16 in the state tournament. This was still something that was quite an accomplishment considering that the city we lived in only had around 40,000 people with the entire population and our high school only had around 400 students. Not all of them played football/soccer either.

I don't know what happened to Maya, she went back to Denmark after the one year exchange program and as far as I know, that was where she graduated and lived her life.

Nowadays, every school has a girls team, including the high school I attended. They once asked me to come and coach the girls team at that school but at that time I lived in a different state and wasn't going to move back for some job that barely pays minimum wage when I had graduated from college already. I don't even know if they ever did very well.

But there was a time when there weren't many dedicated girls teams at all in the state of Virginia and any girl that wanted to play for their high school had to qualify for the boys team. Maya was a massive exception because not only did she qualify completely based on merit, she was one of the better players on our, and every other team in the state.

The quality of American soccer/football has improved a great deal since those days, but I believe that Maya would still qualify for most boys teams if she wanted to play on them.

It was an honor to be on a team with her but I will be honest and say that I had my reservations about her being on our team and there was some rumbling about her making the team simply because she was a girl as well as a foreign-exchange student.

I'll tell you this though: Maya put all that noise to rest as soon as you laced up your boots and played with her. This was not a DEI hire, she earned it. I was last at my high school for a reunion about 20 years ago and her photo is still in the glass case near the soccer coach's office. Despite the fact that I got a division-1 athletic scholarship and was the captain for 2 years on teams that made the state championship, there are no pictures of me!