Pioneer girls of the BC soccer world

This is the speech I gave at the induction ceremony for three Blue Mountain girls soccer teams into the Coquitlam Sports Hall of Fame: 

The Blue Mountain Royals celebrating being named Outstanding Team at the 1982 Sun Cup of Soccer Champions. This photo sits on my bookshelf in my office and it inspired me to gather my memories, make my soccer video detailing the early days of girls' soccer in BC, and nominate the three Blue Mountain teams for the Coquitlam Sports Hall of Fame.

Hello everyone!

For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Anne Russell and I was a proud member of the Blue Mountain Royals soccer team from 1975 to 1984. I still consider myself a Royal today and enjoyed a great reunion with my fellow players, our coach Dean McInnes, and several of the team parents on Sunday.

I am also a friend and admirer of the two other Blue Mountain teams being honoured tonight. We played the Devils on an exhibition basis many times and then in league play during their final U-18 year. We looked up to the Rangers as the senior team in our club.

Forty years ago, I was, to quote Cyndi Lauper, just a girl who wanted to have fun. I loved kicking the soccer ball around in the backyard with my four brothers, and would take it out to the fields at Lord Baden Powell elementary, just behind my house, and kick it against the backstop of the ball diamond. When I got a little older, I would illegally climb the fence into the school courtyard and kick it against the wall there. You just couldn’t stop me!

I would go to my brothers’ games, and watch from the sidelines as they played, and wonder why I couldn’t play on a team too! I was told that girls didn’t play soccer, that there were no organized teams. I didn’t know then that the English Football Association had banned the growing sport of women’s soccer in the 1920s – a ban that was not lifted until the 1970s and that spilled over into Canada in the chilling effect that it had on the development of the women’s game.

Then, in 1975, I heard that my friend Kerry Rupert WAS playing on a team, and that girls soccer had started up. I eagerly informed that my parents that there WAS a team and I wanted to join it! Thus I became a Blue Mountain Royal! Thanks Kerry! 

I was overjoyed to be playing with my new friends on a real team and travelling to Port Moody, Port Coquitlam, and Burnaby to take on other teams. We’d also play against the other Coquitlam clubs: Bel Air and Cape Horn. Along with the Blue Mountain club, they were the precursors to today’s Coquitlam Metro Ford Soccer Club. In the first game I remember playing as a nine-year-old we took on the Port Moody Sparks, and were bowled over by a tiny dynamo forward named Tina Pavan, who would join our team in her teens.

For the next few years we developed our soccer skills and grew as a team. Under the guidance of coaches Dean McInnes and Peter Van Hulsen, we learned the finer points of the game and became very successful in the win-loss margin. But we also learned to play with character, to always be good sports, and to treat our opponents with respect. Jim Gray and Cam Barnetson were working similar miracles with the Devils and the Rangers.

We were also proving that girls COULD play soccer. One year, we travelled to Pitt Meadows for the Hammond Days festival to put on a demonstration of the game before there was any organized soccer in Pitt Meadows or Maple Ridge. A decade later, current national team goalkeeper Karina LeBlanc would start her youth soccer career in a Maple Ridge club. 

 In 1973, there were only three girls soccer clubs across British Columbia. By 1980, there were 317 teams. In 2002, there were more than 307,000 women and girls playing nationally.

So by the early 1980s, girls were playing the game, and playing it well. There was even a championship tournament for girls started in the late 1970s that the Devils and Rangers qualified for. 

But the pinnacle of amateur sport… the Sun Tournament of Soccer Champions …  sponsored by the Vancouver Sun newspaper, eluded us.

Soccer was B.C.’s most high-profile amateur sport from the 1950s through the 1980s and beyond.

Boys who got to play in this elite Sun Cup tournament, which pitted the two best teams in the coastal region against each other, played in Swangard Stadium — a real stadium! They were marched in by bagpipes in a parade of champions, had their games covered by real newspaper and TV reporters, and the Sun Soccer Boy and his runner up were featured in the Vancouver Sun.

But for the first few years of organized girls soccer in B.C., girls were not allowed to play in the Sun Cup.

Then, in 1981, more enlightened minds prevailed. It was the girls’ turn to play at Swangard, with a parade, bagpipes, an announcer calling out their names, an allstar team, and a Sun Soccer Girl and Runner Up being featured on the front page of the Vancouver Sun sports section.

In a happy coincidence that highlights what a hotbed of soccer Coquitlam was, three teams from the Blue Mountain Club — teams that are being honoured tonight — The Royals, The Devils, and The Rangers — qualified for the inaugural Sun Cup for Girls.

Those same three teams emerged victorious in the top three age groups at the first Sun Cup, which also served as the provincial championship at that time.

The Sun Soccer Girl was Jane Norman of the Blue Mountain Rangers. Soccer Girl Runner Up was Karen Daws of the Blue Mountain Royals.

Fully half the allstar team was from Blue Mountain. And the Rangers were named Outstanding Team of the tournament.

Girls soccer had truly arrived and Coquitlam’s Blue Mountain club was leading the way!

It was a moment of immense pride for our teams, our families, and our community.

One local sports writer, the late Norm Wright, said it was seeing our team play that convinced him that girls and soccer belonged together. In fact I think it was that speedy little forward Tina Pavan who convinced him.

My team, the Royals, returned to the Sun Cup in 1982, winning again. We went on to be Western Canadian champions and placed second in Canada. One of our members, Brenda Yamamoto, was named Sun Soccer Girl Runner Up and others were allstars.

It was a thrill, but nothing matched the thrill of that first Sun Cup when Coquitlam girls proved that we deserved the same respect on the turf as the boys did.

There were direct connections between our pioneer soccer community and the early days of the national team. Someone we played against regularly, Geri Donnelly of the Port Moody Flames, went on to join Canada’s first rag-tag version of a women’s national team in 1986. She scored Canada’s first and second goals ever. I played on a summer team with her that same year. Local Coquitlam girl Cathy Ross was also an early national team member.

Someone who played with us as a Royal in our last two years – Linda Petrasch (now Linda Milani), also played for the national team for a couple of the early years.  Both of these women were honored as national team alumni at a recent ceremony before a World Cup game.

Some key national team members reaped the benefits of a vibrant girls’ soccer scene in BC that we helped to create. 

Christine Sinclair, Canada’s current captain, wouldn’t be born until a couple of years after that first Sun Cup, but she went on to play in its successor, the Coastal Cup, in her formative years. My brother- and sister-in-law coached against her when she was a young teen and remember her as a phenomenon even then.  

Other current and former national team members, including Abbotsford’s Sophie Schmidt, got their start in the girl’s soccer system that we pioneers helped to build.

In my lifetime I have witnessed huge growth of girls soccer, the start of rep teams, elite teams, school teams, university teams, and the launch of the women’s national team.

So yes, I will be extremely proud when I join 50,000 other fans to watch Canada against Switzerland in BC Place on Sunday and when that same venue hosts the World Cup final on July 5. When I was at the U.S. game on Tuesday I thought back to those early international soccer exchanges we had with Seattle teams and reflected that I never imagined it would come to this.

But I am most proud of the equity achieved in Canadian soccer: unlike when I was a little girl watching my brothers from the sidelines: my daughters and my son have the same opportunities to play, ref, and coach with our club, the Chilliwack FC. And they take advantage of it.

And there’s another legacy: lots of women playing through their 30s, 40s, 50s or until their knees give out, whichever comes first. Yes, I’m still playing recreational soccer at age 49. I’m no superstar and probably wouldn’t even make the rep team if I was playing as a girl today, but I play in a recreational league my friends and I organized for women over 30. I scored six goals this season! We now have 12 teams and more than 160 players coming out two nights a week in Chilliwack. We are all enjoying the personal empowerment, bonding, commitment to fitness and community building that comes with that. 

I want to give a huge shout out to my coaches when I was a girl – Dean McInnes and the late Peter Van Hulsen gave us the skills to play soccer, but also emphasized sportsmanship, integrity, and camaraderie. And we girls were bonded for life as a result. I know that Jim Gray and Cam Barnetson instilled similar values with their teams.

We learned a lot from winning, but also from our occasional big losses. Ironically, we ended the youth careers of our older rivals, the Devils, in playoff action in 1983, and then were eliminated ourselves by the younger Willingdon Dirty Dozen a year later in 1984. Character-building experiences all!

I just want to take a moment to recognize that not all the legends of the Blue Mountain Club of the 1980s could join us tonight. We’ve lost some good ones along the way, including Rangers coach Cam Barnetson, Royals assistant coach Peter Van Hulsen, parents from various teams, and the first Sun Soccer Girl, the late and great Jane Norman.

I made a soccer video detailing the history of all this as an assignment for university course in digital storytelling that I took. As I approach a half century in age and watch some of my friends pass away, it hits home that nobody can tell your story as well as you can, so if you want to make sure your story is told, then make sure you tell it. The video now has more than 1,400 views on Youtube. It’s called Pioneer Girls of the BC Soccer World if you want to look it up.

I am so honoured to be here tonight being recognized with the rest of you. Forty years later, girls still just wanna have fun. And they are!

Thank you to the Coquitlam Sports Hall of Fame for this wonderful recognition. Thank you, Royals, Devils, and Rangers, for paving the way for the soccer girls of today. And thank you to the adults of the previous generation for having the foresight to let the little girls join their brothers on the pitch and play!