I was just a seventeen-year-old kid. And I thought my choice about leaving with a designated driver had been a pretty good one, but ours was a small town. Somehow our athletic director, Mr. Potter, got wind that I’d been pulled over and that I’d been drinking. He started digging around. Though I had great relationships with most of my teachers and coaches, I didn’t have one with Mr. Potter. He had had run-ins with my family. Even though I was one of our school’s best athletes—something I thought should make our athletic director proud—I never got the sense that Mr. Potter was on my side.
And this time was no exception.
He suspended me from the basketball team for violating team rules. Even worse, the news came out in the paper on February 3, 1999, the same day as the big news that I had signed with UW. Letter-of-intent day is a proud moment, when you get to tell the world that you’re going to be a college athlete. But my day was sullied by the suspension. There was news that two of my Admiral club teammates and one of my Richland High teammates had also signed letters of intent to play college soccer, Bradee Fitzpatrick signed with Idaho, Megan Maxwell with Utah, and Jessie DeLucchi with Montana.
Further down in the story, behind a few basketball scores, was this line:
The Bombers will be without Solo for this weekend’s games as she serves an indefinite suspension for violating the school’s athletic code.
My teammates told Potter and our coach that they’d also been at the party. They knew that they would have a tough road in the playoffs without me. In the hallways of Richland, students and teachers expressed outrage over the decision. Even the principal and vice principal gave me a word of support.
But a week later, the suspension was made permanent. I was kicked off the team for the season. I was very hurt—I had made a bad decision, but so had others on my team. I was being made an example of. It was the first time I realized that by excelling I could become a target. I thought about appealing the decision. Glenn went down to the school and fought hard for me. It made me realize that, in many ways, he was my dad. But the season was almost over, and I knew that basketball wasn’t my ticket out of Richland. So I let it drop. I never played organized basketball again.
IV.
We graduated in June. My cap and gown were shimmering gold, and I wore a white Hawaiian lei around my neck. When I looked out at the audience, there was my father. Terry had made sure he was there—picking him up, getting him cleaned up, putting him in a nice blue shirt and driving him out to Richland with her son, Christian, who was just a toddler. I was thrilled to see my father, but his presence made anxiety bubble up inside of me. I would be going to college in the same city where he lived. Would I see him on a regular basis? Would it be embarrassing? Would my new teammates and friends judge me because of my dad?
We went out to dinner that night with both my family and Cheryl’s. It was awkward trying to share my attention among my mom, Glenn, my grandparents, and my dad. I felt divided, trying to please everyone. I wasn’t concerned just about my dad. I didn’t know how things would be with my mom when I got to Washington. Our relationship was still tense. It was hard to imagine how we could change our deep-rooted habits of arguing and accusation.
That summer was a very cool time to be a soccer player. The Women’s World Cup was taking place, and everyone in the country seemed to be talking about women’s soccer. A few weeks before my graduation, the U.S. team had played in Portland, and some of my soccer teammates and I made the trip down to see the game. The players signed autographs afterward, and my teammates pushed me toward Briana Scurry. “You should meet the goalkeeper,” they said. But the player I really wanted to meet was Michelle Akers. She was from Washington state and was a strong, physical player. She seemed to stand apart from the others, with her bushy hair and powerful game.
I watched every minute of the World Cup games, some of them with my grandparents and some at Cheryl’s while we were making plans for our big move to UW. America’s penalty-kick victory in the championship over China was thrilling. Scurry made a save that helped set up the game-winning penalty kick by Brandi Chastain. I was captivated by the effort of Akers, the aging lioness of the team who gave so much that day that she had to take an IV to rehydrate and wasn’t available for penalty kicks. I loved her power, her ability to impose her will on opponents. I was still thinking like a forward.
I didn’t watch the World Cup games as a fan. I didn’t have a poster of Mia Hamm on my wall. I watched like a player—I was planning to someday be on that roster. And a few weeks after the World Cup, I contributed in a small way to what was dubbed the Summer of Soccer. In late July, the U-18 national team reported for the Pan-American Games in Winnipeg, the first-ever inclusion of women’s soccer in the Pan-Am Games. Soccer was becoming more than just a distraction from my home life. For the first time, it felt like a
