Inman twins carry on soccer love without mom
BRYANT — Nicole Inman always played dual roles.
A former college soccer player herself, she wasn’t going to have anyone else coach her twin daughters, Abbey and Ashton. From the time they were four, whenever the Inman girls were on the pitch, Nicole was on the sideline.
As much as Nicole treasured her two jobs of coach and parent, by the time Abbey and Ashton were 10, she decided that she wasn’t going to try and take on both at the same time.
Instead, Nicole left it up to her trademark pink sunglasses to let everyone know.
“When [they’re] on, I’m your coach,” Nicole told her daughters. “And when they’re off, I’m your mom.”
The shades were a fixture for many years in Central Arkansas soccer. When Nicole took over the Bryant girls program as her daughters matriculated into high school in 2017-18, the pink sunglasses came along for the ride.
They were there for the Lady Hornets’ state runner-up finish that year. They were back the next season when Bryant won just its second soccer state title.
But as the Inman girls and their fellow Lady Hornets look to go back-to-back starting this week at the Class 6A state tournament in Springdale, there will be no pink sunglasses. After a 21/2-year battle with brain cancer, Nicole Inman died Dec. 5.
The void could’ve derailed Bryant’s season. The Lady Hornets feature 12 seniors including the Inman girls, all of whom spent their first two years playing under Nicole.
Instead, they’ve coalesced into a unit even as formidable as the state championship squad from two years ago — not only is there a deep veteran corps, but Coach Olivia Allard has a handful of impressive underclassmen.
They’ve lost just once all year, earning the 6A-Central’s top seed in the state tournament. Abbey and Ashton anchor the defense and offense, respectively.
“I know whenever she’s down and she knows whenever I’m down,” Ashton said of her sister. “We don’t even have to talk to each other about it. It really is twin telepathy.”
Still, there were moments when the Inmans felt their mom’s absence.
“The first day of school, [I remember] walking into the fieldhouse and walking into her office and not seeing her there,” Abbey said. “Usually, she’d be in there or she’d be on the field preparing already.
“It was just weird seeing someone else in her seat … and that’s when it first hit me.”
For a long time, there was hope. Nicole was diagnosed in May 2018, shortly after her first Bryant team lost in the Class 6A title game.
There was also prayer. As the Inmans fought through many rounds of chemotherapy and radiation, they leaned on their faith.
But there was also a sense of the final outcome. A March 2019 biopsy began to inhibit some of Nicole’s speech, and after another biopsy in September as well as continued cancerous growth, Nicole lost nearly all of her mobility as well as more speech.
Amid a pandemic that robbed the Inmans of one final soccer season together — even though Nicole did not coach during the Lady Hornets’ covid-shortened 2020 campaign — the return of their shared love in February of this year restored some sense of normalcy for the twins.
“All my children … have shown strength that a father can only be proud of,” Scott Inman said. “You’re going to have moments where you have to reflect and where you have to grieve and you have to mourn and you have to cry. But you can’t live in that and you have to move forward. I told the kids, ‘We can’t forget but we can’t always remember.’ ”
Having a goal is something Scott hoped could help his daughters through their grief. It’s done so much more — and not just for the Inman girls.
“We’ve told our team, ‘This is for our Hope Warrior,’ ” Abbey said of the mantra Nicole took up during her cancer battle. “Every single game, we tell them, ‘Remember who you’re playing for.’ And I think that’s just given us more motivation to play the best soccer we can.”
Scott won’t have the refuge of the press box this week. Wanting to stay as far away from the sidelines as possible and distract himself from the stress of watching his daughters, the former KATV news anchor served as a stat keeper for Bryant this season.
But he’ll be in the stands in Springdale, watching just what Nicole would have expected from her girls — both by blood and by soccer.
“She would be very proud of them, but she also would’ve told them she knew they could [be this successful],” Scott said. “And those high expectations came from a very deep belief and a trust that they could do what she asked of them.”