Stepping up and delivering
‘I WAS THERE’: MELANIE BOOTH, GUADALAJARA, 2011
She was “still a little kid” in Burlington the last time she stood on the spot, “and I probably missed that one.”
But on the night of Oct. 27, 2011 in Guadalajara, Mexico, Melanie Booth was one of four Canadians to beat the Brazilian goalkeeper on penalty kicks after extra time had expired in the gold medal game.
The Brazilians could counter with only three: their first, and ultimately deciding, miss coming on their third shot, after Booth scored for Canada on its third shot.
Through a superb career that included 11 years with the national team, a bronze medal 2007 at the Pan Ams, an exemplary career at the University of Florida, a starring role with 22 caps for the “junior” national team which won silver at the 2002 U-19 World Cup, and the stunning bronze medal at London 2012 (Canada’s first Olympic medal in a team sport in 76 years), Booth had never taken a penalty kick.
“It was pretty nerve-racking,” she recalls. “I’ve never been one to take penalty kicks, but throughout the tournament John (Herdman, then the newly-minted head coach) had always said, ‘Shed a new skin,’ meaning kind of step outside your comfort zone. He said two people (future Olympic legends Diana Matheson and Christine Sinclair) are going to take penalty kicks and then he just opened it up to the rest of the team.
“I just put my hand up and was like ‘What am I doing?’ But I volunteered and just stepped up.”
And helped the Canadian women turn the corner that Herdman had described when he took over the team from Carolina Morace only a month before the Pan Ams.
”It was a pretty incredible experience for us because it was the first tournament that we’d gone through with John Herdman,” Booth says. “The detail he puts into prepara- tion is amazing.
“This was a big step in the right direction. It was a turning point for us because we believed ‘We can do this’. We knew there was something special going on just with the way John operates. You could just tell from the professionalism and the progress that we were making. It was really neat to just kind of get used to John’s environment. We were used to a lot of down time and he’s very meticulous with meetings and letting us plan strategies for games and letting us implement our thoughts into the games, rather than just the coaching strategies.”
Booth is now retired but has not left the game she grew up loving. In fact, quite the opposite. She has helped train both the U-17 and U-15 national teams and works for the Canadian branch of British-based soccer apparel and equipment giant Umbro.
“Which is pretty neat because it keeps me in the game and it’s directly associated with the Canadian Soccer Association,” she says.