Soccer In The Rockies: Acclimating and Adjusting

0023 Going Cattywampus

After making the U.S. Western Regional Select women's soccer team (really just a list in 1981), she had to essentially start over again in Colorado. At 16, although feeling somewhat invincible, she joined her new club team, arranged before she moved from California, not realizing that she would have to acclimate to the change in altitude. During the first game, not soon after she arrived, she was winded early and could not understand why she had such a hard time breathing. No one had explained to her that it would take time to acclimate from the below-1,000 foot altitude of her home in California to the 6,000-plus foot elevation of Colorado Springs.

The plus side of joining this new team was that soon after she arrived they travelled to Washington DC (her first trip to the east coast) to play in a tournament, which took place in Virginia, Maryland, and DC. The team had recently changed its name to the Colorado Springs Gladbach Attackers, because they got a new coach who had previously played in Germany for Borussia Mönchengladbach. He tried to get the players to learn German phrases to use on the field in order to confuse the other teams, but the only word she remembers learning was "schnell." She would yell “schnell, schnell" every time she wanted the ball. It was really a pointless word to use, since it only meant “fast.”

If she thought the plane flight to Montana was strange, the flight to DC was even more peculiar. After circling in the air a few times around DC, the captain announced that the landing was delayed, and they continued to circle. She remembers taking pictures of the monuments from the air, like the White House, the Capital Building, and the Washington, Lincoln, and Jefferson Memorials. When they flew near the Pentagon, she took a bunch of photos and she was excited to see how those photos would later come out. Back in 1981, the only commercial camera, except Polariods, had film in them that you had to take to a developer and then wait a week or so to get the photos back. When she finally got her photos, the ones of the Pentagon were not with the rest. Were they confiscated? Did the government take them? It is still something she wonders about 40-plus years later.

Once on the ground, the team got to tour some of the monuments and museums and even got to sit in on a U.S. House of Representatives session. She remembers it was pretty boring and that one of the players was woken up by security personnel after she fell asleep. She doesn’t remember much else about the tour, except that at the Jefferson Memorial there was someone who was dressed up as Lincoln and the team took a group picture with him.

The players stayed at host family homes in each location. This team also had drinkers on the roster, like her previous club, and when switching from one house to another, a teammate talked her into storing some leftover beer cans in her suitcase. Unfortunately, when she arrived at the next house, one of the beers had exploded and all her clothes were wet. Luckily, she had time to let her uniform dry before her next game, but it smelled of cheap beer and she was lucky the coach didn’t notice.

She doesn’t remember how she or the team did during the tournament, but mostly saw the trip as a way to travel and to get to know her teammates. Only a few would be going to her high school. The others were scattered among the other high schools across the city and she would be playing against them once the high school season started in the spring.

When she returned, soccer season in Colorado was over for the winter. She had made some friends and got invited to a few parties. At one, she met a guy who graduated from her school the previous year. He played guitar in a band and he invited her to watch them practice in a band member’s garage. Afterwards, they went to hang out at his dad’s house and he then took her to the RV in his backyard. He tried to pressure her into sleeping with him, but she was still a virgin and she didn’t even know him that well. Plus, after 10 years of Catholic school, she thought that God would strike her down with a bolt of lightning if she had sex before getting married.

He stopped calling her after that. She remembers, a bit embarrassed, that she went to a local arcade she knew he hung out at to look for him, but never saw him until almost 9 months later at a 4th of July fireworks celebration at a park. He asked her if she ever moved back to LA whether he and his band could crash at her house while they looked for gigs. She laughed and told him that her parents would say no, and again he disappeared. An internet search decades later revealed nothing. No musician is listed on any website with his name, although there was a 2016 story in the Colorado Springs newspaper about a man with the same name, who would have been the right age, being killed in a hit and run by a drunk driver. She hopes that wasn’t him.

Over her first winter in Colorado, she struggled a bit. She missed her California Left Behind boyfriend, which was made worse by the fact that he already had a new girlfriend. And although she made a few friends, she started to get in trouble from time to time.

She remembers that she, one of her soccer friends, and two boys from their neighborhood decided to walk the railroad tracks to school one morning instead of taking the bus. It was a 5 mile trek, and they arrived late to school. At one point, they heard a train coming, so they put pennies on the tracks to get smashed. She still has that penny today. She didn’t know at the time it was illegal, that pennies could become high speed projectiles. She wasn’t trying to get in trouble. She was just trying to make friends.

On another night, she and another girl on her soccer team got some alcohol, probably beer, but she doesn’t remember, and they got drunk. She doesn't remember much of the night, but her friend was driving and she remembers that her friend ran a red light downtown and freaked out because she said her dad would kill her if they got pulled over, but they made it home safe.

And one of the worst times, she went to a party and was too drunk to drive home. She had borrowed her parents’ car and told them that she and her friends were going to go to the movies. She remembers walking around the party with a bottle of vodka in her hand, and when she got in the car to drive home, the car wouldn’t start, which was probably a good thing. Some friends drove her home, deposited her on her porch, and then rang the doorbell. When her parents came to the door, she wasn’t able to tell them where the car was. She just said she didn’t know and needed to go to sleep. The next day she found herself grounded for a month and eventually pieced together how to find the car.

She was embarrassed. It wasn’t like her to get herself in so much trouble. She was good at pretending everything was okay, always had been, but it wasn’t. She felt like the odd man out everywhere she went. She had a hard time making many friends on her soccer team and wondered if it was because she just showed up and got a starting position, started scoring goals, and took the spotlight from other players.

And it was a bit annoying when, because she was from Southern California, people asked her if she knew movie stars or if she went to the beach every day. Later that spring, Frank Zappa released the song “Valley Girl,” which featured his 14-year old daughter Moon Unit. The song made fun of the slang of girls from the San Fernando Valley and got heavy radio airplay nationwide. This got her teased even more. The song was a satire about where she grew up and made “Valley Girls” seem like ditsy, self-absorbed airheads, who were materialistic and vain. What’s worse is that girls all over the country started to pick up the speech mannerisms characterized by vocal fry, used the words “like” and “Oh my God” as vocal fillers, and raised the final syllables in every sentence to make them sound like a question. Classmates asked her if she thought the song was “grody to the max,” or if she would “totally gag herself with a spoon.”

The few friends she did have were on her high school soccer team and when the spring season started, everything changed. She had never played on a high school varsity soccer team before. Her high school in California didn’t have one and this was the first time she had heard of the sport being offered to girls in high school.

This is where she could shine. And she did. As the season progressed, the local newspaper started to take notice. In her first game, she scored two goals. In the next she had a hat trick, and later that week, another hat trick. The headlines of both local newspapers’ coverage credited her with the win and both quoted the opposing coach saying, “We lost the game, or should I say (she) won it?” One paper said she had “wrecked” the other team’s defense and printed quotes from an interview they did with her after the game.

The following week, her bio appeared in the paper as the Gazette Telegraph Prep Athlete of the Week. By then she had scored 15 goals, which was better than most schools had totaled the entire season.

Every game after that, teams keyed in on her and she was either double-teamed or was stymied because she had a player assigned to cover her every move. The other teams stopped playing the offsides trap, so she couldn’t beat their defense with her speed and her team lost the league final. In the first game of the state final, they were outclassed by the Denver team that ended up winning the state tournament. Her coach’s strategy was to post her high by herself on the center line, with the rest of her team playing back on defense, to prevent being scored on. The other team didn’t play an offsides trap, so the only way she could break though their defense was to get by four or five players, which proved too difficult, and they lost the game 1-0.

And that was the end of her glorious run. She made the First Team for the “Gazette Telegraph All-Area soccer team,” but the goalkeeper from her league won “Player of the Year.” And even though she individually scored more goals than most teams in the state, she didn’t make the First Team for the All-State Team, but was included on the Second Team. She didn’t even win the “Most Valuable Player” award on her own team, which was voted on by the players. She did win, “Best Offense,” and joked that was because she was the most offensive.

She blamed herself for the losses. If she could have scored goals in those important games, everything would have been different. She wondered if her teammates blamed her as well. And to add insult to injury, or injury to insult, during the next game she played with her club, she blew out her knee and tore both cruciate ligaments and her medial ligament all in one tackle by the opposing team’s goalkeeper. One of her coaches on her club team, who was also starting a sports apparel business that catered to teams, had even asked her if he could sponsor her as an athlete. She would get free clothing and gear with his business name on it, but after her injury, her first and only endorsement deal went away.

After rehabbing her knee and many additional surgeries, her career was cut short. She would try to come back, try to play some college soccer, but it was never the same. Although her coach in California nominated her to the National Team a year later, which was only a list at the time, she had lost her speed, her agility, and her confidence. So much of her identity and her self-worth was centered on her ability to excel at soccer, and it took her a long time to rebound. She would pass by soccer fields and avert her eyes. Over time, she would lose her way, try to find other things she could excel at, and eventually come back and coach both boys and girls high school varsity soccer. As she got older, she would try to play in the adult men’s and women’s leagues, but her knee finally gave up completely and she got a metal replacement. She had thought she would play the game forever. After her knee replacement, she still held onto the fantasy that she might play again. In her darkest moments, she would joke that maybe if they just cut off her leg below her knee she could play on an amputee soccer team. So when her daughter showed an aptitude for the game, she cheered her on. And when women finally got paid to play soccer and had their own professional league, she bought season tickets and cheered them on. She wishes she had been born later. She wonders what life would have been like if she hadn’t gotten injured and if she had the opportunity to pursue what she loved full time. But she was glad other women now had the chance to be taken seriously, to get quality coaches and facilities, and be cheered on by thousands of fans in their stadiums. And she wonders if she could have competed at their level.

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