Without soccer, I would be a girl more timid, more scared, less confident.”
HEYKEE RIVAS MASS, HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT
my life. I was always making bad decisions and involved in problems. When I started playing on the team, I became a more mature person and I started thinking about the type of person I want to be in the future.” Heykee originally joined Castlemont’s school soccer team for about a month, but she says girls on the team made her feel unwelcome because she didn’t understand English and how they practiced. Soccer Without Borders coaches say it’s common for their players to try out for the school team and feel discriminated against or unwelcome. “A safe space for me is when I don’t have to feel like people will judge me based on how I look that day, or I’m a (Latina) woman, or I don’t know English, or that I’m new to trying something,” Heykee says. “I know if I need to talk about something, my coach and teammates are here to help with that.” Heykee now has goals. She wants to earn a scholarship to Cal-Berkeley, study criminology and find a job that financially supports her mom and emotionally supports women. “I’ve been around a lot of male-dominated places,” Heykee says. “Lots of things have happened that I don’t want to happen to other girls because they’re bad. There are a lot of women who are in violent relationships and don’t have someone to be there for them and advocate for them. I want to be a person in the world that fights against these things as a strong woman.”
Heykee Rivas Mass, 15
Through soccer, Heykee sees the story of her life.
“Just like in life, you’re not always going to win,” Heykee, a sophomore at Castlemont High School, says in Spanish through an interpreter. “Sometimes you’re not going to score, sometimes you will score. There are fouls. Sometimes you lose. In my life, I’ve had a lot of fouls and a lot of losses. But soccer has taught me how to grow as a person.” Heykee came to the U.S. from Honduras about two years ago. She worries she will never again see her grandmother, who still lives in Honduras. She has a 5-year-old brother now in North Carolina and a 21-year-old sister she doesn’t see often. When she was younger, Heykee says she saw a therapist for a long time because she was very depressed. Then came Soccer Without Borders, which uses soccer to deliver crucial direct services to vulnerable, newcomer youth to the U.S. The program started at Castlemont High School in 2020 when Heykee was a freshman. She hadn’t met a single person at school because she started during COVID-19 restrictions and joined the team to make friends. “Without soccer, I would be a girl more timid, more scared, less confident,” Heykee says. “Before I didn’t have an idea of what I wanted to do in
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PROJECT PLAY — AN INITIATIVE OF THE ASPEN INSTITUTE
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