The amount of people who have stopped and talked about the story, but who have also said, ‘Listen, if it wasn’t for Christine and those girls, my daughter might have dropped out of soccer,’ or, ‘My daughter has started to play soccer.’
Canadian coach John Herdman on the Canadian Women’s Soccer Team
One of the reasons I feel so strongly about there being more hype surrounding the FIFA Women’s World Cup is because I remember watching it as a 12-year-old in 2003. I didn’t grow up in a family that watched soccer, so I hadn’t been tainted with the idea that it was just for men yet. It was the first major soccer tournament that I ever saw and it completely segregated soccer from other sports I was watching at the time. When I think of most sports, I think of men. When I think of soccer, as many women come to mind as men do. In fact, during that time I wouldn’t have been able to name a single male player.
It is so important to publicize and talk about these events. They change and create the mindsets of younger people and they remove connotations that are associated with gender.