From Briana Scurry to Brianna Pinto: U.S. women's soccer and a movement to elevate Black talent (2024)

Brianna Pinto is the future.

This was prophesied in the summer of 2018, at the Expocentre in Moscow. The 68th FIFA Congress met to vote on where the 2026 World Cup would be hosted. North America’s bid, a united effort between the U.S., Mexico and Canada, was looking to make a final statement before the vote. To underscore the impact of a World Cup on the next generation of soccer players, the North American contingency brought youth to speak. Alphonso Davies, then 17 years old, represented Canada. Diego Lainez, who had turned 18 days before, represented Mexico. And even though this was for the men’s World Cup, Pinto represented the United States.

She had also just turned 18, three weeks earlier, and she skipped her high school graduation to be at this vote. She even left in the middle of a tournament in France to rehearse in England with former President Barack Obama speechwriter Terence Szuplat. And on June 13, she was on a spotlighted stage, in a warehouse-sized room glowing with digital screens and flags, facing an international audience of dignitaries.

“They put me, a Black woman, on the stage to be the face of U.S. Soccer in that moment,” Pinto said in a phone interview. “And I realized that the governing bodies of FIFA don’t reflect all of the people that play the game in the world. That’s something I want to change. If I was used on their platform as a Black woman to advocate for the United States to host it, why can’t we put more Black women in positions of power within FIFA?”

But Pinto isn’t the future of women’s soccer just because of her creativity with the ball, or her combination of speed and power, or the pedigree she inherited from a soccer family. Nor because she was the No. 3 overall pick in the National Women’s Soccer League Draft out of college powerhouse North Carolina. It’s not even because she is on a trajectory that will possibly lead her to the U.S. women’s national team.

All of that is true. But Pinto has a calling. Her background puts her in the perfect position to help grab hold of a baton that needs carrying. There is a movement in women’s soccer to elevate Black women.

It sprouted in the summer of 2020 — four years after Megan Rapinoe took a knee in solidarity with Colin Kaepernick before an NWSL game — when America was reckoning with its history of racial injustice. As the first pro league to resume playing after the COVID-19 sports shutdown, the women of the NWSL didn’t shy away. They wore Black Lives Matter T-shirts in warmups and took a knee during the anthem. They provided one of the defining moments of the year when their public acknowledgment of the struggle brought Casey Krueger (then Short) to tears and her Chicago Red Stars teammate Julie Ertz cried right there with her. Women soccer players were not only illustrating the complexity and heaviness of the moment but showing the nation how it could be handled.

During the 2020 Challenge Cup, the NWSL’s 23-game bubble tournament in Utah, the league showcased Black women. Before record-setting viewership, and backed by record-setting sponsorship, talents such as Lynn Williams, Simone Charley and Darian Jenkins shined. Sky Blue FC had eight Black players: Margaret Purce, Ifeoma Onumonu, Estelle Johnson, Jennifer Cudjoe, Imani Dorsey, Domi Richardson, Mandy Freeman and Chantelle Swaby. Many of the Black players spoke out, as did many of their non-Black colleagues.

“It matters,” said Bethany Henderson, CEO of DC SCORES, a soccer non-profit in the nation’s capital aimed at sharing soccer with under-resourced communities. “It’s super motivating to look out and think, ‘Hey, I can be there. Hey, I belong. This is me.’”

Following in the footsteps of the WNBA, the women of professional soccer in the U.S. were stepping up. But being part of the solution also includes taking a critical look at the sport. Behind the scenes, Black players were having hard conversations with their teammates — revealing the difficulties of existing in their predominantly White space, educating about blindspots and unconscious bias, confessing feelings previously swallowed.

Now, a new generation of Black women in soccer is working to lift the sport to its ideals.

Women’s soccer players have been on the front lines of women’s rights, equal pay and LGBTQ+ advocacy. The sport has also jumped into advocacy for Black lives and racial justice. But it also means investigating themselves. Despite its progressive bent, women’s soccer is still in need of progress when it comes to racial diversity. The next generation is getting to work on it.

Somewhere, Briana Scurry was watching. This was a moment. That instance when toil becomes harvest.

When the Portland Thorns and North Carolina Courage all took a knee during the national anthem before the 2020 Challenge Cup opener, they aimed to show support for Black people and, per a statement written by the players from both teams, “demand that the liberties and freedoms this nation was founded upon are extended to everyone.” As the first top-level professional athletes to play a team game in America since the death of George Floyd under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer, these women, and the NWSL, owned the moment.

Scurry was proud.

It’s been more than 20 years since she became a sports pioneer as the star U.S. goalkeeper for the transcendent 1999 Women’s World Cup champions and the symbol of Black progress in women’s soccer. But she isn’t disheartened by the scarce progress of her sport. Scurry, an investor in the NWSL’s Washington Spirit, resolved long ago to get in the fight for access, inclusion and equal treatment — for women and Black people in the overall soccer landscape. She knew it would be for the long haul, that it would consume her career, and she probably wouldn’t see the promised land. She was fine with that, as long as others kept taking up the mission and advancing it.

“I was thrilled to have my game and my league … be a leader in social change,” she said. “The WNBA is, I would say, the leader in terms of leagues that get it right, in terms of like, ‘We need to do more.’ But yeah, it’s twofold, right? I’m excited about where we’re at but so much further to go. I mean, these kinds of changes take decades. … I just saw Billie Jean King right before the pandemic started in New York at an ESPN event. She’s been at this for a long time — 50, 60 years. And she is still in the game, making changes, trying to help, being the example. Her playing Bobby Riggs was (in 1973), and we’re still at it, you know? And I think we will always be at it. And the reason I think that is because when it comes to women of color, or women at all, and then racial justice, and then gay justice, if you will, gay equality, you have to take it. You have to take it every single day. Because if you rest on your laurels, it starts to slide back.”

This is, indeed, a long haul of a struggle.

It’s been over 125 years since Emma Clarke became Britain’s first known Black woman professional soccer player, in a time when one newspaper described her as “the fleet-footed dark girl on the right wing.” Her identity wasn’t even known until 2017, when a historian was perusing old pictures and realized the record had misidentified her as Carrie Boustead, a White woman who traditionally played goalie.

The origins of Black women on the soccer scene in America are more difficult to pinpoint since women didn’t have much access to soccer in an organized capacity until after Title IX in 1972. The first collegiate women’s soccer programs didn’t launch in earnest, outside of recreational club teams, until the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW) added soccer in 1978. The NCAA launched women’s soccer in 1982.

The first three NCAA championships went to North Carolina. But in 1985, the Tar Heels lost in the championship game to George Mason. When North Carolina coach Anson Dorrance took over the U.S. women’s national team in 1986, he remembered a player from that George Mason squad — Kim Crabbe, a speedy and powerful athlete who played all over the pitch. Dorrance brought Crabbe in and made her the first Black woman called into the U.S. women’s national team.

A year later, in 1987, Dorrance discovered Sandi Gordon at the U.S. Olympic Festival, an amateur event featuring multiple sports so Olympic hopefuls could showcase their skills. Gordon was invited to train with the USWNT, and soon after, she became the first Black woman to earn a cap for the national team, in a match against Sweden.

In 1995, a century after Clarke started playing professionally in Britain, Howard University became the first HBCU women’s soccer program to be granted varsity status. In that same year, North Carolina’s Staci Wilson was named Co-National Player of the year by Soccer Digest and Shannon Boxx won a national championship with Notre Dame. Black women were establishing their footing in the American game.

A year later, Scurry and Wilson became the first Black women to win Olympic gold for the USWNT. Scurry would then become the face of Black women in soccer.

In the 1999 Women’s World Cup, the event that launched American women’s soccer into a new stratosphere, Scurry was one of the heroes. Her stop of China’s Liu Ying in the penalty kick phase of the World Cup final paved the way for one of the most riveting moments in American sports history. A sold-out Rose Bowl saw Brandi Chastain seal the championship with the clinching penalty kick, sparking a soccer revolution in the nation.

The hype from the World Cup created a wave that spawned the Women’s United Soccer Association, of which Scurry was a founding member. The league had a few other Black players sprinkled throughout. WUSA’s inaugural title game, in 2001, featured a combined six Black players. The game came down to a penalty kick shootout featuring two Black keepers, Scurry for the Atlanta Beat and LaKeysia Beene for the Bay Area CyberRays. Beene secured the title by stopping two penalty kicks, one from Charmaine Hooper, a Black woman from Canada.

Twenty years later, Black representation in women’s soccer has improved. The American squad in the 2021 SheBelieves Cup featured six Black women — Crystal Dunn, Christen Press, Margaret Purce, Casey Krueger, Sophia Smith and Lynn Williams — in addition to Brazilian-born Catarina Macario. Then there is the growing presence in the NWSL, where six of the 10 first-round selections in January’s draft were Black.

But hold up. The diversity of the sport is a bit deceiving.

“I think there are more, just for the nature of the sport growing,” said Karla Thompson, a coach educator for the U.S. Soccer Federation. “I don’t think there’s been a concerted effort or change in culture that has allowed for more Blacks to play.”

A former second-team All-American at Colorado College, Thompson now spends her days mentoring future coaches. As Thompson sees it, the increase has more to do with Black people assimilating into the White culture of soccer.

One area she pointed to was income. Black people advanced to the middle class, taking themselves to the suburbs where the American soccer experience exists. In 2018, the U.S. Census Bureau released its Income and Poverty in the United States report. Per the report, in 1978, 7.3 percent of Black households had an income of at least $100,000. By 1998, that number was up to 13.5 percent. By 2018, it was 17.1 percent.

This matters because soccer in America is expensive.

Around the globe, soccer is the sport of the people, accessible to all economic statuses. The soccer museum in Sao Paulo has an exhibit featuring makeshift balls poor people created, including a doll’s head and socks. Brazilian legend Marta played barefoot until she was gifted a teammate’s grandfather’s shoes. But in America?

“If you don’t have a substantial amount of disposable income for your child to play soccer,” Scurry said, “it’s hard to get them to a point where they’re going to be seen, or trained at a high level of skill by coaches. It’s very expensive. It’s ridiculous, actually, how expensive it is. And if you’re not in the suburbs, you’re not going to be exposed to it either.”

Another reason Thompson noted is a bit more sensitive — the modern prevalence of interracial marriages.

“A lot of us are mixed,” said Sarah Gorden of the Chicago Red Stars. “A lot of us grew up around White people.”

Many of today’s Black women soccer players are actually mixed-race athletes, products of Black and White parents. Thompson cites this as further evidence that the increased Black presence in U.S. women’s soccer is a product of Black people adopting affluent White culture and not soccer inviting outside cultures. Some of the biracial athletes in the sport are already part of the culture where soccer exists, and thus exposed to the sport, by virtue of their family structure and not because of soccer’s outreach.

“It isn’t that there’s this new revelation of tapping into the inner cities or low-income areas and really going after diversity,” Thompson said. “It’s not that at all. Actually, if you really look at it, you have more of your interracial Blacks that are playing soccer.

“Because soccer is a world sport,” she continued, “and, unfortunately for us, we’re late to the party as far as making it part of our culture and part of our community. If we really want to compete at the highest level, we need to tap into the Africans, the Caribbean, because that’s their world, they understand how to develop a culture around the sport. And we haven’t done that yet. … We have kept soccer as such an upper-middle-class sport.”

To get more stories like this delivered to your feed, follow our Culture vertical:theathletic.com/culture

Lynn Williams is one of the top strikers in the nation, as speedy and crafty as they get. She started for the U.S. women’s national team in the 2021 SheBelieves Cup and is a star in the NWSL. But her journey has been a struggle between acclimation and acceptance. Like many, her experience has not been black and white.

Williams, whose father, David, is Black, and mother, Christine, is White, has found herself on the short end of soccer’s embrace. Like many multiethnic people, she often felt caught between cultures. Too much melanin to pass for White but not Black enough either.

However, as she looks back, she is reminded of her Blackness by the sport in ways that hurt. Like those times in youth soccer when the opponent not having any Black girls meant Williams’ team was going to win, because hers did. Or all those times she was asked to control the music at practices or wherever, because … you know.

Here is a big one: how she is recognized almost solely for her athletic ability. Such tropes have been common in basketball and football. White players in hoop are heady and smart and work hard, while Black players are athletic and naturally gifted but often not considered to have the wherewithal to handle the intellectual load of the game.

“As a Black woman in the NWSL,” Crystal Dunn, now with the Portland Thorns, wrote on Twitter last summer, “I pride myself on constantly developing my awareness, my vision on the pitch and my versatility. For so many years people have made the argument that I am able to play multiple positions because I am athletic. Now, there is some truth in that, but not once am I told that is because I am a smart player who can read the game and understand multiple roles better than most. I have worked extremely hard in my career to break free from the stereotypes that have been placed on Black athletes.”

Williams’ athleticism jumps off the screen, but she’s not a great scorer for speed alone. She also has strong instinct, IQ, feel, efficiency of movement. Yet, she’s largely seen as an attacker who can blow by defenders.

“I think my whole career,” Williams said, “I’ve been fighting to be like, ‘See me also for my technical abilities.’ I’m not saying I’m not fast. I’m not saying I’m not athletic. But I am a two-dimensional athlete (— athletic and technical).”

Not only are these clichés a remnant of the country’s history of attacking or disregarding Black intellect, but the hyper-focus on the athleticism of Black players impacts opportunity. Thompson said it can hurt development.

The marginalization of Black women soccer players as nothing but athletes can pigeonhole their careers. Their athletic exceptionalism immediately directs them to certain positions. Thompson said this can prevent them from developing other skills necessary to play all over the field. She’s argued with coaches across the nation who elevate Black soccer players too fast just to take advantage of their athleticism. Thompson believes it’s sometimes best for the athlete if she is required to have a more complete game before advancing.

“Speed,” Thompson said. “That’s why they get the looks. That’s why they’re getting in the positions they are in — because of speed. That’s the first thing they think about with the Blacks. Speed. And what positions do they play? Always up top or on the outside. When was the last time we saw a Black center midfielder?”

Even Dunn gets converted to outside back, where speed is critical to keep up with the other team’s attackers, for the national team. She famously contained French national team star Kadidiatou Diani in the 2019 Women’s World Cup. It was certainly a flex of Dunn’s defensive abilities. But it also should’ve been a window into her versatility. She has the skills and experience to be an attacking midfielder at the highest levels of the game. And, of course, with those prime positions comes prime acclaim and opportunity. Dunn, however, only gets to play No. 10 in the NWSL. So Dunn, one of the best players in the world, has been deprived of what she believes she has earned.

“I am recognized as a player on the national team, which is great,” she told Forbes in January. “But what I would like to see shift is the whole idea that this sport is predominantly White or that it is a White person’s face that is the face of women’s soccer. I have earned the right to be posterized and be a part of huge campaigns and lead the way for women’s soccer and not feel like I am just a player.”

So imagine having a ceiling placed on your opportunity and then having to point out the ceiling and explain why you’re tired of it. That’s another difficulty of being a Black woman in a sport looking to do better. The women of soccer standing up as allies also comes with the burden of the Black women in the sport leading that allyship. If soccer is going to be “woke” on Black issues, who do you think will do the awakening?

“I would definitely say Carolina,” Brianna Pinto said of her beloved university, where she has led panels and addressed teams, “has put me in a position where I kind of have to lead all of the discussions about race and discussions about equality. And when you kind of live it, that’s your reality how racism manifests itself in our society, and then having to be vulnerable and share that with your peers, it does get kind of exhausting. Having to explain inequality to people. That’s something people can do on their own. They can educate themselves.”

The questions can be unrelenting. Why police brutality is such a concern. Why speaking out about it doesn’t mean violence in Black communities is less concerning. What unconscious bias means. What books help in understanding the struggle of African Americans. What allyship looks like. Where responsibility lies. In this dialogue, Black people are often opening up about their own experiences, sometimes taking on the difficult task of reliving traumas for the sake of their teammates.

Lynn Williams is usually pretty quiet. But when the George Floyd protests broke out, her discussions among her Courage teammates included lively debates. Williams found herself breaking down why kneeling for the flag isn’t a slight to the troops.

“When we all got together, I felt like a lot of questions were actually being directed towards me,” Williams said. “And I was like, ‘I’m not the spokesperson for everybody.’ But if you guys don’t feel comfortable answering, I’ll do it. It’s crazy. Sometimes, I don’t necessarily see myself as, like, this leader. But I guess people see me that way.”

Some activists are on the soapbox, in front of the microphone. But Sarah Gorden? She’s in the streets. Specifically in Chicago.

“I do not back down. I do not bite my tongue,” Gorden said. “I’m raising a Black son. This isn’t fun. This isn’t let’s have a kumbaya. Things need to change right now.”

The Chicago Red Stars defender is a public advocate and has a growing platform that includes careers as a sideline reporter and model. She spent the better part of the last year calling out the silence of non-Black people, especially in soccer, and demanding more from corporations than public gestures.

But she is also a boots-on-the-ground type. Gorden hails from the Northside of Chicago. She went to DePaul, like her parents and her brother Jeffrey. But she was adopted into the Gorden family. Her birth parents are from the Southside. She can’t shake the connection to that part of the city. So Gorden launched HoodSpaceChi in September, a non-profit aimed at improving the mental health of girls of color in the area using yoga, meditation and sports — especially soccer. It taps into why diversity and inclusion in women’s soccer are so vital.

“There is a (culture) gap between the Black community and soccer,” Gorden said. “Being from Chicago and having gone into the Southside so many times, you can’t just bring soccer to them because of that gap. It’s got to be more than that, and it’s hard to know where to start. I would love to work with Black girls and just make that connection with girls of color. It comes all the way back to mental health. Soccer is an outlet. It would be great to offer Black girls that outlet because of the trauma, that is now being brought to light, that Black people face every day — especially in these marginalized communities like Southside Chicago.”

In 1994, Julie Kennedy was an elementary school teacher in D.C. when she decided to use soccer as a way to give her fifth-graders something to do after school. It led to the launch of the DC SCORES afterschool program. In 1998, it held its first poetry slam. In 1999, the model focused on serving low-income communities through soccer and poetry was replicated in the form of America Scores, serving 13 cities.

DC SCORES — which received donations from Washington Spirit forward Ashley Hatch’s goal bonus from the 2020 Challenge Cup and a grant from the Verizon Community Shield program in honor of the Spirit’s third-place finish in the Fall Series — is now serving some 3,000 youths a year. More than 25,000 have been impacted. What’s more, they are being serviced by their community, using (and paying) adults from their neighborhoods. Many of them are teachers in the schools.

This kind of outreach is paramount given the economics of soccer, which has never been profitable enough in America to fund development. So youth soccer exists in a pay-to-play structure that excludes those without means.

Where is U.S. Soccer in all this?

“Well, the first thing that we are doing is we have created a DEI committee,” Karla Thompson said of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Council formed in July 2020. “First of all, we’ve got to address our organization itself before we can start to influence the rest of the soccer community. So that our priority right now is addressing Diversity, Equity and Inclusion within the soccer organization. And then we intend fully to step outside into our communities and hope to hopefully influence those.”

The DEI Council, as soccer writer Caitlin Murray wrote recently, was born of internal Zoom conversations on race in June — conversations sparked by Alex Ross, a Black woman and U.S. Soccer’s events manager, feeling like the organization’s statements following George Floyd’s death rung hollow. The Council met in February and laid out the results of an independent audit and set a goal of establishing U.S. Soccer as a role model for diversity, equality and inclusion.

U.S. Soccer has plenty of work ahead to achieve that. But somebody has to take the joy and beauty of the world’s game to the people America has left out. The current construct systematically excludes large segments of the population.

“Until we really can bring the sport to these communities, then we won’t see that changed,” Gorden said. “It’s a long way from being fixed. We know what we have to do.”

The first step is exposure. That’s why the increased presence of Black women in soccer is important — not solely for the benefit of soccer, to expand the sport’s pool of talent, but to expose the people to the benefits of soccer.

The second step is access. For those that fall in love with soccer and become good at it, having a place to grow in the sport can be challenging. The space, the fields, are far away for many inner-city dwellers. The fields that do exist in the metropolis are often locked or occupied by other activities. That’s part of the mission of the Black Women’s Players Collective (BWPC). It was created in October 2020 to unify and amplify the voice of this demographic of NWSL players and make sure Black players never feel alone. One of their first major initiatives is to address field access. BWPC teamed with Black Players for Change (BPC), made of Major League Soccer players, to create 12 new pitches in communities across the nation.

The third step is development. If just getting the game into marginalized neighborhoods is tough, imagine how hard it is to get top-level training in those areas, in an environment in which club teams can dictate who gets training and who is worthy of more intense development.

“I was lucky enough that I was just seen down in Southern California,” said Lynn Williams, whose only recruiter was Pepperdine. “I think it’s crazy that Fresno is such an amazing hub of talent and a lot of people don’t get seen. And I know that that’s the same across the nation.”

All of this explains why Pinto has been groomed for this movement. If she had any doubts, they were erased when she ran for and won a seat on the 20-person Athletes’ Council. The Council, made up of players who have had some connection to the national team, is an intermediary between athletes and U.S. Soccer. The Council previously had zero sitting Black members and just one person born after 1990. Only two Black women had ever been on U.S. Soccer’s Board of Directors via the Athletes Council — Angela Hucles and Danielle Slaton. So Pinto and four others ran a campaign they dubbed Next Gen United and their aim was to diversify, in age and culture, the governing body of U.S. Soccer. And they won, setting a record for most votes by reaching out to all the players they’d ever played with.

One council member, Seth Jahn, was removed late last month for comments he made after speaking out against the repeal of the U.S. Soccer Federation’s anti-kneeling policy. His speech at the Annual General Meeting included inflammatory comments found offensive by members of the Council, including Pinto. Her timeline after Jahn’s comments included a video montage of Black women soccer players to the Nas song “Ultra Black.”

Pinto just turned pro and she’s already about that life.

Pinto started playing soccer because she wanted to do what her dad, Hassan, once did. Because her parents had the means, and she had obvious future national-team talent, she was able to go all-in. Pinto experienced the entirety of the soccer system: pickup soccer in the neighborhood, elite club-level soccer, a top-notch college program at North Carolina, the U.S. youth soccer experience, national team training camp — she has done it all.

She’s spent countless hours in the car driving to training sessions and games. She’s put a relaxer in her hair to get the high ponytail like the other girls in a quest to assimilate. She’s felt the loneliness of not being relatable — not to Black kids at school who saw her as the girl who played the White sport, or to girls in soccer, where her chocolate skin made it impossible not to be different.

But Pinto also developed self-awareness and identity, the product of being raised in a proud Black family. She also witnessed and was inspired by the examples of the women before her, including Dunn, who Pinto watched at Dorrance Field and wanted to emulate by wearing Carolina Blue.

Pinto also has the heart needed to see these problems, the brains needed to solve them, and the potential that makes people listen. That’s why she was on that stage in Moscow. That’s why she is the future. And that’s why Scurry had this exhortation for her and the baton carriers of the movement:

“As a Black player, please don’t shrink,” Scurry said. “You have to expand. Because every opportunity that a young girl has to see you on that roster is another person coming behind you that can change the world. Be a positive role model. Be someone who yesterday she didn’t know you and today she knows you. She follows you. She sees you. She starts to believe. You start to build a little belief in her that didn’t exist before you came.

“For me, if I die tomorrow, there is no greater honor to me than knowing I had a positive impact on this world through what I did for a living and in my passion for the game. There is nothing that compares to that.”

(Top image: The Athletic illustration / Wes McCabe. Photos: Scott Barbour / Getty Images; Manuel Queimadelos Alonso / Getty Images; Jose Breton / NurPhoto via Getty Images; Ira L. Black / Corbis via Getty Images)

To get more stories like this delivered to your feed, follow our Culture vertical:theathletic.com/culture