McCaffrey '11 Tackles the Pay-to-Play System: Hidden Gems gives girls a nonzero chance at playing professional soccer

As a newly-drafted player to the Boston Breakers, alumna Stephanie McCaffrey ’11 often joked to her teammates that throughout her career she played soccer in the same 10-mile radius: BB&N, Boston College, and then Boston Breakers. After her first year as a Breaker and a U.S women’s national team player, her Breakers coach gave her some advice.

“It was really unusual when the coach of the team pulled me aside and told me that ‘just from knowing you for six months, I think you need to get out of Boston,’ ” McCaffrey recounted to a group of faculty and students during a talk The Benchwarmer organized in December.

From there, the Breakers traded McCaffrey to the Chicago Red Stars. Although she, at first, did not understand what her coach meant, she soon realized that he was telling her that she needed to achieve personal growth that would help her improve in soccer, McCaffrey said.

“When I was at BB&N, soccer was so fun, so I didn’t need an outlet, and I didn’t feel as if soccer defined me as much as it did at BC when it started to feel like a job. At BC, I felt that I achieved a lot professionally and from an athletic perspective, but there was a lot left to be desired in terms of broadening my horizons because at 24 years old, I had a perspective that was very tunnel vision.”

McCaffrey explained that in Chicago, she became inclined to work towards this broader goal, as she was away from her circle of family and friends. Her perspectives began to change when she read The Broken Ladder by Keith Payne, a book that discusses the consequences of social inequality perpetuated by constructs such as race, gender, and sexual orientation on marginalized groups.

“I sometimes look back and kick myself for how I missed this [idea],” McCaffrey said. “Prior to reading that book, I didn’t really understand or care to look into the fact that a lot of people at BB&N started at the 90-yard line. I think I would always say to myself ‘yeah, I worked hard,’ but when I looked around the Chicago Red Stars and National Team locker rooms, everyone was white and wealthy.”

McCaffrey realized that she had several advantages—one of them being that ex-USWNT soccer player Kristine Lilly privately trained her at a young age. Upon this realization, McCaffrey decided that one thing that she could contribute to the community was giving others more access to the opportunities she had. However, she understood that she was no expert in this field, McCaffrey said. She did not know how to incorporate an organization, raise money, or obtain 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status.

“I started thinking that this is maybe the one thing that I reflected on in college that I could start working towards. I knew that I’m not good at it; I’ve never done anything with a nonprofit before. But I came into it thinking: how do I bring high-level youth soccer to families who can’t afford to pay the fees for club teams?”

“When talking to people who work in the nonprofit sector, I was shocked to hear that I was starting in the completely wrong place. They said that ‘yeah, there are groups of people that know that club soccer exists and can’t afford it, but below that in the pyramid of opportunity, there’s a huge band of people that don’t even know club soccer exists.’ ”

McCaffrey said that hearing this fact made her goal to bring top-youth soccer to a wider audience harder but encouraged her to make an even more rewarding impact by targeting communities that lack awareness of club soccer. With these ideas, in her last season as a professional soccer player for the Red Stars, she created Hidden Gems, a nonprofit organization that connects girls in low-income communities with professional NWSL (National Women’s Soccer League) coaches.

Although McCaffrey received support from family and other professional soccer players, she knew that as a full-time professional, she could not develop a youth soccer system and raise money on her own. She still needed to obtain resources such as field space and connections with low-income communities. As a result, she connected with nonprofits such as America Scores—an organization that aims to provide soccer to under-served communities—and KICS FC—a youth soccer club in South Side Chicago.

“One thing that’s great about the nonprofit sector is that everyone’s working towards the same end goal,” McCaffrey said. “So, there’s no real competition between organizations.”

Combining resources with other nonprofits significantly allowed her to build the Hidden Gems organization, McCaffrey said. As of now, Hidden Gems has given quality soccer instruction to girls whose families would not have been able to pay for a club program. McCaffrey hopes that Hidden Gems will eventually encourage girls from less-fortunate backgrounds to pursue a professional soccer career.

“We tell the girls that it’s really hard to be a professional soccer player. You have a 0.1 percent chance, the same that everyone has. But the best thing that you can tell these girls is that they will have a nonzero chance of playing at a youth level that will get them to the professional level.”