CHAPTER 1 PIONEERS With 11 players on each side soccer requires great teamwork A truly great player can have a massive impact for a team however And throughout the history of women's soccer some superstars have stood especially tall The pioneers of women's soccer turned the game from an 4
1918 Women's soccer became briefly popular in the early 1900s afterthought to a mainstream sport Each generation of new players has emerged to take the game to the next level Soccer was still a young sport going into the 1900s Though people had long been playing soccer-like games many point to 1863 as the official beginning That's when men's soccer clubs from around England came together to set official rules Over the coming years the sport began to grow And by the 1920s one of the most popular teams in England was the Dick Kerr Ladies The team was made up of workers from a local munitions factory in Preston England With the country fighting in World War I 1914 the team proved to be a welcome distraction A crowd of 10,000 fans came out to see them play on Christmas Day in 1917 Eventually crowds reached five times that One of the big reasons for the growing fan interest was a teenage scoring sensation named Lily Parr Parr was just 15 when she joined the team in 1920 Yet with her powerful left-footed shot she quickly became a dangerous scorer She reportedly once shot the ball so hard that a male goalkeeper broke his arm trying to save it Parr scored routinely She tallied 43 goals in her first year with the team Fans across England were drawn to watch Parr and her team However the success would not last 5
6 Lily Parr center goes up for a ball during a practice session for the Preston Ladies Football Club
The Football Association FA governs soccer in England After the war the FA became concerned that women's teams were becoming too popular and taking attention away from the men's teams So in 1921 the FA barred women from playing on its fields This essentially banned women's soccer in England Parr and Dick Kerr didn't go away entirely The team eventually was renamed Preston Ladies and continued playing games when it could Parr who later became a nurse continued playing until she was 45 years old She reportedly scored nearly 1,000 goals while rarely missing a game However fans could only imagine what Parr might have done had she been given more chances FIGHTING FOR OPPORTUNITY Parr and her English teammates were not the only women denied an opportunity during this time Around the world many viewed sports as being improper for women As a result some proud soccer countries such as Germany banned women from playing Others simply refused to support the women's game This led to many decades of women's soccer being hidden in the shadows if it existed at all Attitudes toward women's soccer began slowly changing during the 1970s By the 1980s some countries were making 7
