Women’s Soccer in Mexico Gets a Cross-Border Kick

Three years ago, Jennifer Molina was studying environmental biology at Colgate University, playing soccer for fun on the side.

Around that time, her father made a trip to Texas, where he ran into the Mexico women’s national soccer team at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. As a native of Cordoba, Mexico, with a Mexican-born, soccer-playing daughter, he stopped to chat.

“It was just a chance meeting,” Molina recalled. “He noticed the girls with their uniforms.”

As a result of the conversation, the team’s coach, Leonardo “Leo” Cuellar, later called and offered Molina a tryout -- if she paid her own way to Mexico.

She did, and now Molina, who has lived in Massachusetts since she was 3, is Mexico’s starting goalkeeper and headed for Athens in August and an Olympic experience she never had imagined.

Molina is one of four Mexican American starters on Cuellar’s team, a group that includes Notre Dame graduate Monica Gonzalez of Corpus Christi, Texas; University of Miami graduate Lisa Gomez of Miami, and Cal State Fullerton junior Marlene Sandoval of Placentia, each of them defenders.

All have dual citizenship, making them eligible to compete for either nation.

The four have not only helped make Mexico a force on the field but are helping their teammates open the eyes of a hesitant Mexican public to the potential for women’s sports, Cuellar said.

At the same time, they are discovering their roots.

Sometimes, their discoveries have been surprising.

When Sandoval was invited to join the team a couple of years ago, she quickly learned that women’s soccer was not as readily accepted in Mexico as it was in the United States, where players such as Mia Hamm and Brandi Chastain were sporting icons.

“People were saying, ‘How can it be possible that the Mexican soccer federation supports a bunch of women who have nothing else to do? It would be better if they were cleaning house,’ ” she said in an interview before a recent match here.

“They were serious,” Sandoval added.

But Cuellar, who coached at Cal State Los Angeles for 11 years, and his players have undermined that notion with notable success in the last year.

Last July, 95,000 fans turned out at Azteca Stadium in Mexico City to see Mexico tie Japan, 2-2, in a playoff game for a place in the 2003 Women’s World Cup.In March, thousands turned out at the Mexico City airport to welcome the team home from Costa Rica, where it had defeated Canada and qualified for the Olympics.

Both accomplishments delighted Cuellar.

“It’s been an example for little girls who now can dream about wearing a green jersey at Azteca Stadium in the future,” he said.

“I would like to know how many soccer balls have been bought for little girls in Mexico since we qualified for the Olympics.”Dolores Rojas Rubio, an official at the Women’s Institute of Mexico City, a government agency that promotes gender equality, said the team’s influence had been significant.

“The women on the Olympic team are trailblazers and pioneers,” she said. “They have fought an uphill battle to play a traditionally masculine sport....We have to keep working until the day that a woman playing soccer is not news and it’s just part of the everyday routine.”

Mexican Americans, who have been part of the team since it was founded in 1997, are helping in that process.

Of the current players, Molina and Gomez had never seriously considered playing internationally, but Gonzalez and Sandoval had played for the U.S. at the under-age-19 level.

When the latter pair saw their chances of advancing to the two-time world champion U.S. national team diminish, they opted to play for Mexico instead.

“I went [to Mexico City] and tried out and I just loved the people,” said Sandoval, whose parents came from Zacatecas, Mexico. “I felt more at home there than I had on the U.S. team.”

Under international soccer rules, players are eligible to represent a country as long as at least one parent or grandparent was born in that country.

The arrangement has posed some confusion for the U.S. players as they explore their heritage.

“I guess now I’m Mexican,” Molina replied when asked what nationality she considered herself.

“It’s hard because I grew up in the States. It’s an identity thing, not a crisis, but it’s hard.”

Especially when Mexico’s national anthem is played before games.

“I know the words and I have the pride,” she said.

“When I’m on the field with Mexico and when I’m in Mexico, I’m entirely dedicated to it, but when I go home I do go home to the States and my family. That’s the difference. I get a flight to Boston.”

Gonzalez, the Notre Dame graduate from Texas, has played for Mexico for seven years and is its captain. She said integration of Mexican Americans into the team took time.

“The answer to that question has changed tremendously from what it would have been six years ago,” she said. “Now this team is more cohesive than any team I’ve ever played for, given the fact that there are a couple of people who don’t speak Spanish and there are a lot of people who don’t speak English.”

Mexico’s native-born players, including veterans such as Maribel Dominguez and Iris Mora, said they had accepted that the Mexican American players had a right to be on the team and were, in fact, a valuable addition.

“At the beginning, it was something that bothered me,” said Dominguez, the team’s top goal scorer and acknowledged star. “I thought it was going to be difficult. But when I saw the quality of the players and what they would do for the game in Mexico, I started to understand it a little better.

“I realized some of them were born in Mexico and went to the U.S. when they were young, or their parents or grandparents were from Mexico, so there is still a close relationship.”

Mora, a midfielder from Cancun who attends UCLA on a soccer scholarship, pointed out another plus.

“It’s hard for us to find players who are tall and strong,” she said. “The typical Mexican is like me, short and quick, feisty. They bring the physical part. It works.”

The team’s success appears to be having an effect.

More and more girls are playing in structured leagues and schools, not just in recreational pickup games, and players such as Dominguez and Molina are achieving the same sort of recognition and adulation as Mexican track star Ana Guevara.

“Seeing the women’s team making it to the Olympics is super cool,” said Claudia Bonalos, 15, a goalkeeper for Colegio Merici in Mexico City’s Lomas de Palo Alto district.

“I want to be like Molina. She’s quick on her feet, like a cat.”

When asked whether it mattered that Molina had lived most of her life in the U.S., Bonalos replied: “Molina is playing for Mexico. Who cares if she’s [Mexican American]? She’s good, and that’s what matters.”

The team’s influence is filtering down to young children.

“Now, parents want the girls, their daughters, to play soccer,” said UCLA’s Mora. “Before it was like, ‘No, just the boys. I’m going to take the boys to practice.’ Now they want to buy a ball for the girls. So that’s a big improvement.”

Nonetheless, Cuellar has had to walk a fine line with his countrymen, and especially his countrywomen.

“A lot of girls in Mexico feel that they can do a better job than the ones we have coming from the States,” he said.

The Mexican American players, he said, have the advantage of coming up through a system that encourages competition from the youth level through college. Until the Women’s United Soccer Assn. went dormant last year, they even had a professional league to play in.

“So what they bring is that competitive nature,” Cuellar said.

In Mexico, where the men’s team has long been an international powerhouse, such opportunities are limited for female players.

But the Mexicans have something that Cuellar has found difficult to instill in the Mexican Americans: An instinctive understanding and love for the game and a deep feeling for the country they are representing.

“It’s taken time for them to have the passion of the other players,” he said. “Now it’s a little better, but at the beginning

His voice trailed off.

The Mexican-born-and-raised players, he said, “feel the colors, they feel the flag, they feel country, they feel the people. For the Mexican Americans, it’s been a process to identify with the culture of their parents.”

But it is working, the players say.

“It’s a very emotional thing for me,” Molina said.

“If I never came on this team, I’d probably never have figured out my roots and my family. I would not be visiting them [in Mexico] as much. I would not be speaking as much Spanish. So it’s very personal.”

The on-field benefits, meanwhile, are obvious. Mexico is now a contender -- a point made clear in March when it defeated Canada, the world’s fourth-best team in 2003.

Qualifying for the Olympics “is the validity that they’ve been looking for, to say that the program should exist in their country,” said Chastain, a member of the U.S. team that also is going to Athens.

Hamm said Mexico’s players had an entirely different attitude now than they had a few years ago.

“They’re not afraid of anyone now,” she said. “... You can see that in the eyes and faces of those players. It doesn’t matter who they play, they feel they have a chance.”

A chance is all Cuellar wanted.

“I think we are very lucky that the U.S. is our neighbor and that the U.S. has the most powerful [women’s soccer] program in the world,” he said. “We are learning a lot.”

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Times researcher Dan Vasquez, in Mexico City, contributed to this report.