From fan of Morgan to being teammate
Five summers ago in Mission Valley, when the United States and Brazil were to kick off a women’s soccer match, local girls accompanied the players onto the field. One girl recognized U.S. star Alex Morgan.
Being a forward herself, she saw a scoring opportunity.
“I asked her if she could give me her jersey after the game,” remembered Melanie Barcenas.
Following the U.S. victory, the 10-year-old Barcenas positioned herself near where players would exit. Seeing Morgan, she asked if she’d remembered the jersey request.
“She started taking off her jersey and signed it and threw it up to me,” Barcenas said. “Which was pretty cool.”
Five years later, Barcenas has done herself one better.
She’s is now one of Morgan’s teammates on the San Diego Wave of the National Women’s Soccer League.
The club and the former San Diego Surf youth-team standout have agreed to a three-year contract. Barcenas has practiced with Morgan and teammates and played briefly Saturday in the Wave’s preseason match against Angel City. She’ll be with the club Saturday, when it opens the 2023 season against the Chicago Red Stars at Snapdragon Stadium.
“I had a little bit of nerves,” said the 15-year-old. She added, “It was fun just to be out there and just have fans there and be in that environment.”
Opportunity is a wonderful thing, isn’t it?
The old Mission Valley stadium where Barcenas caught Morgan’s autographed jersey was the same venue the city of San Diego built for the football Chargers and other men’s sports teams in the mid-1960s. When a new NFL stadium in San Diego didn’t materialize by January 2017, the Chargers ended their 56-year relationship with San Diego and headed to Los Angeles and a $5.5 billion, privately financed stadium.
As painful as the NFL team’s exit was for thousands of San Diegans, it nevertheless led to new sports opportunities.
The Wave were created in anticipation of a much smaller stadium arising on the same Mission Valley site, financed by the taxpayer-supported Cal State system. The Wave’s first game at Snapdragon Stadium attracted a sellout crowd of 32,000, setting a record in the world’s top women’s soccer league.
Among the excited spectators that night? The girl who walked onto the Qualcomm Stadium field in July 2017.
“It was amazing,” Barcenas
said of the Wave match, one of several she attended. “I just knew that’s what I wanted to do, play in front of 32,000 in Snapdragon and having a soccer team here. That’s just so cool.”
Who knows what will trigger a child’s imagination?
When John Lynch Jr. was growing up in Solana Beach, family outings at Chargers games in Mission Valley, Lynch would say, intensified his ambitions of becoming an NFL player. In the same stadium where he’d watched Hall of Fame quarterback Dan Fouts pilot the “Air Coryell” Chargers, the Hall of Fame-bound safety Lynch would win a Super Bowl with the 2002 Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
Morgan, 33, is recognized by a large number of young people, not only in the United States but other countries. Her various social media accounts have attracted some 20 million followers.
“Even before I met Alex, she was my favorite soccer player,” said Barcenas.
She’s also a fan of Brazil’s
Neymar, a “very skillful” forward on the men’s national team.
A lefty, Morgan often plays left wing. At the same position, the Wave have attracted a pair of teenage standouts who chose to turn professional before becoming of college age: Jaedyn Shaw, of Frisco, Texas, who was 17 when she joined the Wave last summer and became the youngest player to score in her NWSL debut; and now Barcenas, who’ll turn 16 in October.
“I knew this was going to be a step to get me better,” said Barcenas, who’s 5-foot-4 and can play other forward spots and in the midfield. “I wanted to take a new challenge. And just getting to represent my hometown team, that’s a dream.”
Her new mentors are a decorated bunch. They include Morgan, who played in Saturday’s match; another World Cup and NWSL champion in defender Abby Dahlkemper; NWSL coach of the year Casey Stoney, who turned professional as a youngster in England; and Wave President Jill Ellis, who raised two World Cup trophies as the U.S. head coach.
Shaw, now 18, scored three goals last year across a fivegame season.
Elsewhere
Jurickson Profar’s decision to leave the Padres in November worked out for the upbeat left fielder. He gets an additional $225,000 in fully guaranteed salary plus the $1 million buyout for declining a Padres option. Per an MLB source privy to other details, it’s essentially a $2.75 million gain. And, Profar stands to play more with the Rockies and bat
leadoff, a preference.
If Profar draws trade interest this summer, the Rockies figure to move him — and the Padres could be a candidate. His OPS last year was 11 percent above average . ...
San Diego State’s Sweet 16 challenge is familiar: Overcome a team with more NBAprojected talent.
Alabama forward Brandon Miller lands in the top five of most 2023 NBA mock drafts. Six-foot-10 Noah Clowney is penciled into the first round, too.
Three players from Connecticut’s team that beat SDSU in the 2011 Sweet 16 went in the first round: Kemba Walker (ninth), Jeremy Lamb (12th) and Shabazz Napier (24th). Four future NBA players, including first-rounders Aaron Gordon and Rondae Hollis-Jefferson, powered Arizona past SDSU in the 2014 Sweet 16.
However: SDSU’s programbest “grown men” profile makes an upset possible Friday night. Several Aztecs will play professionally.