Joy in Unexpected Fields
By Elizabeth Bird
July 15, 2023
July 15, 2023
I sensed the coach’s ears prick up when he heard my voice among the motley group of women milling around to try out for Iowa City’s first women’s soccer team. British accent -- must be a player! Noticing this undue attention, all eyes were suddenly on me -- the presumptive veteran who had never in her life kicked a ball in earnest.
I felt I should explain to our coach that his optimism was in vain. As we gathered there in 1980, British football was indisputably a man’s game. Women were welcome in the stands, but if he considered female players at all, your average male fan would likely agree with Dr. Johnson’s famous aphorism about women preachers: “like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”
In truth, there was a time when women not only did it but did it well. The British Ladies Football Club, formed in 1894, played throughout the country, rocking voluminous trousers, long sleeves, and caps. Some stars played under pseudonyms to avert male disapproval, such as team captain Helen Matthew, who played as “Mrs. Graham.” She recruited the first Black woman footballer – Emma Clark, born in Lancashire in 1876, and described in the press as “the fleet footed dark girl on the wing.” In 1897, Helen and her team, “The New Woman and Her Lady Friends” even beat a team of “Eleven Gentlemen” by three goals to one, in a match a reporter dubbed “grotesque.” And when World War I suspended men’s football in 1915, women’s teams, now clad in modest shorts, drew large crowds. Even after the men came home, the women’s game remained popular, with a match in Liverpool attracting 53,000 people in 1920.
But such grotesquery was not acceptable, and in 1921, the powers-that-be abruptly discovered that football was a dire threat to women’s moral and physical fitness. Football was, after all, Our National Sport. The Football Association summarily banned all women’s teams from playing on FA-designated grounds; most teams disbanded and women’s football disappeared into the wilderness.
All this to tell you that while I was kicking a ball with feigned confidence and a bad case of impostor syndrome, women’s football in Britain was only just making a tentative come-back, after European authorities had forced the removal of restrictions in 1971. It would take years to be taken seriously, the irony being that U.S. women’s soccer, unhampered by the weight of playing a sacred sport, was years ahead. My British accent meant nothing.
But no doubt this was unknown to Jerry, our coach. As our drills wound down, he assembled us and announced that in addition to Gloria, the goalkeeper and driving force behind the team’s formation, “I think we have ourselves a center forward.” Me. Playing the striker, from whom goals were expected to flow …
***
Jerry, a fiery lawyer with a passion for soccer, played on the successful Iowa City club team, alongside my husband, whose British accent conveyed exactly the correct message – that he’d been blithely kicking goals and heading balls for most of his life. Once Jerry made the connection, his conviction solidified – I must be what they needed. My first instinct was to confess the truth and slink away. But there was beer and camaraderie to be had, and I realized that my rudimentary skills, honed casually like every British child, did give me a marginal edge. Not that my selection was exactly competitive – “try-outs” was something of a misnomer. With this number of hopefuls, if you were on the field, you were on the team.
So I went back, and from this inauspicious beginning, our team was born. Over the promised beer, our first order of business was a name. No, we would not be the Lady Hawkeyes, or some such nonsense. Neighboring Cedar Rapids had four thriving teams, with generically inspiring names like Spirit, Express, and Magic. We wanted to assert our womanhood, without sounding “girly.” Nothing seemed quite right.
“How about Virago?” I ventured tentatively.
“What the hell is that?”
I explained that in antiquity a virago was either an Amazonian heroine or a belligerent harridan, depending on your point of view. Or a shrew, a hellcat, a spitfire – the list goes on. I freely admit to stealing the name from the then-revolutionary feminist publisher.
“I love it!” cried Gloria, and with her seal of approval, Virago was born.
We set out to live up to our name, even attracting the rather condescending attention of a local sportswriter. He reported that Cedar Rapids Spirit members had traveled over to inspect us, but “didn’t believe the caliber of play by the Iowa City team was acceptable.” He went on to note that our oldest players were in their 40s, with many having been drawn to the game when cheering their kids in the soccer equivalent of Little League. The message was clear.
But Jerry was a fighter, and he vowed to pummel us into shape with drills, passing practice, and the worst horror of all – sprints. His motivation to take on this unpromising rabble remained murky, but we accepted it as a gift, and plunged in with all the bravado of women who had no clue what we didn’t know about the “beautiful game.” Another snooty reporter noted that since we were so sadly lacking in fundamentals, “if you can’t outskill ‘em, out run ‘em.” Indeed. We ran. And ran. And ran again. Sometimes we even ran with the ball. And miraculously, under Jerry’s relentless drilling, we learned how to send a pass to our team-mates. While running.
Our matches started appearing in the local sports round-ups -- we were a real team, playing other real teams. We finished our first season 3-3-1 and couldn’t have been prouder. The sports brief did note that in one match, our second goal “was more an act of God and the wind” than skill on our part, but it produced a victory against the Spirit. And in the final match of the season, we beat the fearsome Cedar Rapids Express 2 goals to 1, knocking the previously unbeaten team out of the league top spot. I scored.
I have heard soccer players say there is no feeling like watching the ball fly into the net past the lunging goalie, and that no matter how often it happens, it is magic. They are right, even at our lowly level. Indeed, I never expected the sheer joy of it. A chubby, awkward child, I grew up feeling lumpy and cumbersome. I had followed football avidly, caught up with everyone else in the exhilaration of England’s 1966 World Cup triumph. A nerd before we even knew what that meant, I put together a scrapbook chronicling the entire tournament from hope to triumph. My sister and I knitted scarves in our city team’s black and white stripes and cheered in the stands until we were hoarse.
But play the game? Or any team sport? Depending on the season, our school sports alternated between netball (a form of basketball deemed suitable for girls), rounders (an equally girl-appropriate form of baseball), and field hockey. Hockey required us to don an extraordinary outfit featuring long culottes that flowed over our thighs, recalling those 1880s’ football stars. School authorities had clearly taken to heart a 1930s ladies’ hockey rule that this garment “must look like a divided skirt and not like shorts. It must not be too short or too wide.” Heaven forbid! In any event, I was universally deemed “hopeless,” in all sports, and wholeheartedly agreed with the judgment of my peers. Games periods saw me loitering on the edge of whatever dismal playing space the particular sport required, waiting for the gym teacher to order the five minutes of action that everyone must have, which elicited choruses of groans from the hearty team captains.
With such a history of sporting inadequacy, I’m not sure what possessed me to show up for tryouts in the first place. Boredom probably. I was 28, with a newly-minted Ph.D., a busy husband, and no job. On great sufferance, I had crossed the Atlantic to Iowa City, where my husband had secured a visiting teaching position at the University of Iowa. Only a year, he promised. Then we’ll travel, see America, and go home. His visa did not allow a spouse to work, attend classes, or do just about anything. It will be like a holiday, he assured me. Well, Iowa City has many charms, but vacation spot it is not. Days passed slowly.
***
As I pondered the try-out notice, I realized no American had seen me flounder in a divided skirt, and my physique had definitely improved over the last decade or so. I fancied myself quite fetching in shorts. So why not soccer? At least I knew the rules. Sown on that field, seeds of imagination bloomed into reality, as our team formed, bonded, played, and celebrated. Our second season was glorious, as we floated from victory to victory, culminating in winning the first Iowa Women’s Soccer League tournament, beating two Cedar Rapids teams on the way.
We wrapped up the season by taking on the official University of Iowa team, packed with fit young Amazons who had played since childhood. And we beat them.
It felt like living in one of those Disney movies. You know – the ones featuring multiple variations of ragtag bands of misfits, driven by hope and passion, and the feisty coach who believed in their dream… Maybe a little longer in the tooth than your typical heroes, but you get the drift. And for me, soccer’s gift was a sense of physical confidence I had never known – an exhilarating and unexpected comfort in my own body. I reveled in every moment.
But as Springsteen sang, “glory days” pass “in the wink of a young girl’s eye.” The omens were there with the arrival of Julie toward the end of our second season (yes, we were still in Iowa, although that’s another story). Tall, fast, strong, and fresh from four years playing collegiate soccer, she ran like a gazelle and kicked like a horse. She dominated the mid-field and scored with stunning regularity.
For a while, it was fun. I still got playing time, scoring often enough to enjoy seeing my name in the sports briefs. Julie was a generous team-mate, pushing us all to step up. We celebrated our wins as much as ever, but a sense of foreboding bubbled in our core group. Julie had brought a friend, another fearsomely fit young woman with impressive credentials. She appeared not long before that final tournament; in the crucial game, she sent me a perfect pass which I kicked for a gorgeous goal.
At the start of the next season, she casually took me aside:
“You know, when you scored like that from my pass, I thought you must be a really good player. It was a great goal! But it was probably luck -- you’re pretty slow, to be honest. It’s basically a team of moms and amateurs, isn’t it?”
Her matter-of-fact observation was the beginning of the end. Gradually, more strapping friends arrived; as once-active regulars rode the bench and drifted away, the team’s average age fell about a decade. Jerry handed us on to a new coach who had played semi-pro in South America. I clung on and continued to score – I was woefully slow compared to our new stars but had a knack for skulking near the goal and tapping in their tidy passes. My third season was bitter-sweet. Following win after win, we became Iowa State Champions in 1982; I still have the medal to prove it. To be sure, it is pitiful – a generic soccer-themed medallion with “State Champs 82” scratched faintly on the back. I need my reading glasses to make it out. I love it.
But the joy was seeping away as the genuine viragoes slid in, and it was time to move on. I didn’t begrudge them their success; those fierce young women did us proud. And that this shining moment of sporting glory opened my eyes to other goals on the horizon. I began to pine less for England, while tentatively embracing new opportunities. The next season, Virago won every game in a fearsome show of dominance; I read about it in the paper. The same paper where by then I was writing columns and editing op-eds, something that would have seemed inconceivable back home.
I am long gone from Iowa, but still in America, to my everlasting surprise. I suppose if this were indeed a Disney movie, it would end with one of those inspiring speeches, where the coach brings his once-bedraggled champions together to send them, transformed, into life. “Know you can be anything you want to be,” he will assure them as they gaze raptly into his grizzled face. It’s not true, of course – wanting it doesn’t make it so, and desire often ends in disappointment. But four decades ago, I dared to wonder for a moment if everything I’d assumed about myself was not set in stone. And it was beautiful.
I felt I should explain to our coach that his optimism was in vain. As we gathered there in 1980, British football was indisputably a man’s game. Women were welcome in the stands, but if he considered female players at all, your average male fan would likely agree with Dr. Johnson’s famous aphorism about women preachers: “like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”
In truth, there was a time when women not only did it but did it well. The British Ladies Football Club, formed in 1894, played throughout the country, rocking voluminous trousers, long sleeves, and caps. Some stars played under pseudonyms to avert male disapproval, such as team captain Helen Matthew, who played as “Mrs. Graham.” She recruited the first Black woman footballer – Emma Clark, born in Lancashire in 1876, and described in the press as “the fleet footed dark girl on the wing.” In 1897, Helen and her team, “The New Woman and Her Lady Friends” even beat a team of “Eleven Gentlemen” by three goals to one, in a match a reporter dubbed “grotesque.” And when World War I suspended men’s football in 1915, women’s teams, now clad in modest shorts, drew large crowds. Even after the men came home, the women’s game remained popular, with a match in Liverpool attracting 53,000 people in 1920.
But such grotesquery was not acceptable, and in 1921, the powers-that-be abruptly discovered that football was a dire threat to women’s moral and physical fitness. Football was, after all, Our National Sport. The Football Association summarily banned all women’s teams from playing on FA-designated grounds; most teams disbanded and women’s football disappeared into the wilderness.
All this to tell you that while I was kicking a ball with feigned confidence and a bad case of impostor syndrome, women’s football in Britain was only just making a tentative come-back, after European authorities had forced the removal of restrictions in 1971. It would take years to be taken seriously, the irony being that U.S. women’s soccer, unhampered by the weight of playing a sacred sport, was years ahead. My British accent meant nothing.
But no doubt this was unknown to Jerry, our coach. As our drills wound down, he assembled us and announced that in addition to Gloria, the goalkeeper and driving force behind the team’s formation, “I think we have ourselves a center forward.” Me. Playing the striker, from whom goals were expected to flow …
***
Jerry, a fiery lawyer with a passion for soccer, played on the successful Iowa City club team, alongside my husband, whose British accent conveyed exactly the correct message – that he’d been blithely kicking goals and heading balls for most of his life. Once Jerry made the connection, his conviction solidified – I must be what they needed. My first instinct was to confess the truth and slink away. But there was beer and camaraderie to be had, and I realized that my rudimentary skills, honed casually like every British child, did give me a marginal edge. Not that my selection was exactly competitive – “try-outs” was something of a misnomer. With this number of hopefuls, if you were on the field, you were on the team.
So I went back, and from this inauspicious beginning, our team was born. Over the promised beer, our first order of business was a name. No, we would not be the Lady Hawkeyes, or some such nonsense. Neighboring Cedar Rapids had four thriving teams, with generically inspiring names like Spirit, Express, and Magic. We wanted to assert our womanhood, without sounding “girly.” Nothing seemed quite right.
“How about Virago?” I ventured tentatively.
“What the hell is that?”
I explained that in antiquity a virago was either an Amazonian heroine or a belligerent harridan, depending on your point of view. Or a shrew, a hellcat, a spitfire – the list goes on. I freely admit to stealing the name from the then-revolutionary feminist publisher.
“I love it!” cried Gloria, and with her seal of approval, Virago was born.
We set out to live up to our name, even attracting the rather condescending attention of a local sportswriter. He reported that Cedar Rapids Spirit members had traveled over to inspect us, but “didn’t believe the caliber of play by the Iowa City team was acceptable.” He went on to note that our oldest players were in their 40s, with many having been drawn to the game when cheering their kids in the soccer equivalent of Little League. The message was clear.
But Jerry was a fighter, and he vowed to pummel us into shape with drills, passing practice, and the worst horror of all – sprints. His motivation to take on this unpromising rabble remained murky, but we accepted it as a gift, and plunged in with all the bravado of women who had no clue what we didn’t know about the “beautiful game.” Another snooty reporter noted that since we were so sadly lacking in fundamentals, “if you can’t outskill ‘em, out run ‘em.” Indeed. We ran. And ran. And ran again. Sometimes we even ran with the ball. And miraculously, under Jerry’s relentless drilling, we learned how to send a pass to our team-mates. While running.
Our matches started appearing in the local sports round-ups -- we were a real team, playing other real teams. We finished our first season 3-3-1 and couldn’t have been prouder. The sports brief did note that in one match, our second goal “was more an act of God and the wind” than skill on our part, but it produced a victory against the Spirit. And in the final match of the season, we beat the fearsome Cedar Rapids Express 2 goals to 1, knocking the previously unbeaten team out of the league top spot. I scored.
I have heard soccer players say there is no feeling like watching the ball fly into the net past the lunging goalie, and that no matter how often it happens, it is magic. They are right, even at our lowly level. Indeed, I never expected the sheer joy of it. A chubby, awkward child, I grew up feeling lumpy and cumbersome. I had followed football avidly, caught up with everyone else in the exhilaration of England’s 1966 World Cup triumph. A nerd before we even knew what that meant, I put together a scrapbook chronicling the entire tournament from hope to triumph. My sister and I knitted scarves in our city team’s black and white stripes and cheered in the stands until we were hoarse.
But play the game? Or any team sport? Depending on the season, our school sports alternated between netball (a form of basketball deemed suitable for girls), rounders (an equally girl-appropriate form of baseball), and field hockey. Hockey required us to don an extraordinary outfit featuring long culottes that flowed over our thighs, recalling those 1880s’ football stars. School authorities had clearly taken to heart a 1930s ladies’ hockey rule that this garment “must look like a divided skirt and not like shorts. It must not be too short or too wide.” Heaven forbid! In any event, I was universally deemed “hopeless,” in all sports, and wholeheartedly agreed with the judgment of my peers. Games periods saw me loitering on the edge of whatever dismal playing space the particular sport required, waiting for the gym teacher to order the five minutes of action that everyone must have, which elicited choruses of groans from the hearty team captains.
With such a history of sporting inadequacy, I’m not sure what possessed me to show up for tryouts in the first place. Boredom probably. I was 28, with a newly-minted Ph.D., a busy husband, and no job. On great sufferance, I had crossed the Atlantic to Iowa City, where my husband had secured a visiting teaching position at the University of Iowa. Only a year, he promised. Then we’ll travel, see America, and go home. His visa did not allow a spouse to work, attend classes, or do just about anything. It will be like a holiday, he assured me. Well, Iowa City has many charms, but vacation spot it is not. Days passed slowly.
***
As I pondered the try-out notice, I realized no American had seen me flounder in a divided skirt, and my physique had definitely improved over the last decade or so. I fancied myself quite fetching in shorts. So why not soccer? At least I knew the rules. Sown on that field, seeds of imagination bloomed into reality, as our team formed, bonded, played, and celebrated. Our second season was glorious, as we floated from victory to victory, culminating in winning the first Iowa Women’s Soccer League tournament, beating two Cedar Rapids teams on the way.
We wrapped up the season by taking on the official University of Iowa team, packed with fit young Amazons who had played since childhood. And we beat them.
It felt like living in one of those Disney movies. You know – the ones featuring multiple variations of ragtag bands of misfits, driven by hope and passion, and the feisty coach who believed in their dream… Maybe a little longer in the tooth than your typical heroes, but you get the drift. And for me, soccer’s gift was a sense of physical confidence I had never known – an exhilarating and unexpected comfort in my own body. I reveled in every moment.
But as Springsteen sang, “glory days” pass “in the wink of a young girl’s eye.” The omens were there with the arrival of Julie toward the end of our second season (yes, we were still in Iowa, although that’s another story). Tall, fast, strong, and fresh from four years playing collegiate soccer, she ran like a gazelle and kicked like a horse. She dominated the mid-field and scored with stunning regularity.
For a while, it was fun. I still got playing time, scoring often enough to enjoy seeing my name in the sports briefs. Julie was a generous team-mate, pushing us all to step up. We celebrated our wins as much as ever, but a sense of foreboding bubbled in our core group. Julie had brought a friend, another fearsomely fit young woman with impressive credentials. She appeared not long before that final tournament; in the crucial game, she sent me a perfect pass which I kicked for a gorgeous goal.
At the start of the next season, she casually took me aside:
“You know, when you scored like that from my pass, I thought you must be a really good player. It was a great goal! But it was probably luck -- you’re pretty slow, to be honest. It’s basically a team of moms and amateurs, isn’t it?”
Her matter-of-fact observation was the beginning of the end. Gradually, more strapping friends arrived; as once-active regulars rode the bench and drifted away, the team’s average age fell about a decade. Jerry handed us on to a new coach who had played semi-pro in South America. I clung on and continued to score – I was woefully slow compared to our new stars but had a knack for skulking near the goal and tapping in their tidy passes. My third season was bitter-sweet. Following win after win, we became Iowa State Champions in 1982; I still have the medal to prove it. To be sure, it is pitiful – a generic soccer-themed medallion with “State Champs 82” scratched faintly on the back. I need my reading glasses to make it out. I love it.
But the joy was seeping away as the genuine viragoes slid in, and it was time to move on. I didn’t begrudge them their success; those fierce young women did us proud. And that this shining moment of sporting glory opened my eyes to other goals on the horizon. I began to pine less for England, while tentatively embracing new opportunities. The next season, Virago won every game in a fearsome show of dominance; I read about it in the paper. The same paper where by then I was writing columns and editing op-eds, something that would have seemed inconceivable back home.
I am long gone from Iowa, but still in America, to my everlasting surprise. I suppose if this were indeed a Disney movie, it would end with one of those inspiring speeches, where the coach brings his once-bedraggled champions together to send them, transformed, into life. “Know you can be anything you want to be,” he will assure them as they gaze raptly into his grizzled face. It’s not true, of course – wanting it doesn’t make it so, and desire often ends in disappointment. But four decades ago, I dared to wonder for a moment if everything I’d assumed about myself was not set in stone. And it was beautiful.
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A retired Professor of Anthropology, Elizabeth Bird has published seven books (most recently Surviving Biafra: A Nigerwife's Story), and now focuses on creative non-fiction. Her work appears in Under the Sun (winner, Readers' Choice Award 2022), Tangled Locks, Biostories, Streetlight, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, Ariel’s Dream, The Guardian, Mutha Magazine, and elsewhere. She placed third in the 2022 International Human Rights Art Festival's Creators of Justice Literary Awards.
Her website is www.lizbirdwrites.com. |
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