I’ve spent hours trying to find a way to write this first sentence without sounding like a melon, but there’s no point. The gist: I used to hate football. For 15 years, no love.

Backstory time. In a small town outside of New Orleans, Louisiana, a grassy field once belonging to cows has been dissected into football pitches. On one rectangular patch are children no older than seven. There is one capering through a tangled mesh of small bodies like a current of water. He is actually using his feet. This brown-haired sprite has something about him: rawness, pluck and that thing six-year-olds generally don’t have, poise.

Now turn your head to the left. See that sad, sorry state of freckles, red pigtails and too-big Shaquille O’Neal jersey flapping near the goalposts? She has just been leathered by the brown-haired boy’s shot at goal (he scored the rebound). The brown-haired boy is her brother. She cannot grasp the concept of only feet, despite her sweaty efforts. She is me. And I am toiling.

I did not receive an invitation back to my local under-7s team, a lifetime accomplishment very few people can match. My brother, contrarily, did receive an invitation — to the higher age group. He was something special. And as a hyper-competitive triplet, these types of moments ultimately defined the trajectory of my life.

Remember how I used the word hate earlier? I used it in the same way scorned lovers hate their jilter. I hated football because I felt it rejected me.

But that did nothing to stop me from wishing it hadn’t.

For years, I would sit on the bannister of the staircase in our home, peering around the corner to watch my brother and dad watching Manchester United on the television at silly o’clock on a Saturday morning, trying to decipher a game I wanted to find repulsive but couldn’t. At my brother’s games, I’d carry around a pompously large novel to showcase my non-interest, only to spend the next 90 minutes stuck on the title page, eyes glued to the grass.

My best friends at school played for the girls’ teams. Here, I found something akin to a sanctuary. When they lifted silverware annually, I clapped from the stands, satiating whatever curious monster groaned within. Women’s World Cup summers warranted barbecues and screening parties (American exceptionalism will always be celebrated), but in Louisiana in the 2000s, to be a football (soccer) fan was to rail against the DNA of the red, white and blue. This was American football country. When it wasn’t, it was basketball. Or baseball. Girls were cheerleaders or ran cross-country. My nearest women’s soccer league team existed in Atlanta – a whopping eight hours away by car on a good day.

I’m not telling you this so you pull out a violin. Rather, for context. My context, to be precise. There was my world. And there was football. Very rarely did these universes collide.

Collision required a hike-gone-wrong in the Appalachian mountains with my triplet sister nearly five years later, followed by an impromptu decision to move to Cardiff, Wales, for a postgraduate journalism degree to procrastinate staring adulthood in the face.

A month into life in the UK, I stood in the Ninian Stand at Cardiff City Stadium. It was November, raining (obviously), and Aaron Ramsey scored a brace against Hungary to send the Wales men’s national team to Euro 2020.

What follows next is the football equivalent to every John Green novel: I let myself love, first slowly, then all at once. Suddenly, I was bear-hugging total strangers and serenading a man’s top-knot. I fought down an insatiable urge to get something silly tattooed in a prominent place on my body. I called my parents outside of the stadium to let them know I was going to be a football writer. Neither spoke. Finally, incredulously: “Soccer? Are you sure?”

Three months later, the Covid pandemic left me stranded in the UK in a small apartment by myself for a year. Football became my lifeline, specifically women’s football. The manner in which something could not only survive so many decades of neglect and maltreatment but return stronger tugged at something visceral inside of me at a time when I felt wholly abandoned.

To give my days structure, I consumed all things football: books, podcasts, matches, articles from The Athletic (I promise, this isn’t a shameless plug). I called my brother for tactics lessons, scribbling lines and arrows into a journal. Other notebooks were filled with facts, figures, events, results — whatever I could get my hands on.

I still have that notebook…

And the others. Periodically, I go back to them. Mostly to remind myself of the wonder I felt at first discovering phenomena like Mexico 1971, or the anger at discovering the decades-long bans on women’s football imposed around the world, or the chagrin in myself at not appreciating, much less knowing about, these battles earlier — and assuming all was fine now.

I have joined The Athletic because I always loved a sport in which I never felt I could partake, whether due to ability or sex or culture or the fact I was convinced for too many humiliating years that David Beckham had an American passport.

At The Athletic, I want to ensure no one ever has to pretend to hate a sport they want to love. I want to bring the awe and wonder and (when necessary) anger that I found upon finally gaining access.

The Athletic is committed to telling stories that need to be told and reaching audiences who want to be told them. For too long, women’s football was not only not told but told to be quiet. To speak when spoken to. To never ask for more than is provided. To be grateful. This culture is swiftly changing. The Athletic is committed to driving that change further. And for that, I cannot wait to get started.

(Top photo: Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images)