Home » Community » Learning to Fall

Olga Rey sat in her car for three hours.

She wasn’t early because of a scheduling error, and she wasn’t there to scout the competition. She was parked at Carver High School because she needed to see if she could actually do it. Inside her bag was a pair of soccer cleats her youngest daughter had helped her pick out the day before—shoes for a game Olga had spent thirty years watching from the sidelines, but had never been allowed to touch.

In Colombia, where Olga grew up, soccer was a language everyone knew but only half the population was encouraged to speak. She was the one among four daughters who loved the game most, tagging along with her father to matches with season tickets. By age twelve, she took it upon herself to look for ways to play organized soccer using the "internet of the time”—the Yellow Pages—and finally found a match in a coed soccer summer camp. Despite finally discovering a summer program that accepted girls, her father’s response was a sharp, protective "no."

So, she tucked the desire away. She moved to the U.S. for graduate school, earned a PhD, and built a life defined by the mind. She sat on the bleachers for decades, watching her own children navigate the pitch, her oldest eventually playing at the college level. She was a "soccer mom" in the most literal sense—an expert observer who knew the tactical flow of a game but remained a stranger to its physical reality.

Then she saw a yard sign: “Beginners Only Soccer.” She scanned the code in the corner of the sign and saw “ages 18–75 welcome.”

"If you can be 75 and do this," Olga thought, "I should try."

The Shared Risk of Trying

For adults, the act of being a "beginner" is a social risk. We are accustomed to being experts in our fields—Olga is a woman with a doctorate and a career built on competence. To voluntarily enter a space where you are guaranteed to be clumsy is an act of vulnerability that most people avoid after thirty.

In fact, most adult sports leagues are built on the "glory days" model—reclaiming the athleticism of youth. But SOPFC’s Beginners Only is built on the opposite: shared awkwardness—a space where the common denominator isn’t talent, but the courage to be bad at something together.

During that first session, Olga found herself at the back of a line for a warmup drill: running to two cones and backing up into one. She was the last person. As she began backing up, her feet tangled.

She fell flat on her back.

"I was like, oh my god," Olga recalls. "But then I thought, who cares? I’m enjoying this. I’m too old to get embarrassed for tripping."

The first reaction from the group was a cheer. Then Coach John called out, "I love that smile! That’s how we do when we sit back."

In that moment, the thing Olga feared most—standing out as the "worst" player—happened. And it was fine. The world didn't end, the game just kept going.

The Arc of the Athlete

As the weeks progressed, Olga’s relationship with her body began to shift. She realized that progress at fifty isn't measured against the twenty-somethings on the pitch; it’s measured against who you were last Thursday.

"Two weeks ago, I wanted to get there and I couldn’t be fast enough," she says. "And then this week, I found a way to get that ball and pass it to someone else."

According to Olga, there is a quiet, profound victory in seeing passes on television for years and then finally feeling your own foot execute one just like it. She describes a moment where she placed a pass exactly where she envisioned it. "I’ve seen this on TV," she thought. "It looks very nice."

But the transformation wasn't just physical. It was an expansion of identity. For most of her life, Olga viewed "sports people" as a different species—a group she didn't belong to. Now, when she talks to the families she works for or her sisters in Colombia, she uses a different word.

"I have a club," she tells them.

She isn't just a nanny, a mother, or a PhD; she’s a teammate. She is a soccer player.

Belonging Without Pressure

Olga noted that while some players were naturally faster or more experienced, the environment was characterized by a sense of companionship. When a player was clearly more advanced than a "level one" beginner, organizers moved them to a higher level—not as a promotion, but to protect the psychological safety of the beginners space.

"Soccer is a very inclusive sport," Olga reflects. "It doesn't matter if you slipped, if the ball went in with your nose... it's a goal. You are part of it."

She even found herself advocating for those who didn't return. She remembers a woman who attended the first session and never came back. "It felt like a loss," Olga says. "I wanted to say, 'Come on, give us a chance. We could have learned this thing together!'"

The Gospel of Play

As Olga prepares for the next season, her goals are modest and admirable. She wants to "graduate" to SOPFC’s “protected” league, specifically for people who have finished the program—a middle ground between continuing to learn and full-scale competition. She wants to keep finding the space where she belongs.

The conversation with Olga reveals a broader truth about community sports: we don't play to become professionals, we play to reclaim the parts of ourselves we left behind in childhood—the ability to fall down, laugh, and get back up.

Olga’s daughter came to the field on her birthday just to watch her mother play, taking videos and photos to document the "high" Olga felt driving an hour back home after a session.

"I’m going to play soccer for the rest of my life," Olga told her therapist. "I don't think a year ago I would have thought that."