I was a heavy kid. I hated running, but I loved soccer. To this day, though the sport has one of the smallest television audiences in American sports, youth enrollment, especially among young girls, is at its highest. We can give credit for that to two things. One is the inherent accessibility of the game. Soccer is a sport that nurtures all body types. The heavier girls muscled people off the ball, the smaller ones worked to speed past them, and everybody had to run. In a world where girls are told that they are too thin or too fat, too tall or too short, the only thing that matters on the soccer field is who runs and who gets the ball.

The second cause for the general excitement about the sport is the success of the US Womens Soccer team. What's ironic and very exciting is that the international superpowers in women's soccer often come from countries where cultural attitudes still nurture sexism  and laws condone it (Brazil, China, maybe even the United States). In the 1999 Women's World Cup Final, the United States and China fought hard for 2 hours and ended the game with penalty kicks. When Brandi Chastain, scored on the fifth kick, she ripped off her shirt to reveal her black sports bra and dropped to her knees. In that moment, millions of little girls cheered and took the field. The American women had acheived what the men had not. They had won a World Cup and would go on to medal at every subsequent Olympics.

Now we know it was not a fluke. Those young girls have played in their own Olympics. A very young American team, containing none of the members of the 1999 World Cup team has just defeated Brazil to win a Gold medal in Beijing. 

I no longer play soccer, but every time the United States wins a soccer game I remember the fourteen odd years I spent playing soccer and the strength, both physical and mental, that it brought me. It taught me that I could run with the boys and even outrun them. So I would like to say a public thank you to the American women who inspired my generation to run hard, no matter what the context.

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