I’ve played soccer my whole life. I started as a goalkeeper when I was five. As you’d assume, my foot skills were okay, but I couldn’t juggle.
When I was playing in high school and got injured, I learned how to juggle just because that was all I could do for those four months. I went from being able to do twenty juggles when I got injured, to just a few months later, when well, I think I stopped counting at around three thousand.
I’ve been freestyling for about four and a half years now. It’s been two years since I went full time. I was just a 17-year-old kid who was good at juggling and got paid a little to do it. The more I did it, the more shows I’d get, the more interest people had because I was a girl doing this in a very male-oriented sport.
When I started, I was one girl on a team of about ten guys. They were all super supportive, but it was obvious that I had an influence that none of the guys could have because you’d get the girls in the audience watching, and they were much more interested in seeing me do it than a bunch of guys. Seeing that representation is so important for kids.
This all started as just a bit of fun, but now I do it full time and last year earned the rank of the number one female freestyler in the country.
My freestyles are quite dance-based (which is funny because I am a terrible dancer) but I used to be a gymnast so that influences what I do. My style is pretty fluid, acrobatic. I go with my intuition when building routines, picking things that flow well together and just going from there.
When I perform, I don’t feel any pressure. I practice every day for several hours, and it’s become second nature. It’s actually almost more meditative for me;
I’d say: freestyle is something you have to focus on entirely to do well and when you are doing that, none of the other worries from your day to day life seem to matter. It’s a way to escape from it all.
I love LA for soccer. I never really figured that out until after I stopped playing for my college team and started looking for places to play pickup.
I just realized there were so many opportunities to play futsal, full-field, five-a-side with all cultures, all ethnicities, in all sorts of backdrops: places that are full of graffiti, beautiful traditional soccer fields, and so much in between.
