Susie Petruccelli - Raised a Warrior: A Memoir of Soccer, Grit, and Leveling the Playing Field

Raised

a

Warrior

A Memoir of Soccer, Grit, and Leveling the Playing Field

Susie Petruccelli

Raised a Warrior: A Memoir of Soccer, Grit, and Leveling the Playing Field

Copyright 2021 by Susie Petruccelli

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Published in compliance with Californias Proposition 65.

Published in the UK by Floodlit Dreams.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021930018

Print ISBN: 978-1-948062-82-4

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-948062-83-1

Printed in the United States of America.

Contents

Gratefully dedicated to girls around the world and the teams that help me through life, especially the Harvard Womens Soccer Team.

For Madi, Luca, Marco and Armando. And Foudy, for telling me to Get er done!

In loving memory of Meg Bert Owen, Liz McNamee, Leslie Poole, Katie Urbanic Moore, Molly Lynch, Cori Rising, Aaron Villegas, Matt Stauffer and Vikki Orvice. The goals are up, the music blasting, the everlasting joy of the game in our hearts.

Special thanks to my brother Tom DeLellis, Kely Nascimento-DeLuca and Ian Ridley.

And for all of you out there who were chanting, Equal pay.

It was like a slow-rising sun, gradually dawning on mepart of an awakening shared and accelerated by others, all of us coming to the same understanding and building momentum for change in the world.

Melinda Gates, The Moment of Lift

No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.

Title IX of the United States Education Amendments of 1972

Introduction

As I sat down to write this book, I saw an opportunity like a seam that opens up on the field between two defenders during a match. And I knew that my teammates would see it too and do everything they could to get in behind. Through the process of researching and writing the early versions of this bookmeant to be a tribute to my Harvard soccer teammates and everything we shared on and off the fieldI started to see that I might have found a way to make a difference. And thats when my life took an unexpected turn.

Growing up as a soccer player in a non-soccer-loving country, I always felt like I had work to do. It became a competition in my young mind: me vs. the (as yet) non-soccer-loving world. I wanted soccer to have a fair share of television time along with baseball and American football, which dominated the channels in houses in my neighborhood. I wanted soccer players to be adored by America too, like the Joe Montanas and Babe Ruths of American sports lore. I wanted to sit at a dinner table where everyone was arguing passionately about soccer. I didnt know yet that there were other countries in the world where that was happening, where soccer was king. When I found this out, I thought I had been born in the wrong country.

When soccer finally started to appear on American television, it didnt come with an equal amount of girls soccer, which was disappointing. But I had faith in soccer people. In my world, soccer was the equal sport. Much later I learned that I was lucky to have been born in my soccer-ignoring country at a time when girls soccer had begun an astonishing wave of growth.

My love for the game kept growing but I had a lot to learn. I lived a sheltered childhood and the news frightened me so I tuned it out. I grew up not learning about current events around the world. I grew up believing that wars had finite endings with a winner and a loser. Our history books say we won World War II but lost Vietnam. I thought we had won the civil rights movement and the womens rights movement. I didnt know there was further to go.

By the time I was in high school, my club soccer team was winning important tournaments. My high school team won our divisions Southern California championship (California was so big it was divided in two). I had trophies and medals, including a couple of special ones for Most Valuable Player. I had the great honor of playing with and against women who played on the US youth and womens national teams. I was recruited to play soccer by some of the best universities in America. And yet, I had absolutely no clue how or by whom that path had been created or how rare and valuable those opportunities were, and I didnt show anywhere near the character of a true champion until the moment I said goodbye to the game I loved.

I had been raised to be a warrior by my father. He taught me to show no mercy on or off the sports field. But being my own kind of warriora spiritual warrior, a champion on and off the field, a student of the world in search of a way to give back to itwas something I was barely beginning to see through the fog.

Prologue

Before the neighbor put up a chain-link fence and the climbing vines turned it into a leafy green wall, the window of the back bedroom of my parents house had looked out beyond the little soccer field that was our backyard and across to the tall buildings of downtown Los Angeles in the distance. I had shared that back bedroom with my identical twin sister. Wed moved in when we were two years old, two matching blonde toddlers. But there were depths to us that were not the same, and before we were seven she had moved out, angry, in the middle of the night to another room as far away as she could get.

Now I was back in that bedroom after being away at college on the East Coast for two years. The bunkbeds were long gone, replaced by a king-sized bed with puffy, floral bedding for guests. The old me was long gone too.

I heard my dads car pull into the driveway. His approach always had the same effect: a tightening of the chest. I heard his car door open and close, followed by the sound of the front door. I heard muffled voices as he spoke briefly to my mom in the kitchen and then he sat down as usual in his chair in front of the television with a beer. Some things hadnt changed.

I knew what I had to do. I took a deep breath, stood up and faced the mirrored closet door. The person looking back at me looked like a wreck. I saw a loser, a selfish fuck-up. I deserved whatever was coming my way. I pulled on the knitted hat that I held in my hand. I looked more normal with the hat on, but I wasnt normal. Just a few years ago I had felt strong, my whole life in front of me. Now so much adrenaline was pumping through my body I might as well have been looking out the open door of an airplane 12,000 feet in the air. Yet I was weak and permanently broken.

No one had seen me yet except the young woman who did it and my friend Romi, both of whom had tried valiantly to talk me out of it. I wasnt that surprised the young hair stylist had been afraid. I must have seemed crazy as I coaxed her into it.

Dont worry, Id said. This is on me, I promise you. I wont hold you responsible. This is my decision.

Id been surprised that Romi wasnt on board. She was like me, rebelling against the social confines around us, but shed just grimaced and hugged her knees to her chest in one of the other stylists chairs.