Brandi Chastain - Poetry in Motion
Clockwise, from top left: KPIX Anchor Elizabeth Cook, America SCORES host Angela Bailey, World Cup Champion Julie Foudy, and World Cup Champion Brandi Chastain.
“Put me in Coach”
by Brandi Chastain
The hardcore tears, the long spent years,
The ups, the downs, the smiles, the frowns,
What do you want?
Why are you special?
Growing up in a no you can’t, yes I can generation
Opening eyes, changing minds
It’s mine to take if I can just make
An impression, a difference.
I want to be seen, to make the team
Why? For who? For me?
No. Yes. I’m not sure
I know, for them.
Them, they are my muse
They ignite my fuse
In the depths of my soul
There was a hole
Through years of darkness, quietly, alone
The anguish had a home
I never thought
until you brought me into the light
and showed me how to fight
For a chance to make a stance for myself
To be unique at times, even a freak.
Do you have H-E-A-R-T?
Do you wear it on your sleeve?
They’re the words of soccer legend Brandi Chastain, two-time World Cup Champion, two-time Olympian, and multi-team professional player. Expressions of doubt, hope, determination, resilience, and complexity. They form the beginning of a much longer poem Chastain wrote from a hotel room in China on hotel stationery during her time on the US Women’s National Team.
Chastain read her poem during a panel discussion with fellow soccer legend Julie Foudy (two-time World Cup Champion, two-time Olympian, U.S. Women’s National Team Captain 200-2004, professional player) and interviewer Elizabeth Cook (KPIX weeknight anchor) during the weeklong December 2020 SCORES Soccer Summit. This season’s summit—Building, Empowering, & Strengthening Women & Girls through Soccer—featured 42 speakers covering a broad range of topics including leadership, gender and pay equity, mentorship, body positivity, and Title IX. Among the featured speakers were other US National Team greats, including Heather O'Reilly, Danielle Slaton, and Cindy Parlow Cone, who now serves as President of the US Soccer Federation.
Chastain and the San Jose CyberRays helped launch America SCORES Bay Area nearly twenty years ago. Chastain served as an official spokesperson when SCORES involved just six elementary schools in San Francisco spread among Hunter’s Point, Bay View, and Visitation Valley.
September 2001 edition of Soccer California
In 2001, Chastain was a superstar in the soccer world. Two years earlier, she had memorably scored the winning penalty in the Women’s World Cup final. Nobody who saw her ripping off her shirt and falling to her knees in celebration will ever forget the searing image, one that helped propel Women’s Soccer into the forefront of US sports.
But Chastain’s passions weren’t limited to soccer; she’d grown increasingly interested in poetry at a time when poetry slams were first emerging on the scene. “I was really into urban culture, and I loved how the words of the poets I saw were so powerful and how much emotion was connected to those words.”
Poetry came to become another way she could express herself. Describing to SCORES Summit panelists Foudy and Cook the moment she wrote the poem, Chastain reflected, “I wasn’t playing much. I was up in the middle of the night, sitting in the bathroom in the dim light, just writing. I’d never done anything like that in my life. If you could see the poem, you’d see how messy it was. It just came out.”
Chastain decided she wanted to share the poem with her teammates the next day, even as she battled doubts over whether she’d get to play. “It was my way of showing them and telling them that they were really important to me.” Her desire to be on the field was rooted in her desire to be better for her teammates.
For Chastain, the sharing of her poem both then and now felt like something that required bravery, courage, something she had always shown in spades on the soccer field. But we all need a push.
“I’m really grateful to America SCORES because they inspired that poem. They have inspired so many young people to get out of their comfort zones to use literacy and soccer as vehicles to enable something even greater to happen in their lives. “
See the full talk here.