Where activism meets the pitch: Alexia Garcia's changing relationship with the game

Having grown up in Portland, Oregon, I was lucky enough to be surrounded by many women's football trailblazers right in my own city. The football stars of our town were the University of Portland Pilots, home to greats like Christine Sinclair, Megan Rapinoe, and Tiffeny Milbrett.  And Portland, being the sports city that it is, meant I also got to meet Mia Hamm on the Nike campus, attend a good chunk of the 2003 Women's World Cup matches that took place in the city, and (since my dad was my football coach and quickly took on a role in youth rec football)  I found myself privileged with VIP access to things like hanging out with the Ghana women's national team while they were in  Portland during the FIFA Women's World Cup. What can I say? I grew up with no shortage of women's football role models around.

Zoom forward a number of years, and I had quit football, my beloved sport, due to extreme burnout. I had done what felt like a 180, since football spaces didn't feel very activist to me at the time, and I got deeply involved in the Portland Student Union instead. Sadly, I felt like sports spaces were never that activist, and activist spaces were never that sporty. I spent a few years very removed from football until a couple of protests started happening in the sports world, and I began paying attention.

In an unprecedented event, Colin Kaepernick took a knee during the United States' national anthem, in protest against the racial violence inflicted on Black folks in the country. A few weeks later, Megan Rapinoe also took a knee during the national anthem in solidarity with Kaepernick. I wrote an essay on it for my American Studies course. I read Michael Bennett's book about playing in the NFL, and Dave Zirin's book about the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. I was hooked.

In 2019, I moved to Madrid with the goal of learning Spanish and was deeply committed to it, which meant steering clear of expat circles where everyone just speaks English. The problem was that, without the language, making friends was tricky. But as the story goes, football is the universal language.

One evening, I found myself in a bar, talking with the sporting director of CDE Dragones de Lavapiés. He told me that the club brought together players from many nationalities and that I could join the women's team, a group originally formed by the mothers of the club's youth players. Six years after hanging up my boots, I bought a new pair of football cleats and returned to the game. I was thrilled to find a club that served as both a sporting community and an activist organization.

A few months later, the club needed a coach. I was fresh off an ACL injury (it's hard to jump back into a sport where you're simultaneously competitive and out of shape, conditions ripe for injury) and ready to move into a coaching role. My Spanish was still shaky (I was writing notes on my hand to remember vocabulary), but I loved being part of the community.

As my Spanish language skills have improved, and my confidence in managing a football club has grown, I have quickly moved up the ranks at the club. Today, I serve as Director of Sponsorships for CDE Dragones de Lavapiés. I still coach the youth girls' team, and I've found myself completely immersed in the world of football.

In addition to my role at Dragones, I currently work for love.fútbol, a sports-for-social-change non-profit committed to ensuring safe spaces for kids to play. The organization focuses on building sports infrastructure through a community-participatory methodology. I also work as a professor of sports business, write as a freelancer, and consult for clubs and teams on sponsorship strategy. 

I recently joined the Bonito Foundation team as a sports writer. Too often, the stories of sport-for- social-change organizations go untold, and there are limited spaces dedicated to exploring sport's role as a tool for community organizing. I'm excited to help fill that gap by writing about football, sports politics, and the transformative power of the game.

You can also find some of my writing on my Substack, "Cleats Up."