When she was playing, Coach Yaliz Campos didn’t have women leading her teams. Now, she’s being the change: she serves as Community Soccer Programs Manager and Coach for South Bronx United: Soccer for Social Change. She’s working with Girls Leadership to support female and gender-expansive players. Whether they live and breathe soccer or are completely new to the sport, Coach Yaliz wants to show that women–and especially queer women of color!–belong in everywhere in sports, whether on the field, coaching the players, reporting on the action, or anywhere else they want to be.
- What inspires you to coach youth sports?
I started coaching when I was around 21. I realized that the coaches in my life were either male or they did not have a soccer background. So I was like, OK, actually, I’ve played soccer all my life. I’ve played in high school. I haven’t coached yet, but I want to try and learn. So let me try youth sports. Let me try to coach. I want to be an inspiration to kids. Show them that OK, maybe you did not make it professionally, but there’s other options for you. You can work in sports. It could be coaching, it could be managing, it could be journalism. Or anything else. I wanted to show kids like there are other pathways other than just playing.
For me personally, as a person of color, as a woman, as a part of the LGBT community, I wanted to show kids that someone like me that looks like me can be in this position. Especially with our young adults or teenagers, they might need someone that looks like me or someone that they know is part of my community. I want to be that.
- What motivated you to take this program?
I wanted to take on this program because we have mostly boys teams and so we want to expand our girls teams. We want to expand girls’ access to sports. I think mostly that it was just increased access. So we are part of the South Bronx community where there are a lot of issues, not just like access to sports, but also poverty and violence. And so the hope is that we can create a space for girls that’s by women for women, so they can just come and be with other girls. And just like if soccer is for you, great. And if it’s not, at least you have a space
for you to come in and mingle and just be safe.
We also hope that our girls who are older take more of a leadership role. We hope that they see or they start learning that our younger girls look up to them and they’re like oh actually I want to be like them when I get to high school and we hope to give them the tools on how to show them how to stay motivated, how to keep playing, how to balance school and athletics and things at home. A lot of our kids have responsibilities at home. They are the translators at like 10 years old, or the ones who have to help mom and dad if they have younger siblings. So we hope that our older girls help our younger ones.
- What are you hoping to get out of this program?
I run our recreational program; it’s about like 800 kids registered right now. My hope is that I can bring a little bit of that to our recreational program. Our rec kids maybe see us an hour a week, so we don’t see them often, so our hope is to give tools to our recreational coaches who are just volunteers. They only do this for an hour, and that’s within like the first 5 minutes. If they could just ask him a question or do a reflection with them. Just something really short so they know that at least our kids, who we don’t see very often, get something, especially our girls.
- What do you hope your athletes will get out of this program?
First, I definitely want to receive some SEL out of this. We do that a lot with our kids already, but it would be great to have someone else come in and just give a different aspect so that they don’t just hear our voices all the time going over things like how to deal with your emotions on and off the field, and how to deal with relationships.
My hope is that the girls see that there’s other options for them. It’s not just playing. Playing is great, but I think there’s other things that they can do, like become the sports commentator, or they can play and then maybe retire and do something else.
Even today, professional soccer players have to look for something else. We’re still not at that place where they can retire with whatever money they made or whatever sponsorships they have. They still have to get a job after soccer. While that is the reality, at least they are still showing our girls that there’s other options, so my hope is that we can show girls hey, so-and-so played, and now she’s reporting; or so-and-so played, and now she has her own nonprofit.
If you coach youth sports, sign up for our professional development workshops Belonging in Sports, which include lessons you can use right away. Also, check out our full collection of 26 Free Social-Emotional Check-ins.
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