Living the (separate, unequal) dream
Roommate Dash players point to sacrifice beyond time away from loved ones: great wage disparity with male players
Drests her feet on a coffee table that isn’t much of a coffee table at all. It’s just a piece of plywood balanced on two overturned trash bins. Not exactly the furnishings you’d expect in the home of a professional athlete.
But the women of the Houston Dash don’t live a glossy life.
“We call this the international house of players. IHOP,” says Ellie Brush, a defender from Australia, who’s sitting cross-legged on the wood floor, across from O’Sullivan, an Irish forward. “We all just got put here.”
Brush and O’Sullivan are two of five Houston Dash players living in this four-bedroom townhome in the Heights. They each have their own rooms, as does Australian goalkeeper Lydia Williams, while Brazilians Andressa Cavalari Machry and Poliana Barbosa Medeiros share an upstairs bedroom.
“They’re besties,” Brush says about the Brazilian women, who played together on their national soccer team and will join Brazil’s Olympic team later this summer to play on their home turf. “They have to be.”
No matter, Williams says, trying not to laugh. “Poli’s always sleeping anyway.”
The women — all in their 20s — joke and poke fun at each other, cracking comments with a familiarity that can only be earned through cramped spaces and crammed schedules. Each morning, they wake at 7 to head to practice, where they battle Houston’s heat for several hours as they condition and train.
Then the roommates hop back into a rental car and return to their home in the Heights.
“From then onward, we do whatever we want to. But we can’t do too much because we have to be ready for training tomorrow,” Williams says. “And we can’t really go out on weekends. But when we’re not playing soccer, we go for coffee, or we’ll usually do something in the week. One of the girls might say they’re going to lunch somewhere and ask if we want to come.”
Mostly, they eat at home — often crowding around the coffee table that isn’t much of a coffee table since they don’t have a dining-room table.
Personal space isn’t a luxury they’ve been afforded.
“We live together, but we don’t spend all of our time together. Sometimes we just go upstairs and close the door,” says O’Sullivan, who just finished binge-watching “Friday Night Lights” on Netflix. She’s since moved on to “Scandal.”
Often the women call their families, but the timing on those calls and videochats varies greatly. For the Brazilian players, their families are only two time zones away. But when Brush calls her father or fiancé in Australia, it’s a difference of 15 hours.
“Most days I go to a coffee shop. I’ll take my laptop, and I’ll drink a coffee and I’ll be working,” says Brush, who juggles her job on the American team with an offseason position on an Australian team and a second career as a physical therapist to make ends meet. She spends her coffee-shop time on professional development; she wants to keep her therapy credentials up to date.
Unequal pay
Earlier this year, five of America’s top female soccer players — including Dash midfielder Carli Lloyd, who’s been out with a knee injury since April — filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, alleging gender-based wage discrimination.
In the complaint, directed toward the U.S. Soccer Federation, the players point to the wage disparity in 2015’s World Cup, when Lloyd scored a hat trick — three consecutive goals — in the final game to propel the women to world domination.
“The pay structure for advancement through the rounds of the World Cup was so skewed that, in 2015, the (Men’s National Team) earned $9 million for losing in the Round of 16, while the women earned only $2 million for winning the entire tournament,” the complaint reads. “In other words, the women earned four times less than the men while performing demonstrably better.”
It remains to be seen whether the complaint will be taken up by the EEOC or have any ripple effects on other soccer organizations, such as the Dash’s National Women’s Soccer League. Still, the revelations it brought forth — the Women’s National Team is projecting a profit of $5 million this fiscal year, for example, while the men’s national team expects to lose $1 million — have shed light on inequality across the sport.
Many members of the Dash have second jobs or additional roster spots on national teams to help subsidize their soccer careers. That’s mainly out of necessity since the Dash pays only between $7,200 and $39,700 per season, with an average salary of $17,375. By comparison, the lowest-paid players for Houston’s men’s team, the Dynamo, earn $51,500.
“The Women’s National Team brought in more money than the men,” Brush says. “You can’t use the argument that the women are making nothing and the men are bringing in all the money, which is a bit what happens in Australia. But with the women here, they’re bringing in all the money, so U.S. soccer doesn’t have a leg to stand on with that argument.”
The women of the league are all working together these days, Williams adds.
Williams, 28, was only 16 when she first made Australia’s national team. In the years since, she’s formed tight bonds with her fellow Australian players, many of whom play in America during their home country’s offseason.
“I probably know someone on each team, like to say hello,” Williams says. “And I think with everything that’s happened in women’s football in the past two years or so with equality, everyone’s kind of fighting for the same thing. So if you see another player walking on the street, you would say hello. You might not have a conversation with them, but you have a mutual respect.”
Girl power
When the Dash’s lineup is introduced at a home game, the players parade out onto the field two by two, each woman leading a young girl into the bright lights. It’s an inspiring moment when a little girl can stand next to a hero and imagine herself in those cleats.
Women’s soccer and its sponsors have played on this idea plenty; in February, Lloyd sat down for an interview with the Chronicle, wearing soccer shorts and a purple Powerade T-shirt that proudly proclaims “just a kid from Delran” in big letters.
Raised in Delran, N.J., Lloyd was 5 years old when her parents signed her up for her first soccer team. By the time she was 10, she quit dancing. Later, she threw aside softball, basketball and the swim team to focus on the sport that made her happiest. She can’t remember a time when soccer wasn’t her favorite way to spend an afternoon. But growing up in the 1980s and ’90s, Lloyd didn’t have a soccer star’s hand to hold as she strolled onto the pitch for a Sunday night game.
“It’s one of those things where you don’t think that you can do this as your job,” Lloyd says. “That’s not something that was in my brain as a kid in middle school or even high school. I wanted to aspire to play in the Olympics and the National Team, but I think when you’re that age, you don’t think that this could just be your job.”
That changed in 1999, when Lloyd was entering her junior year of high school. The Women’s World Cup team took the world by storm, and Lloyd watched from the stands at Giants Stadium near her hometown, rooting for her favorite players, including Michelle Akers — “she was just tough and rugged and basically would do anything, throw her body out there.” Lloyd still has the program from that game and a poster signed by some of the players — women she now knows as coworkers and competitors.
One year later, the first professional women’s soccer league, The Women’s United Soccer Association, was founded. But it lost $100 million in its first three seasons and shuttered in 2003. In 2007, women’s soccer tried again, launching the Women’s Professional Soccer League, which closed down in 2012 because of a lack of investments, among other issues. The current incarnation, the NWSL, hosted its first game in 2013. Progress has been slow and steady.
“The depth here in America is so good. The college system is awesome and produces so many players,” Brush says as she rolls out her hip flexors on a hot-pink foam roller where the roommates’ non-existent dining-room table should be.
“It seems like every game is the highest quality, whereas, say, France has two or three really good teams and the other ones really drop off,” she says. “That’s what makes this league so good, is that there’s such a depth of players and the standards here are a bit higher. And then you have all those stars on top of that. Honestly, I would say this is the best league in the world.” “Let’s go, Dash!”
Brush has traveled halfway across the world to pursue her dream.
It’s been worth it, she says, but not easy.
“My fiancé, he’s the breadwinner, and he’s been allowing me to be over here and live the dream — the dream without the money,” Brush says. “If I was a guy in the MLS, then he could come over with me, and I would be able to support him. But that can’t happen here.”
The economic realities, even for a top-tier player like Brush, mean that her dream comes with an expiration date.
“If we were males, and getting paid, like, a decent actual salary, then I’d be getting savings, and I could get a mortgage, a place and I would have good job security,” says Brush, who has been able to squirrel away some savings thanks to her physical therapy side jobs. “A lot of girls have to retire early — earlier than they should because they’re not earning enough money to actually create a life. My friends who are back home who are not playing soccer, you know, they’re starting families, and they’re buying houses and stuff. And there’s no way I could do that. So I’ll have to retire so I can get a proper job that pays well.”
Maybe someday that will change, she says.
In the meantime, she soaks up the moments of bliss that come with making it as a professional athlete, charging hard across the field in pursuit of victory while a soprano chorus of 8-year-old girls fervently chants, “Let’s go, Dash!” from the stands.