By Amy King.
Peace Corps Volunteer
2012 will see a Eurovision take over Baku in all of its newly renovated glory. Preparations for the international singing competition are well underway and a huge number of Azerbaijanis and expats in Azerbaijan are excited about the competition. In the meantime, Baku is preparing for another competition, one of much less promotion and that lives in the enormous shadow of Eurovision. The Under-17 (U17) Women’s World Football Championships will be held in Baku in the summer of 2012.
First step on the road to champions was to make a team. Yes, Azerbaijan won the bid to host the tournament without having an actual U17 team to enter it. And yes, this newly formed team will now have an automatic bid to play in the games. Right after winning the bid, the Azerbaijan Football Federation Association (AFFA) started building their girls’ team. First they hired Sissy Raith as head coach of the then newly formed Women’s U15 national team. Raith comes from a strong background playing for the German Women’s National team in and a coaching career that includes Bayern Munich. I got the opportunity to meet Raith and tour the AFFA facilities last summer and it was obvious that the Azerbaijani U17 national team had a great captain at the helm. Next, they formed a team of Bakuvian girls who they could train to play football in time for the 2012 tournament. They also put together a U15 girls’ league with teams in 16 different regions of Azerbaijan. These teams would be the pool of players that the national team would eventually choose from. However, most of the girls on the national team are still from Baku, not the regions. From my own experience, it is important to start young, and a U15 league would not be good enough to really implement a successful girls’ soccer program in Azerbaijan. I decided to attempt to hold football awareness camps for young women in different regions.
When I first found that Azerbaijan won the bid, I was shocked that the country would hold a tournament of this magnitude. I worked last summer on a football project with the United States Embassy and USAID‘s Sports United program and during the project, girls and boys were invited out to the football training sessions with two American soccer professionals John Cone and Cindy Parlow. Parlow was one of my hero’s growing up as a young soccer player. She was a member of a US Women’s National team that came first in the 1999 Women’s World Cup and earned a gold medal in 2000. I thought for sure girls would want to come out and meet her, but in the 300 kids that came out to the training sessions, I saw maybe three dozen girls, many of those from Baku.
After touring the AFFA facilities, meeting Raith, and participating in the Sports United project, I began my own push to bring girls’ soccer to the regions. Personally, I have been in Azerbaijan for 2 years now as a Youth Development volunteer with the United States Peace Corps. I came here with a strong desire to play soccer with girls, and it took me a year to figure out all the logistics of how to get them to come out to play with me. I have been playing with 15-year-old boys in my site of Goranboy while the girls have watched from the sidelines. When I invite them to play in a separate game, I am only able to get them out to the field in small numbers. In the regions of Azerbaijan, girls only play pick-up volleyball. There is no organized soccer for girls. There is no organized any type of sport for girls in the regions of Azerbaijan. When I was a kid, my parents had me in softball, soccer, basketball and even gymnastics. I could have chosen ice hockey, track or even American football for that matter. I had everything at my fingertips. When I got to Azerbaijan, I knew that I wanted to give the girls here some of that, even if it was only a small portion of the opportunity I had as a child.
I started my Azerbaijani girls’ soccer coaching in Lankeran. In that region, I was introduced by a fellow Peace Corps Volunteer (PCV) to one of the most wonderful people I have met in Azerbaijan. His name is Xalid Muellim and he is the girls’ soccer coach for the Lankeran U15 girls’ team. I have been working with him and his team for the past year and a half. He is patient and kind with the girls, and one of the few people I have met in the regions that is really trying to strengthen girls soccer in his community. Last summer I did a summer soccer camp with the girls, and by the time this year rolled around, I wanted to step up the parameters of the camp. It was great to do the camp with just the girls who already had played, but I wanted more girls to get the opportunity to participate.
With the help of a young Azerbaijani woman who studies in the U.S., and three other Peace Corps Volunteers, we wrote a grant and obtained funding from Access Bank, one of the sponsors of AFFA. With this funding we were able to buy new soccer balls, bibs, and small goals for the program. We invited other girls from the community to come out to the camp and try out a new sport. Girls from the local orphanage were especially interested in playing and we were thrilled to have them. In total, about 30 girls showed up to camp on the first day. I was shocked because up until then, I hadn’t been able to get more than 5 girls at a time out to play soccer in my town.
We split the girls into two groups, those who hadn’t played before and those who have. I took the new players and two PCV’s who had coached before (one had played college soccer) took those who had played. With the experienced girls, advanced training took place. They worked on things they had never worked on before camp, and showed a definite improvement as a team as the week went on. Working with the new players, I concentrated on keeping it fun, and showing the kids that soccer can be entertaining to play. We played different skills-based games and I taught them the basics of how to dribble, pass and shoot. The last day of the camp, the Azerbaijani media came out and covered our small sided tournament. They asked me about girls’ soccer in Azerbaijan, and why we were having the camp. They seemed confused as to why we would have a camp with girls without it resulting in a competition, so I explained that we want the girls to live healthy lifestyles and have something to do in their spare time that is productive and fun. I also explained that to have a strong national team, one must have a strong and broad national program. Starting from young players up to the national team, the coaches must be able to choose from a wide pool of players to end up with the best team.
Now that the camp is over and done with and was a success in the Lankaran community, I want the program to spread to other regions. The important thing about this camp is to spread the news that there is a newly developed AFFA girls’ soccer league in Azerbaijan, that girls from the region can join, and that soccer is a valuable tool to develop strong and healthy girls in Azerbaijan. Unfortunately, I am leaving Azerbaijan in November, but I am passing the reigns to another Peace Corps Volunteer to continue this work in soccer camps. The hope is that even more areas of Azerbaijan receive knowledge about girls’ soccer and that we can get more children to play. Azerbaijan has a huge opportunity to promote and build a soccer program with the U17 championships around the corner, and I and other Peace Corps volunteers are more than willing to be spread the word.
