Written by Brendan Marks
Jenny Chiu’s used to it by now, the endless waiting for something that will never come.
She wants to be anywhere but here, not standing on the sidelines of Avaya Stadium in San Jose, California, not peering out with her almond eyes at the game she has no part in.
No — if she could, she’d strip off that navy sweatshirt and tighten the laces on her pink and white cleats. She’d run — fast — sink her heels into the muddy grass and sprint away from the bench she’s been chained to for the last four years. She’d mess up her French braid as she stabbed and lunged at the ball, let her long, dark ponytail ripple behind her with every step. For once she’d sweat, and she’d smile, and she’d matter.
But that isn’t this story.
Instead, the one-time prodigy is stuck on the sidelines, no longer the world-beater she once was. She’s still good — just not good enough. Maybe it’s unfair to say she’s used to sitting out, or even that she’s accepted it.
Maybe she’s just dealing with it. Really she has no choice.
But that’s hard, especially at this level. It’s Dec. 2, the College Cup semifinals between UNC and West Virginia. Winner moves onto the championship game; loser goes home.
So she’ll stand and watch, cheer on her teammates and grasp her fellow benchwarmers’ hands with every UNC shot. One goes wide, and they clench each other’s fists. Another high, and she throws her hands on her head.
In four years at UNC, Chiu — who once captained Mexico to the U-17 World Cup in Azerbaijan — has played in just 15 games. Barely 150 minutes in her entire college career.
But why? And for what? How did one of the youth soccer’s brightest stars, a technical wizard with scholarship offers from every major Division I program, end up here, relegated to the bench as a surrogate cheerleader?
****
C.Y. Chiu is good at a lot of things.
Say, like selling insurance. Or running a 10K. Or slow-cooking meat for his trademark neckbone soup.
But sports? Especially youth sports?
Heck no. The only thing C.Y. knows about youth sports is that his 8-year-old daughter Jenny plays, and that today, he’s her chauffeur.
“I was thinking I’m just her driver,” C.Y. said. “After the game I would take her home. That was my job.”
When they get to the worn-down field in El Paso, Texas, Jenny runs off and C.Y. makes for the row of parents on the sidelines. He plops his chair down in the back of everyone, the field out of sight entirely. He pulls out a newspaper and starts to read.
Then, an eruption of cheers. C.Y. looks up just in time to catch the blur — that’s how fast this girl was moving — streaking out of his line of sight. He’s intrigued. He puts down the paper.
He gets up and peers through the gap of two parents in front of him, the field now framed by their shoulders, but before he can get adjusted, a second eruption. What happened?
She scored, someone says, that blur of a girl from a second earlier. That speed, at such a young age… Who was she?
“I said who, who? And they said your daughter,” C.Y. said. “So that brought up my interest, and I sat up front and I thought, ‘She’s good. She’s really good.’”
So C.Y. hires two former Mexican national team players — Salvador Mercado and Guillermo McFarlane — as Jenny’s personal trainers, to teach her footwork and shooting and any technical tricks they could.
Remember, she’s 8.
By age 12, coaches from across the country are flocking to El Paso to watch Chiu play, watch her dazzle them too. Soon she starts playing on boys teams — it’s just unfair to keep her with the girls; she’s so much faster and more intelligent and more skilled — and dominating them the very same.
“She’s just so dynamic, very creative and smart with the ball,” Andy, Chiu’s older brother who eventually played at Akron and Boston College, said. “Her shot is incredible. Honestly it’s better than mine.”
At this point, her hometown now a turnstile for coaches from across America, she becomes conscious of her talent. And here’s where her downfall begins.
Like anyone with a talent — athletes, artists, musicians, writers — Chiu began placing much of her self-worth in her sport. Start, play well, score goals? She’d beam, her confidence and sense of value skyrocketing. But sit on the bench, not score or even play? She’d bottom out, like anyone would — a deflated balloon, dejected and insecure.
For the most part, the latter never happened growing up. By the time she made it to Franklin High School, she was being courted by all the nation’s top college programs. She’d already been a staple in both the U.S. and Mexican national youth systems.
And then, right as Jenny Chiu was peaking, she fell off entirely.
****
The “spot” first showed up Chiu’s sophomore year of high school.
It started out as a pinch, a little pull in her lower back just to the right of her spine. Whenever she ran, bent over, kicked a ball, the pain would flare up.
She noticed it during high school practice one day — Chiu’s one year of high school ball was the only girls team she ever played on, besides at UNC — during sprints. Coach Scott Gilmore had the girls run from sideline to sideline, reaching down to touch the painted grass each time.
But for Chiu, that pulled at the “spot.”
It was miserable. It was persistent.
“I would ask people to dig into the spot,” Chiu says. “I would try to do anything for it to stop hurting.”
It didn’t — instead, it got worse. That pinch grew to a sting and then to pure agony, a throbbing gash that ached with seemingly every movement. The prick had grown, mutated into a sting that penetrated deep into Chiu’s back. It’s hurt you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy.
“Most painful thing I’ve ever experienced,” Chiu says, “and it’s not even close.”
Eventually Chiu caved, went to see a doctor to discover the root of the “spot” and why it was lingering. The diagnosis?
Three discs in her back — L3, L4 and L5, the ones right at hip level — were bulging, throbbing, grinding against her vertebrae and the nerves nearby. Think of the discs like jelly donuts. Normally, the jelly’s in the center. When the discs bulge, that jelly oozes to one side, piling up in a pocket and eventually — if it’s severe enough — leaking through.
Chiu’s discs never leaked, or herniated in medical terms, but that wasn’t necessary to cause her this unending, merciless pain. On top of that, the pressure from the discs gave Chiu micro fractures in her vertebrae, which only compounded the hurt.
Doctors said it was for any number of problems, but likely a mixture of them all: Overuse; the shoddy, downtrodden fields in El Paso; playing essentially non-stop from the time she was a little girl, never giving herself a break even after the pain began.
The “spot” would turn out to be her undoing.
****
At first Chiu coped any way she could: Digging into it; gripping her lower back for support; stretching in the back of her classrooms for a second’s temporary relief. Most of it, though, was to no avail.
Then, when the U-17 Women’s World Cup in Azerbaijan came up during the summer of 2012, right after Chiu’s junior year of high school, the Mexican national team invited her to play. They didn’t just want her — they wanted her as captain.
So Chiu went, even with her faulty back. In Mexico’s first game, a 1-0 win over New Zealand, Chiu played, but not well. In the team’s second game, a 1-0 loss to Brazil, she was better, even logging substantial minutes.
Little did she know it would be her last international appearance.
When she got home to El Paso, the pain had become almost unbearable, devastating at even the slightest twist or bend. Acupuncture didn’t help. Neither did physical therapy. The only thing that eased the pain at all was the chiropractor, but even that relief didn’t last long.
“We’d come home from practices or games and she’d be in tears just because that pain was so much for her to handle, and then the fact that she wasn’t playing, she just kind of felt useless to the team,” Jessica Valadez, Chiu’s teammate on that U-17 World Cup team, said. “It definitely hit her.”
Chiu considered surgery, but her parents were against it. She was too young, they said, to have such serious back surgery. Her soccer career, or at least what it was building to, might evaporate.
So instead of taking that chance, Chiu made another equally gut-wrenching decision: Sit out. She wouldn’t play for a year, her entire final season in high school or for her club, the El Paso Galaxy. No practices. No games. No training sessions with Mercado and McFarlane, no kicking around with older brother Andy, who left to play Division-I soccer at Akron.
“It sucked,” Chiu said. “It’s tough because there’s only so much I could control, and it really was devastating.”
Suddenly, for the first time in her life, the prodigy felt unfulfilled. She’d put so much stock into her career, invested so much of her self-worth and sense of meaning into a game, that when it was taken away, she stumbled.
It wasn’t that she crumbled all at once — that came later — but this was certainly the first notch in disassembling her confidence.
And it wouldn’t be the last.
****
So Chiu sat out the entire year, spent afternoons watching Netflix in her Tempur-Pedic bed — that helped her back, too — instead of running a gauntlet of drills at practice. It hurt, for sure, not being able to play, but still that pain had nothing on her back.
And besides, she hadn’t lost it all. UNC still wanted her, still valued her skills and her shooting and her altogether. Coach Anson Dorrance, perhaps the premier talent evaluator for women’s soccer players — he coached the United States to its first women’s World Cup victory in 1991 and led UNC to 22 national championships — still thought she was worth the investment even a year removed from the game.
“It was a no-brainer for me,” Dorrance said. “We thought she had some game, and we chased her. We still liked her as a player and a person. That didn’t interfere at all.”
But when Chiu arrived in Chapel Hill, she felt differently. She joined a team stacked with stars, the brightest of them Crystal Dunn, a current starter for the U.S. senior national team. The one-time wonder-kid, for the first time in her life, wasn’t the superstar, wasn’t the singular focus of attention.
For the first time, she was secondary.
Her confidence faltered, and it showed in her game. The nerves of not playing for an entire year compounded with the nerves of feeling inadequate, of feeling insignificant. She’d avoid the ball in practice, even trying not to touch it, for fear or worry that she’d mess something — anything — up.
It was stark, almost remarkable how quickly her confidence disintegrated. For someone who such a short time ago was untouchable, her self-worth swelling, to fall this far, this fast… it was confounding. Is, confounding.
Chu struggled to adapt on the field, stumbled catching up to where she was before that damn “spot” ruined it all. She redshirted her first year in Chapel Hill, partly because the team was so stocked with talent and partly because she seemingly forgot hers. The next two years were hardly different — Chiu only saw game action six times in two years, and always for inconsequential minutes.
“Her mindset was ‘I probably shouldn’t be here, I’m not going to play here,’” Nate Britt, Chiu’s boyfriend, said. “You start thinking, ‘Maybe I shot too high. Maybe I’m in over my head.’”
As her playing time shrank, so too did Chiu’s remaining sense of self-worth. And then a bigger problem arose, one that perhaps undermined everything else she did in college. That confidence issue from soccer? Well, it seeped over from sport, flooding and inundating every aspect of her life.
“People measure us based on how successful we are or what we can do in our sport, and people do it our whole lives,” Britt said. “You always feel good about yourself because people glorify you for whatever you do. But at this point, when you’re not being glorified, that takes a lot away from your overall confidence, because it takes away your sense of worth.
“And I think that’s what happened to her.”
****
But there was reprieve.
And while it might not have started in the confines of Hanes Hall during her first-year History 140 lectures, from there it grew. Between Soviet war marches and the Partition of India, Chiu met Britt, the first of a small and growing army to reaffirm Chiu’s worth.
It didn’t happen all at once, this renewal of confidence, but rather over time. Britt, himself a freshman on the men’s basketball team, could relate to Chiu. Not necessarily just about playing time, but in valuing yourself beyond your sport. In recognizing that there’s more, so much more, to life.
“I was doing my best to help her,” Britt said, “and I still kind of am.”
The two started as friends, but by the end of their sophomore years began growing into more. They’d text and Facetime when Chiu left for Utah over the summer — she played with Real Salt Lake for a few months — and then meet up back in Chapel Hill.
For the first time in so long, there was something that gave Chiu a sense of purpose.
Her relationship with Britt turned serious and blossomed, but so did her other friendships. Her feistiness, a staple of her personality, returned from dormancy. She laughed again, and picked playful fights with her teammates, and flashed the dimples she’s so proud of when she smiled.
“After games I didn’t play, I just felt shitty about myself,” Chiu said, “but they were always there. Nate really was amazing. He always reminded me to play for me and that soccer isn’t the biggest thing in the world.”
It was small, a mindset that took root, but as it sprouted, it became clear that for once, maybe soccer wasn’t everything. Maybe it was just her journey here, the path that took her, but not her final destination.
And maybe that was OK.
****
The ball lofted, hung in the air, an unguardable missile, before floating into the top corner of the net.
It was the 74th minute against West Virginia, almost the end of the game, and the Mountaineers had scored what would be the goal that ended Jenny Chiu’s soccer career.
And she knew that, and that’s why she cried, sobbed on the sidelines as soon as the goal went in. She knew that after all the cross-country flights, all the missed dates, all the late nights dribbling on packed-dirt fields and car rides across the border, all the back pain and stretching and hours warming the bench in Chapel Hill, all the goals and missed opportunities, all the time she’d invested in this game, that all of it was done. Over.
When the final whistle blew, it was only confirmation. Her career ended with a U-17 World Cup captaincy, but not a single college goal. It was perplexing, her rise and fall and relative fade from relevance. But now, at last, it was over.
Chiu kept crying as she collected post-game hugs, heard the muffled whispers — “we’ll miss you so much” — and heavy breathing from her teammates. Eventually she made it back to the team hotel, showered, and re-joined the masses for one last dinner together at Annie Kingman’s nearby home.
There was roast beef and toasted rolls and strawberry macaroons, but none of that mattered. What did was spending time with these girls, the ones who once seemed so much more talented than her but now loved her, laughed with her, cried with and for her.
Andy, who works in San Francisco, had made the trip for the game and dinner afterward, but he had other plans. He invited his little sister, her housemate and teammate Cannon Clough, plus Clough’s brother, back to his apartment to hang out.
And here Chiu could have moped, could have said no and gone back to her room. Could have cried some more, or gotten angry at what just happened and what happened to her those last four years.
But she didn’t. She wiped the trickle of tear stains off her face, and then they left. Maybe it was an impulse, but maybe it was a sign of something more. Maybe it proved that in spite of everything, Chiu had finally realized soccer didn’t define her. Or maybe it was nothing.
Either way, when they got to Andy’s sixth-floor apartment overlooking the University of California – San Francisco, they had their own celebration. They split kimchi and pickles, knocked back shots of tequila and Costco vodka. Chiu Facetimed Britt, told her now-boyfriend she loved him. Then they bar-hopped around downtown San Francisco, and Chiu even gave a bartender — she swears he was rude, but that could be her feistiness again — a one-star Yelp review. Then they went back to Andy’s, crashed altogether on his massive gray couch and tugged for a share of the comfiest flannel blanket you can imagine.
And that’s how this story ends. Not with any grand revelation, no almighty reckoning with her past and acceptance of the impending future. Just Chiu, surrounded by some of the people she loves most, having a good time.
Really, that’s how it should end. Soccer gave this girl everything, took her to places she and you or even I could never have imagined. It made her famous, paved her way to college. That was the good, but there was an underbelly.
It was so easy, so natural to see herself as an athlete and an athlete alone, especially when it took up so much of her time from such a young age. It wouldn’t truly make any sense if she wasn’t that way. But the problem with all of that is that she forgot all the other pieces of Jenny Chiu, and she forgot that all of those pieces mattered.
She forgot the bubbly smile and the rambunctiousness. She forgot the way she hugs too-tight and how that means she loves you, how her skills in the kitchen — try her pho, you won’t regret it — matter just as much to her teammates and Britt as do her skills with a soccer ball.
There’s no telling what Chiu will do next, no surefire way to see the future. She wants to be a sports broadcaster, or maybe go to graduate school, or maybe move to Australia — it depends on what day you ask her.
But amid that uncertainty, there is a constant: Jenny Chiu lost. First her back and her confidence, then that last game and her entire career. She lost her sense of self-worth along the way, and at times her sense of belonging, too, and ultimately she lost herself.
And then she found it, found it all. Not in a game or in goals or in playing time, but in Britt, in her brother, in her parents and her teammates and the whole mob of people who matter.
For all that, Jenny Chiu didn’t lose. In fact, she won about as much as you can.
