The Team USA squad going for an unprecedented three-peat at the FIFA Women’s World Cup in Australia and New Zealand looks different than its predecessors.
And that’s a good thing.
We finally get a better representation of the United States. Not that the others were bad actors; it’s that this group actually looks like the country they’re playing for. After homogenous teams, almost all straight and white, this is the most diverse.
They’re white but also black and brown. Straight, LGBTQ+, daughters of immigrants all led by a naturalized citizen coach.
After decades of being an example of exclusion, they’re embracing inclusion. And better for it.
“When I was growing up, there wasn’t a lot of black people playing soccer, let alone on the national team to look up to,” said forward Lynn Williams of Gotham FC, who is black. “It’s just awesome that the national team is starting to look like the nation.”
It took long enough.
Women’s soccer has had a long-standing diversity problem in this country.
The USWNT has only had 19 women of color and just nine out LGBTQ+ players on a World Cup or Olympics roster in its history. Much of that diversity is brand new.
Team USA has seven black players, and just the second and third Mexican Americans to represent the country in a World Cup or Olympics. There are three LGBTQ+ members, including Gotham FC’s Kristie Mewis making her World Cup debut in a tourney co-hosted by the nation of her girlfriend, Aussie star Sam Kerr.
Staggeringly, the USWNT had fewer than a dozen black players in their history before 2012. The 2019 World Cup champs feted as the most diverse U.S. women’s squad had just five players of color, with Crystal Dunn often the only black starter.
For perspective, France had a dozen black players.
“It hasn’t been the easiest road, obviously,” Dunn said recently. “There were moments where I felt like I needed to conform to the environment and say, ‘OK, let me tone down who I am because I feel like there’s very few of us on this team.’ ”
Too few.
For years, pay-to-play has been a big part of the reason why, the monetary glass ceiling keeping marginalized kids from climbing the ladder.
It has hamstrung the U.S. men, and made staving off rising powers even harder for the U.S. women. They’d cut off most of their own talent pool, and cut it down to sport for privileged, mostly white children.
“We’re alienating so many young kids to play this beautiful game. And this is a world game, so we should be inviting kids to play. We should be opening up doors,” ex-U.S. keeper Hope Solo said at Hashtag Sports 2018 in New York. “But we’ve alienated the Hispanic communities. We’ve alienated our black communities. We’ve alienated the underrepresented communities, even rural communities. So soccer in America right now is a rich white kids sport.”
Even U.S. Soccer president Cindy Parlow Cone had lamented the same. But recent efforts to fix that are finally paying off.
The U.S. Soccer Foundation has tried to make the game more accessible, its Soccer for Success program working with over 400,000 children since 2008 — 90 percent of them from communities of color. They expect to serve over 100,000 this year.
The foundation has engaged 5,475 coaches who identify as women or nonbinary in the past three years, and the timing is apt.
There are more anti-LBGTQ+ bills adopted in state legislatures than any other year. Anti-semitism is on the rise, as are Asian hate crimes. Black history and books are being removed from classrooms, and diversity is derided in some circles.
But not within the USWNT, for so long barred to most besides primarily rich white kids. The newfound diversity can actually inspire little girls who see themselves in their stars.
“Representation matters so much, and young minority girls when they see me play, they are so inspired and that brings me tears of joy,” Dunn said. “It reminds me why I play this game and it inspires me to just want to be my very best.”
