A piece of paper in the backpack of Bob Marley’s grandson.
See, that’s how this all began. One afternoon in 2014, Cedella Marley, Bob’s eldest daughter with his wife Rita, was handed a flier by her son, Skip, after he came home from school. The flier was from Skip’s soccer coach, and it asked parents to consider donating money to resurrect Jamaica’s women’s soccer team.
Cedella was startled. She lives outside Miami but is still royalty in Jamaica, leading Tuff Gong, the record label her father started, as well as the foundation named for him. She made some calls. Turned out, the women’s soccer team hadn’t existed for much of the previous four years because the country’s soccer federation cut the funding.
There were still girls youth teams, sure, but no senior national team that could try to represent the country at the Olympics or the Women’s World Cup.
Cedella bristled. Was it a soccer thing? she asked. Nope. The men’s team, known as the Reggae Boyz, had its funding fully intact.
“People were saying no to [the women], and it was for no reason,” Cedella says now. “The more I got involved, the angrier I got.”
Cedella thought about it. And made some more phone calls about it. And then decided to fix it, thrusting herself and a few dozen determined players on a journey that involved raising hundreds of thousands of dollars, challenging stifling gender norms, surviving tense elimination games and persisting despite a haunting feeling that their dreams might die anyway.
“They are pioneers now,” Dalton Wint, general secretary of the Jamaica Football Federation, says of the women’s team. He shrugs. “And they will suffer from it.”
In conversation, Cedella, now 51, laughs easily, sauntering into the backyard of her South Florida mansion with an iPad full of notes and canned sound bites that she never consults. Instead, she riffs on travel, food and music as we sit under her gazebo.
Asked if she was at all surprised to hear about the decision to get rid of the women’s team, Cedella snorts. “Coming from Jamaica? Not really.” She laughs. “I think they would like to see girls in bathing suits and tennis skirts versus cleats and soccer gear.”
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Women’s World Cup 2019: How Bob Marley’s daughter saved Jamaican soccer
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How Cedella Marley saved the Reggae Girlz (2:28)
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5:36 PM
Sam Borden
ESPN global sports correspondent
A piece of paper in the backpack of Bob Marley’s grandson.
See, that’s how this all began. One afternoon in 2014, Cedella Marley, Bob’s eldest daughter with his wife Rita, was handed a flier by her son, Skip, after he came home from school. The flier was from Skip’s soccer coach, and it asked parents to consider donating money to resurrect Jamaica’s women’s soccer team.
Cedella was startled. She lives outside Miami but is still royalty in Jamaica, leading Tuff Gong, the record label her father started, as well as the foundation named for him. She made some calls. Turned out, the women’s soccer team hadn’t existed for much of the previous four years because the country’s soccer federation cut the funding.
There were still girls youth teams, sure, but no senior national team that could try to represent the country at the Olympics or the Women’s World Cup.
Cedella bristled. Was it a soccer thing? she asked. Nope. The men’s team, known as the Reggae Boyz, had its funding fully intact.
“People were saying no to [the women], and it was for no reason,” Cedella says now. “The more I got involved, the angrier I got.”
Cedella thought about it. And made some more phone calls about it. And then decided to fix it, thrusting herself and a few dozen determined players on a journey that involved raising hundreds of thousands of dollars, challenging stifling gender norms, surviving tense elimination games and persisting despite a haunting feeling that their dreams might die anyway.
“They are pioneers now,” Dalton Wint, general secretary of the Jamaica Football Federation, says of the women’s team. He shrugs. “And they will suffer from it.”
In conversation, Cedella, now 51, laughs easily, sauntering into the backyard of her South Florida mansion with an iPad full of notes and canned sound bites that she never consults. Instead, she riffs on travel, food and music as we sit under her gazebo.
Asked if she was at all surprised to hear about the decision to get rid of the women’s team, Cedella snorts. “Coming from Jamaica? Not really.” She laughs. “I think they would like to see girls in bathing suits and tennis skirts versus cleats and soccer gear.”
She isn’t exaggerating. Sashana Campbell, a 28-year-old midfielder with the Reggae Girlz for the past five years, says she grew up playing with boys because there weren’t any high-level, organized opportunities for girls. She worried about getting too good “because you think, at some point, they’re just not going to allow you to play.”
This reality, Cedella says, is why the revival of the Reggae Girlz has been a multi-stage process. In spring 2014, with qualifying for the 2015 Women’s World Cup in Canada underway, the initial goal was to simply exist. At the time, the Jamaican team wasn’t even part of FIFA’s rankings because it hadn’t played a real game in years. Cedella donated plenty of her own money but also tried to create a buzz around the team, largely by releasing a song, “Strike Hard,” featuring her and her brothers, Stephen and Damian. An accompanying Indie-gogo campaign gave the Reggae Girlz just enough money to re-form, though calling it a bare-bones operation would be kind.
The players did their own laundry. They rode in rickety vans. They practiced for a day or two on one weekend, then broke for a few days so many of the players could work at their jobs before regrouping the next weekend. Even the common practice of exchanging jerseys after international matches had to be abandoned.
“People would be like, ‘Can I get a jersey?’ and I’d be like, ‘I don’t even have one for myself!'” Campbell says. “We had to give everything back to the federation: training gear, jerseys, everything.”
Despite it all, the team didn’t play badly that summer. The Reggae Girlz dominated tiny Martinique 6-0 before losing a tight match to Costa Rica, and they even led Mexico in the qualifying tournament’s final group stage match before being eliminated in a 3-1 defeat. The next summer, in 2015, the team tried and failed to qualify for the 2016 Rio Olympics.
It didn’t matter; after all, the Reggae Girlz had never made it to the World Cup or the Olympics in their history. They were just glad to be competing. It felt like something had changed, Cedella thought. It felt like progress.
It wasn’t. In 2016, the Jamaican federation disbanded the team again.
Khadija Shaw grew up praying for rain. She acknowledges this was a strange wish, particularly for a kid in the gritty St. John’s Road community of Spanish Bay. But rain meant the soccer game her brothers and the other neighborhood kids played every day wouldn’t be held at the field — too sloppy — and would instead take place in the street. Since Khadija’s mother had told her she wasn’t allowed to play herself, Khadija prayed for rain so she could watch the sport she adored from her front steps instead of having to stare, grimly, as the boys took their ball and trooped off toward the field.
By:ESPN
Shuaeeb Is a seasoned sportswriter, social worker, and philanthropist. He has been renowned for his support of disabled sports persons and championing for equal rights and opportunities for all sports persons. He is also a father of 4 children and married to His partner Moana who is of Australian descent. He currently does sports volunteering and disability support work aside from writing for this August media.
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