Canadian women’s soccer goalkeeper Stephanie Labbe is looking to face a new challenge with a bid to join a men’s soccer club in Calgary.
Labbe, 31, already has an Olympic bronze medal, but she hopes playing against the men will help her elevate her game to one day win gold for Canada at the World Cup and the Summer Games.
“For me to push beyond and get to that level, I knew that I needed to do something different and challenge myself in a whole new way,” Labbe told CTV’s Your Morning on Wednesday.
Labbe says she decided to look for a spot with a men’s team after finishing last season with the Washington Spirit of the National Women’s Soccer League in the U.S. She considered playing in Europe, but she dismissed that notion because she felt she had already learned as much as she could after playing in Sweden for six seasons from 2009-2014.
That’s when the Edmonton native turned her attention to the men’s game and started making calls to coaches and executives who she thought might be open to giving her a shot.
“I got a lot of resistance,” she said of those first few phone calls. She says many soccer veterans told her they’d never seen it done before, and so they didn’t think it could be done now.
That changed when she connected with Tommy Wheeldon Jr., coach of the Calgary Foothills FC in the Premier Development League.
“He basically said that he was going to look at me and judge me based on my performance and not on my gender,” Labbe said.
That open attitude also extended to other players on the team, who have been nothing but welcoming, she said.
Labbe already had a sense of what it would be like to play against men, having trained with them many times during her off-seasons. Now, she’s practising with the team in hopes of landing a spot on the squad.
“I haven’t been super surprised by a lot of things,” she said.
The biggest difference in going from the women’s game to the men’s has been the speed, Labbe said.
“Everything happens just a little bit faster,” she said, adding that the players are all slightly bigger, stronger and quicker than the opponents she’s used to.
“There’s no way that I can’t improve by being here,” she said of the competition.
The Foothills’ league, the PDL, is two tiers down from Major League Soccer, and is run like a professional team, although it’s composed of amateur players. The club just opened its pre-season schedule and is slated to begin the regular season on May 11.
Labbe acknowledged that joining a men’s club could be a risky move for her, in that she won’t be competing alongside others from the women’s national team.
But in the end, Labbe believes winning a spot on the men’s team roster will put her one step closer to a brighter future with Team Canada.
