When a small piece of South African history was made recently in the coastal city of Cape Town, it looked as if the boys would have the last laugh.
The event in question marked the first occasion on which a girls’ soccer team was competing in a boys’ league — albeit for a friendly game. By half-time, the boys’ team had racked up three goals to nil — sending the crowd of spectators, numbering a few hundred, into a frenzy.
”Girls can’t play! Girls can’t play!” several onlookers roared after every goal, in an idiomatic Afrikaans so studded with swear words that it cannot be translated here.
But by the end of the game on Rocklands sports field, where poverty-stricken Mitchell’s Plain dissolves into the Atlantic Ocean, the smirks were gone. The girls, who make up the junior section of the Cape Town Angels football club, had beaten the Rovers by four goals to three.
”Lo and behold, the boys were whipped by the girls! This has been a major talking point,” said Clive Bailey, president of the Rocklands football district, which covers 25 clubs.
Some would say that this talk has not come a moment too soon.
With South Africa scheduled to host the Soccer World Cup in 2010, coverage of the sport is pervasive. However, you would be more likely to read about the activities of a Russian owner or French manager of a British soccer club than about women players in this country — although they did feature in recent articles about how women should wear more shapely outfits off the field to emphasise their femininity.
While a national women’s soccer programme is in place, it is hampered by a lack of funds to a degree not experienced by football initiatives for men. A sponsor of women’s soccer has halted its support for the game, and the South African Football Association (Safa), which co-ordinates the sport nationally, has not yet found a replacement.
In the Western Cape, there is no league for girls in the under nine, 11, 13 or 17 year age groups — although leagues do exist for boys. Last year, many clubs that cater for girls found themselves forced to field just one team, in the under-15 league.
Although there may be as many as 25 clubs in the Western Cape that could put together teams for the under-15 grouping, fewer than 10 clubs currently participate in the league. Others say they simply haven’t the funding to cover transport costs for their players, or kit expenses.
”A world class national women’s team”
Unsurprisingly, there is no professional women’s league in South Africa — although cellphone giant Vodacom is sponsoring a semi-professional league. Ria Ledwaba — formerly the owner of a professional men’s soccer club, and now head of the Safa women’s programme — says she is committed to having a ”world class national women’s team” by 2010.
Ledwaba says she has also called for more attention to be paid to girls’ soccer at primary school level, of critical importance if talented players are to be identified and encouraged in the game from an early age.
If soccer authorities succeed in giving girls’ football its due, they will be doing more than contributing to gender equality in South Africa. Soccer also holds out the prospect of a more promising future for girls in the some of the country’s poorest communities.
At the memorable Rocklands game, the first goal for the girls’ team was scored by bubbly Kayleen Jacobs,13, who lives across the road from the gangster’s paradise of Lavender Hill.
The next two goals were booted into the net by Xhosa-speaking Cecilia Qasana, 14, from the shanty town of Phumlani. She is the only child of a domestic worker who cleans the same high school her daughter attends, and a taxi driver who supports one of South Africa’s most popular professional soccer teams, Kaizer Chiefs.
Nimble Jade Koks of Athlone, a 13-year-old refugee from a boy’s team, weaved between a wave of defenders to administer the coup de grace — sweet revenge for having been forced to trek to a neighbouring cricket pitch with her team mates, to pull on their kit in privacy. Of course, they were only able to do so after their coach had evicted two marijuana-smoking teenagers from the change room.
The beautiful game
Meanwhile, the best chance for the future of girls’ soccer in South Africa can be glimpsed at places such as the municipal playing field at Green Point. Here Jogo Bonito (”the beautiful game”, in Portuguese), a non-profit academy, has been training soccer-mad girls from the age of six in partnership with the Cape Town Angels, since 2001. It is one of only two such facilities in South Africa.
Shouts of ”Near post!”, ”Stay onside!” and ”Early ball!” can be heard as the girls play there every weekday afternoon, ponytails and plaited hair extensions bouncing. The wind whips off Robben Island, where former president Nelson Mandela was once jailed, occasionally capturing a few stray balls and disrupting practice.
15-year-old Teri ”Dinho” Jacobs, who looks and plays like a sister of her namesake, Brazilian-born footballer of the year Ronaldinho, is one of the academy’s rising stars. She has been selected for the under-19 women’s national programme, which is now in its second year.
”If we give these girls the opportunity to do something meaningful, they will be able to push on using the discipline that the sport has given them,” says technical director Lee du Plessis, who has just achieved the highest coaching licence possible from the United States. He also has the second-highest English coaching licence tucked under his belt.
”We have plenty of future Mia Hamms (the high-scoring American soccer player). Many of them are going to be world class footballers; but others who won’t make the grade will use football to do something else phenomenal.”
Jogo Bonito’s junior coach, Melissa Witbooi, is a case in point. Witbooi, also a goalkeeper for the Cape Town Angels, has used a soccer scholarship to study for a Bachelor of Science degree at the University of the Western Cape.
”I made sure my academic schedule gave me afternoons off, so I can train,” she says. ”I don’t think I could have afforded university otherwise.”
The fact that training at Green Point continues is, in no small measure, a tribute the dedication of Jogo Bonito coach Joey Jacobs, du Plessis and his wife Debs, an American who played soccer with the boys at her elementary school until resentment of her doing so grew too intense.
Soccer moms wanted
Green Point is one of the more affluent areas in Cape Town, but also miles away from the homes of girls who play football here. In light of this, the du Plessis couple and Jacobs collect the girls from their schools, and train them until dark. Then it’s back on the road for the long trek home to schoolwork, dinner and housework.
”The stereotypical soccer mom in the USA is in a mini-van with five kids — hers and the neighbours’ — a lawn chair and a picnic,” says Debs, who washes mountains of soccer kit every night, despite the drought-imposed water restrictions currently in force.
”Here, the majority is supportive. But some of them might have to take public transport to get to the field to watch their daughter and they can’t afford the fare. A lot want to come but they have to work in a factory on a Saturday morning.”
Those parents who were unable to make the Cape Town Angels’ second friendly against the boys earlier this month missed a great game. (The first match took place on Feb. 26.)
At half time, the score was once again three-nil – but this time, it was the Angels who had done the scoring. And, like the two young women in the 2002 film ‘Bend it Like Beckham’ who defy the odds to pursue a future in soccer, the Angels were winners in more ways than one. — IPS