Block Club Chicago
Your Neighborhood News Site
WRIGLEYVILLE — Before she suited up for her first soccer game, Guadalupe Ruiz already knew she could hang with the boys.
Ruiz, a junior at Solorio High School who was just named to the Chicago high school All-City team, begged and pleaded with her dad to let her play on her older brother’s team when she was just 7 years old.
“I had to ask to play on my brother’s team because there weren’t really leagues for girls my age at the time,” Ruiz said. “I remember some of the boys were like, ‘Who’s that girl? What’s she doing here?’”
After the game, a coach approached Ruiz’s parents and gushed about the youngster’s skills. On a pitch with 21 boys and one girl, Ruiz was the one who stood out.
In the male-dominated universe that is professional sports, it would be impossible not to acknowledge that right now, women are having a moment in the spotlight.
Interest in women’s sports — both at the professional and collegiate levels — is growing at a meteoric pace. The 2023 women’s NCAA basketball tournament drew nearly 10 million viewers for the championship game between Iowa and LSU — up 103 percent from the previous year, according to Nielsen.
In the WNBA, average viewership for the first five games that aired on ESPN topped 1 million people and surpassed last year’s average by 226 percent.
And in professional soccer, the National Women’s Soccer League just inked a four-year, $240 million TV rights deal, the largest in women’s sports history.
As a sign of how popular the pro women’s soccer league has become, the undefeated Chicago Red Stars will make history on Saturday as the first professional women’s soccer team to play at Wrigley Field when they host Bay FC at 6:30 p.m. Tickets are still available online.
During Saturday’s game, the Red Stars will honor the final four high school girls soccer teams in this year’s city playoffs: Solorio, Amundsen, Lane Tech and Whitney Young.
“It is so exciting that the Red Stars are coming to Wrigley Field,” Amundsen sophomore Raisa Yuille said. “I’m excited to see that women’s soccer is starting to grow and hopefully will become as popular as the men’s league.”
Seeing women’s soccer in the spotlight has been a long time coming, Yuille and her peers said.
“I think women’s sports have definitely been broadcasted more over the last few years, but I still notice some inconsistencies between men’s and women’s sports,” Whitney Young senior Kate Sweitzer said. “It wasn’t that long ago when the U.S. [women’s] team was fighting for equal pay. There are definitely still issues that need to be discussed and figured out, but I have started to notice a change and that’s exciting to see. I just hope we can continue to move it forward.”
For younger players like Ruiz, having the chance to watch her soccer idols was nearly impossible growing up. She said she remembers bugging her dad to watch games on TV and doing research of her own online.
“I used to try and watch professional games on TV, but it was never accessible,” Ruiz said. “A few years ago when women’s soccer started to get more popular, I started to notice all these programs playing the games and it became so much easier to watch.
“I didn’t know about the Red Stars until I joined my travel team. I didn’t know there were all these opportunities until I started to really get into it.”
Over the past few years, it feels like women’s soccer and other professional leagues are finally getting the platform they deserve, Sweitzer said. Not only is that proving to be good business for TV networks and advertising partners, it gives younger players in youth leagues and high school something to aspire to, she said.
“Having a team like the Red Stars in Chicago can only increase the chances of younger female athletes to achieve success at the highest level,” Sweitzer said. “Seeing them on that stage can be really inspiring for girls going into sports and can help them realize that it can be them some day.”
The national spotlight on women’s sports has trickled down to the local levels as well, the CPS athletes said.
“There’s definitely been an intense amount of interest in our games now,” Ruiz said. “My freshman year I would tell my friends to come to a game and the guys would turn around and go, ‘Really, you have a game today?’
“This year, the principal started to come to our games, which is wild. We’re getting new uniforms next year, too.”
Looking ahead to Saturday, Yuille said she’s most excited to pick up some new moves from the pros that she can use in her own game next year.
“I’m also excited to experience it all with my friends and teammates,” Yuille said.
Sweitzer said she’ll be paying attention to how the women carry themselves in warm-ups and the in-between moments.
“I like watching really pretty soccer,” she said. “I’ll be watching how the teams move the ball through the field and how they create chances. Really good soccer is mesmerizing to me, and I’m really excited to see this team play in person.”
Ruiz will be locked in on the center backs, the position she plays for Solorio.
“I love watching games and examining the players,” Ruiz said. “How they handle the ball, how their chemistry looks as a team, all of it. Sometimes I’ll just be like, ‘Dang, I want to do that.’”
Support Local News!
Subscribe to Block Club Chicago, an independent, 501(c)(3), journalist-run newsroom. Every dime we make funds reporting from Chicago’s neighborhoods. Already subscribe? Click here to gift a subscription, or you can support Block Club with a tax-deductible donation.
Listen to the Block Club Chicago podcast:
Block Club Chicago is a nonprofit news organization dedicated to delivering reliable, nonpartisan and essential coverage of Chicago’s diverse neighborhoods.
