I CHOSE TO go to Seton Hall because I thought it had a close-knit ‘family’ appeal. There were bigger and probably better colleges interested in me but I wanted to be in a classroom of about twenty people, not a hundred. I wanted more individual attention rather than feeling like just a number. That was important to me. This college also had a good academic advisory programme, so if I struggled with my studies I knew there would be people there to help me. That’s why I chose to go there. But within twenty-four hours of getting there I was convinced I had made a big mistake.
I flew into Newark airport, where I was met by the assistant coach, Chris McDonald. The Seton Hall Pirates squad was down on New Jersey shore in pre-season training; I was due to join them the next day. In the meantime, I was driven to the campus, taken to a dorm and left there for the night.
It was quite a shock to the system. It was summer school at the time and the dorms weren’t used, so the electricity was off. There was also no duvet, no pillow and no bed sheets. There was no television and no telephone either. All I had were the clothes and other items I had brought over in my bag. I had to sleep on a jumper with another jumper as a cover. I didn’t know what I had got myself into or what I had just done with my life. All alone in that dorm, I cried my eyes out.
The next day wasn’t any better either. After finally joining up with my team-mates down at the shore I was told that I couldn’t train with them. A call had come through from the college’s athletics department offices to our head coach stating that I was not eligible to train with the Pirates due to National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) rules. Basically, my BTEC qualifications had to be transferred into an American points system before a decision could be made about whether I was qualified to begin studying for my degree at Seton Hall. It was a chaotic start to my life out there, and totally unexpected. They were still trying to figure out if I could play for them when I’d already gone out there!
It seemed to take ages to sort it all out. It was so frustrating for me because it could and should have all been dealt with properly before I left England. In the end, this ongoing administration process delayed everything for me. It was the best part of a month before I was cleared to play football.
Those first weeks in the US rocked me. I guess it was due in large part to loneliness. The upshot of the administrative mess surrounding my qualifications was that I had to train on my own and wait for the process to be completed. Until it was, I had to sit and watch training or go to the gym and work out alone.
It was also due to a lack of confidence on my part – and that was to become an important factor for me to recognize in my life. When every aspect was added up, all the stresses and the strains, I just wasn’t mentally ready for any of it.
I hadn’t really prepared myself for what I was getting into out in the USA, to be honest. I certainly hadn’t expected to be left in a dorm by myself – that’s quite a scary prospect for any eighteen-year-old girl on her first night in another country, regardless of how confident a person she is.
I found it really hard to deal with. I suppose that I didn’t realize just how shy and timid a person I was until I was put in that situation in a foreign land. I didn’t know anybody there and I found it difficult to mix. Furthermore, being cast aside from the outset didn’t help me one bit. I needed to develop a rapport with the other players out on the pitch, but I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t play football and I struggled to make friends as a result.
It was both frustrating and damaging for me. I had gone over to New Jersey to play the game I loved, and it turned out to be the one thing I wasn’t allowed to do. It isn’t nice for a player to watch their team-mates play football and be forbidden to join in, particularly when that was exactly what had taken me across the Atlantic Ocean in the first place.
I was homesick. I hated my life out there in those first weeks. I couldn’t play football, and because of that I couldn’t fit in. I felt I had made a really big mistake in going over there. Sometimes I wanted to turn the clock back and stay in Watford.
I stayed in a beach house down on the shore. It was beautiful down there, but I couldn’t appreciate any of that. I had known deep down for a good few years that I was a shy and quiet person, but there and then the fact really hit me. It hadn’t been such a problem back home. Now it was a massive problem. I found that I struggled to speak to people unless they spoke to me – and even then it was difficult. At college I was asked to introduce myself, which involved me standing up and making a speech. It was awful. I hated it. I didn’t want to be there. I don’t think my English accent helped. I felt different from the start and I couldn’t speak up for fear of my accent drawing attention to me.
I seemed to be missing everything about home, particularly my mum’s shepherd’s pie. Every week I would ring Mum and Dad and tell them I wanted to come home. They were great. ‘Let’s speak about it next week,’ they would say. ‘Let’s just see how you get on during the next seven days out there and then we’ll see.’
Before too long I found that I wasn’t ringing home quite as much. I had finally begun to find my feet in America and make some friends. Life became more enjoyable as a result. But if it hadn’t been for Mum and Dad I might not have reached that stage.
Both my parents knew that this was a fantastic opportunity for me, one that I had wanted all my life. They saw the bigger picture, beyond the lonely dorm and the shyness, and they didn’t want me to make a rash decision that would affect my future. They really supported me during that time and got me through it. Without them I’m not sure I could have stuck it out.
Without doubt, though, if I had been able to play in the team from the start I would have been able to blend with and be accepted by the squad a lot quicker, which would have made a huge difference to me. The other players can tell if you are a good player, and of course we then have more stuff to talk about to each other. It was much easier for me after they saw that I could play football. That is how I communicate really. That is where my personality comes out – on the pitch. I found it awkward making friends with the players at Seton Hall until I could play with them. As it was, I started out with the worst-case scenario: sitting on the sidelines and becoming more and more introverted and withdrawn. Things improved quickly for me when I was able to play football and bond with my team-mates.
The college football season was relatively short in America. We played for just three months, from the beginning of August until the end of October. If you were lucky enough to make the NCAA tournament at the end of the season, you would play a little longer. But Seton Hall Pirates never used to get that far. The college didn’t have a proud history when it came to women’s football.
Beyond the college system there were semi-professional leagues. But the top American players didn’t play in those leagues. They all trained in national camps, ultimately preparing themselves for the big one – the 1999 Women’s World Cup, which was to take place on home soil. Players such as Mia Hamm, the star name in women’s football at the time, didn’t need to play in a league because they were in camp for months at a time, playing alongside fellow USA internationals.
Back in England, before a match we would meet up for a week or so. The USA would have all their players in camp for two or three months, training in California or somewhere. All the players had come through the college system. That was the birthplace for them all. It was college system straight into national camp, and then into national team. It was a robust system, and it worked.
The one downside at that time was that if a player wasn’t good enough to play for the national team, there was nowhere for her to go. The W League changed that, and the Women’s Professional Soccer league (WPS) took it a step further. Both were so good for aspiring American athletes, because young players were able to be seen playing football in a strong, competitive format.
Now that I was playing, and showing that I could play, a lot of attention was on me. That was OK, but when people wanted to talk to me in person about it all, I found that I imploded. On the field I could be myself. I could express myself in the way I wanted to and I could be what I wanted to be – a confident, smiley person enjoying life and showing off skills. But off the field I was a completely different person. I was unable to cope with any of the extracurricular stuff that was being thrown at me. I needed to find a solution. Without realizing it, I began to find solace in alcohol.
My drinking days started in earnest at the end of my first season at Seton Hall. It had little to do with football. I just found that drinking made me a much more confident and fun person to be around – and someone I liked. I was still well under the legal drinking age of twenty-one in the USA and I would use fake ID to get served if I had to.
I roomed with a girl called Meredith Reckord, who wasn’t an athlete. We had a two-bedroom dorm. Next door to us were Christine Cassano and Amy McKee, who were both in my team. There was just an adjoining bathroom between us. So, really, there were four of us together.
University life is about going away and discovering yourself. In England, lots of people get drunk in the process and do silly things. That’s life, I guess. This was similar. I was living in America, I was young, and I was away from my family. I was also very introverted.
There would always be a party going on at college. It might be at a baseball player’s place, a volleyball player’s place, or at our place. There was an opportunity to drink every night if you wanted to take it. So it slowly got into a habit for me. I would drink most nights of the week, cheap beer that we would get from the liquor store. It was all we could afford. The refrigerator would always be stocked with cheap beer. I got into drinking it after class had finished. It was never a social thing for me, it was always about binge drinking – about drinking as fast as I could.
I would shotgun a beer. I’d burst a can with a pen and suck the alcohol out as quickly as I could. It would be finished in seconds. It was always like that for me – fast drinking from three or four o’clock in the afternoon. That would move into going out to a bar or just staying in the dorm, drinking. Various athletes would come in and go out. It was pretty relaxed, and that is how it all started for me.
I would get up for college the next morning feeling hung over. But I would go to class and get through the day and I would train hard. And then I would get home and start the whole cycle again. The drinking could go on for six or seven hours a night.
Christine and another goalkeeper, Marybeth Foran, became my regular drinking buddies. The three of us became best friends in the team and the big drinkers in the team. If I wanted a drink, the others would be persuaded to drink; if one of the others wanted a drink, the rest of us would be persuaded to drink. It went on and on like that. It became a habit that we would rope each other in. It ended up that we rarely got a night off from it.
But I was young and fit and I found that I could do all this and still play the next day. My body recovered quickly so there was never any problem on the pitch. I couldn’t do it today, but it was so easy to do it back in the late nineties.
Many times I woke up and thought to myself: ‘Shit, I won’t be doing that again.’ But as the day went on I gradually felt better and then I would be ready to get back on it again after class.
Sometimes I wouldn’t make it to class the next day. I would feel so bad physically that I would skip lessons, and then I would get into trouble for not attending class. But I would find a way out of it, saying I’d overslept or something. It was college life. That is pretty much what I did in college anyway.
I did my drinking mostly in groups and at parties. And I was always there. It was very rare that I would turn down an invitation to drink. I liked the way alcohol made me feel. The heavy head in the morning soon passed. The whole thing became a routine. It was the norm for us. I didn’t know any different than to wake up at college with a hangover. It was an expected start to the day. I would simply drink a pint of water and go about my business.
Having said all that, during the short football season it was pretty much no drinking for us because the focus was so much on football and doing well on the pitch. That was OK because those games fuelled my confidence. But in the longer off-season it was a different story. I took on the party lifestyle. I was still training and doing what I had to do to stay in shape and tick over, but in the evenings I was in full-on party mode, all of the time.
When I was drunk, I was the person I wanted to be: confident and outgoing. I felt happy. I desperately wanted to be like that all the time. It felt so good inside. I wanted to bottle up that feeling. But of course that feeling doesn’t come in a bottle. It comes out of a bottle.
When I was sober I was back to being the person who couldn’t cope, and I struggled, particularly when somebody came up to me and wanted to talk about football, or wanted to get to know me. When I was drunk, you couldn’t shut me up. I spent my life being two different people.
There were crazy times. I would wake up with a scratch under my eye or a bruise on my face and I couldn’t recall what had happened. That was funny to a degree but also scary at the same time. I would sit in class racking my brain, trying to remember if I had got myself into a fight. Deep down I would know that I hadn’t got myself into a fight because my friends would have told me that I had got into a fight. But I just couldn’t remember what had happened so naturally all sorts went through my head.
The hardest part with all that was going into training and my coach saying to me, ‘What happened to you?’ What could I say to that? I had to make up lies on the spot – ‘I walked into a branch’, that kind of thing. I had to create such stories because I didn’t have any clear memories of the night before. Looking back, that was a big warning sign.
My first year at Seton Hall was a slow build-up to what was to come. During the latter part of my time at college I was drinking every night. Christine, Marybeth and I had to keep that to ourselves, otherwise it was a situation that would have had to be addressed by management. That would not have been good. To my knowledge, it was never brought to their attention.
Other than my drinking buddies, no one knew how much drinking I was doing. That’s because as time went on I began to do it largely in secret.