College or pro? It’s a tough call when you’re 12
MUNICH — On a warm afternoon here late last month, a few minutes before soccer practice, Olivia Moultrie, 12, was talking about her haters.
“I like looking through the comments,” she said, referring to her Instagram account, which has more than 70,000 followers, “and then I find that one comment, and I’m like, ‘Really, bro?’ And then I just keep scrolling.”
Olivia once wanted to be a dentist. Then she reached third grade, and her focus turned to becoming the best soccer player in the world.
Itiswhyshehasbeenhomeschooled since the fifth grade and why her family spent $60,000 installing an artificial turf field behind their house in California. It is why she accepted a scholarship offer from the University of North Carolina last summer, at age 11, and why she has made two trips to Europe this year to meet with some of the top women’s club teams in the world.
It is why a 12-year-old youth soccer player has haters.
K.C. Moultrie refers to his daughter’s nascent soccer dream as “the goal” or “the project” or sometimes just “the thing.” Whatever the name, it has totally consumed him. A manager for an international pharmaceutical company, Moultrie, in recent years, has made his daughter’s development his primary job.
He and Olivia traveled last month to Germany from their home in Canyon Country, Calif., to train with the youth team of Bayern Munich, a sort of get-toknow-you trip that they repeated a week later with Olympique Lyon in France. During a similar visit to Paris St.-germain earlier this year, coaches seeking an appropriate level for Moultrie moved her up an age group a day until,bytheendofthevisit,she was scrimmaging with the club’s under-17 boys.
“There’s no blueprint when you want to be better than anyone’s ever been,” K.C. Moultrie said.
Still, their quest is not just about the soccer future of a single girl. In its audacity, it is challenging long-held assumptions about the best way to groom American players. Less than a year before the United States will begin defending its Women’s World Cup title, it is also highlighting the ways in which girls soccer development in America is changing, the ways in which it is flawed and the ways in which it all might one day evolve.
Risk and reward
Projecting adult success onto any 12-year-old is a fool’s errand, of course; hyped young athletes across all sports, both boys and girls, regularly fail as they travel seemingly preordained paths to stardom.
Nevertheless, the emergence of a promising, young soccer talent now triggers ripples of activity among an increasingly global set of potentially interested parties. More of the biggest soccer clubs in Europe are shifting resources to the women’s side of the game, and at the national team level, the once yawning gap between the U.S. and the rest of the world has narrowed considerably. An expansion of the Women’s World Cup has led even more nations to invest in the sport.
Yet while the world of women’s soccer is expanding, it can also feel as if it is getting smaller, thanks to an increase in international events and the effects of social media, which can amplify and distort a player’s profile like a fun house mirror.
Olivia’s uncommon skills have inevitably inspired superlatives; her father, who attaches #witness to online posts about his daughter, can rattle off countless coaches who have told him she is destined for stardom. But those skills have also inspired her family to look beyond the well-worn, existing pathways for talented young American girls. While Olivia’s commitment to North Carolina places her firmly on the traditional path for a talented American girl, her journeys to European clubs show a willingness to explore a different one.
“I tell her all the time, ‘Nobody cares that you’re the best at 12,’” K.C. Moultrie said. “If you’re not the best at 17 or 18, nobody’s going to care. You’re going to be one of those child actors that nobody cares about. You’re going to be Macaulay Culkin.”
In past decades, Olivia’s path to her goal would have been clear. For years, all of the best female prospects in America have been funneled to U.S. colleges, a vast network of teams and coaches that still produces nearly all the players who eventually suit up for the women’s national team. Top players from abroad, seeking the highest competition, often supplement NCAA rosters.
But as other countries have begun to embrace women’s soccer, and as top clubs have begun to offer more and more players access to year-round training, the best talents from Europe and elsewhere have increasingly been following a path long open to boys by turning professional by their late teenage years.
In an internal analysis after the United States was eliminated from the recent FIFA under-20 Women’s World Cup, April Heinrichs, the technical director for U.S. Soccer’s women’s national teams, highlighted the players on each country’s 21-women roster who were competing in a first-division professional league. Japan, the eventual champion, featured 17. Spain had 18. The other semifinalists, France and England, had19and14.
“And we have zero,” Heinrichs said, “so that’s going to catch up to us eventually.”
Heinrichs said the women’s landscape was undoubtedly experiencing a shift with the increase in investment overseas — Man- chester United recently created a women’s team to keep up with rivals like Manchester City, Chelsea and Arsenal, and Real Madrid has made a public commitment to add one — but she noted that it would probably take time before the soccer calculations changed for the majority of girls in the U.S. In most families, college remains the preferred destination, and the conventional wisdom remains that athletes should forgo it only if the guaranteed compensation for a professional contract exceeds the cost of a full four-year scholarship, generally valued around $300,000.
Only two current players on the current U.S. national team, in fact, have skipped college to pursue a professional career: Lindsey Horan, who joined PSG in 2012 at age 18, and Mallory Pugh, who was 19 when she walked away from a scholarship to UCLA to join the Washington Spirit of the National Women’s Soccer League.
K.C. Moultrie betrays no doubts about his daughter; everything she does now is geared toward “the goal.” She has had a personal coach since age 6. Last year, she became the first girl to play full time in U.S. Soccer’s boys development academy system. This summer, she was called in to the United States’ under-15 girls team, and she will play the coming club season for an under17 girls team.
The home schooling gives her a more flexible training schedule. She has tried to remove sugar from her diet.
“We’re not just like, ‘Ah, she’s 12, have a Snickers,’” K.C. Moul- trie said. “We don’t do that.”
A girl on tour
In their hotel room last month in Munich, as Olivia fought jet lag and recorded goofy messages on Snapchat, K.C. Moultrie suggested that she send Anson Dorrance, the longtime coach at North Carolina, a text message to congratulate him on his 1,000th victory.
Olivia attended a showcase camp last summer at UNC. (She was 10 when she attended her first college camp, at the University of Texas.) After one day, Dorrance — who has coached players like Mia Hamm, Kristine Lilly and dozens of other national team stars in almost four decades leading the program — determined Olivia, at 11, was already good enough to make the Tar Heels’ traveling roster. He described her in an interview as “wonderfully creative,” a “brilliant technician” and “the kind of player you pay money to watch.” Before she left campus, he offered her a scholarship.
Dorrance and the Moultries initially agreed to keep the offer secret. But the family grew uncomfortable having to lie to people inquiring about Olivia’s plans. So a few months later, they announced the scholarship offer, and Olivia’s acceptance, on her Instagram account.
“We can see how through a jaundiced eye this would look wrong in all kinds of ways,” Dorrance, 67, said of recruiting a tween. “But all we have to do is look at our rivals and know that we’d have to play against her if we didn’t do this.”
Since they are nonbinding, early commitments like Olivia’s essentially function as handshake agreements, and many people, Dorrance included, understand that Olivia may not end up at UNC, or in college at all.
European clubs are interested, but they must abide by FIFA’S international transfer rules. Or perhaps an NWSL club could try to arrange to sign her before she reaches college age. (The initial connections with the European clubs this year were made with the help of a sports agent at Wasserman Media Group who has been helping the Moultries in an unpaid role.) Nike and Adidas, meanwhile, have been hovering nearby, sending the family shipments of free gear.
After sending the Snapchats, texting Dorrance and taking a short nap, Olivia left the hotel to practice with Bayern Munich’s under-17 women’s team. Her touches on the ball were clean and refined. At one point, she smoothly unwound a sequence of step-over moves to dribble out of traffic and score. Aside from some language issues, she fit in seamlessly with the older girls.