In the 23rd minute of Portland’s tournament-opening loss to North Carolina, something amazing happened. It started with Steph Labbé sending an arcing pass to Debinha in the midfield. As Debinha tried to settle the bouncing ball onto the turf, Kelli Hubly—the second sidekick in the sadly defunct Midge Purce-led dance team, she of the rolled-up shorts—charged in, got her body between the ball and her opponent, and, under pressure, completed a flailing left-footed pass to Lindsey Horan.
I have watched this sequence about eight times, both in the interest of describing it accurately above, and because I love it. I find the whole thing deeply relatable.
I’ve written a lot of words about people like Horan and Christine Sinclair and Tobin Heath over the last few years, because I like watching them play. When I get the chance, I also enjoy talking to them and hearing their coaches and teammates talk about them. But Horan and Sinclair and Heath are not the same as me.
At the same time as them being different and better than me is a major reason I like watching them, sometimes it starts to feel ridiculous writing about these people and their feats. They are basically beyond my comprehension. Their brains have a fundamentally different kind of connection to their bodies than mine does, and their bodies are also quite a bit stronger and better. There’s an inherent absurdity to me not just criticizing, but making any observations at all, about someone like Lindsey Horan. It’s like congratulating a cheetah for being fast.
Hubly, though—we are at least recognizably the same species. She’s not a hyper-competitive monster like everyone at the highest level of the sport. She’s clearly talented, to have gotten this far, but she’s talented in the way regular human beings are. She made the team, and has stayed on it, by dint of honest hard work. You get the feeling watching her that she is always trying very hard.
I have this image seared into my head which I’m not even sure is real—I’ve asked our photographers and none of them remember having captured it—of Hubly having just messed something up, either given away a goal or conceded a penalty. I believe it’s 2018, because I think she’s wearing that godawful white kit with the tire tracks on it, but I might just be remembering the Thorns kit I most associate with disappointment. She may or may not be sitting on the ground. She looks absolutely shellshocked, eyes wide, jaw tense, and I’m projecting here, but to me this is the face of someone not just deeply embarrassed about what’s just happened, but also in mortal fear of the potential longer-term personal consequences.
Thinking about that image, I can feel what that’s like viscerally in my body. I don’t think many of us can really empathize with what it’s like to do something like win a World Cup. I imagine I’d feel very happy! But I can’t picture it. Feeling like you’ve just let everyone around you down and that you might also lose your job because of it, though? That I can understand.
Another thing I can understand is the much smaller-scale victory Hubly had on Saturday. She wasn’t perfect. Lynn Williams, being Lynn Williams, burned her a few times. She let some crosses in. But she had also very clearly heard and understood her instructions for the game. She judiciously applied pressure in the areas it was needed, didn’t bite when Crystal Dunn or Jaelene Daniels tried to dribble around her, sensibly cleared the ball a number of times.
In part, as Mark Parsons pointed out in a Zoom call a few days ago, she was finally playing a role she’s actually suited to, rather than being tossed in as the third center back behind Meghan Klingenberg. This is not the story of a breakout moment, about how Hubly is good enough to replace Ellie Carpenter, about how she’s going to start for the Thorns going forward. She’s always going to be a serviceable NWSL player. But you know what? That’s fucking hard. Playing multiple seasons as the fifth or sixth defender on the depth chart and still showing up to work every day with a smile on your face, ready to keep doing your best—that takes a level of tenacity I’m not sure I can relate to. We don’t appreciate what that takes enough.
When those smaller-scale victories come, for Hubly or any of the other mortals in this league, celebrate them. We’re all out here doing the best we can.
