Find Your Football
Donna-Kay Henry, Crystal Cuevas, and Lily Honor have all been around soccer for years. Perhaps more than anyone, they know the challenges that women face when trying to carve out a career in pro soccer. For the past three years, though, they’ve been fighting to break those barriers.
That’s what their organization Find Your Football is all about -- mentoring girls and young women interested in soccer and giving them a space to follow their dreams. What started as three friends chatting about their pro and collegiate soccer experiences has turned into a movement that is sure to alter women’s soccer in New York for years to come.
“At the end of the day, you need to show up and play, but if you don’t get that opportunity, you can’t be successful,” said Henry.
While Henry, Cuevas, and Honor all have strong ties to New York, their pro and collegiate experiences have taken them all over the United States and overseas.
Henry was born in Jamaica but moved to Queens at the age of eight. In junior high and high school, Henry made a name for herself among the New York soccer community. She was then able to earn a full scholarship to the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, where she met her current partner and talented college player, Cuevas.
After finishing her studies at UT Chattanooga, Henry moved back to New York in 2016 to play for Western New York Flash, who eventually went on to win the NWSL Championship that season.
Following her one-year stint in the NWSL, Henry traveled with Cuevas to Switzerland and Iceland to pursue a professional career. She enjoyed a successful club career abroad that even led her to be called up to the Jamaican national team on several occasions, scoring 9 goals in 9 games. In 2018, though, Henry decided to return to New York.
“It was just a great experience,” Henry said. “I played in Iceland for two years, and then after that, I got to the point where I was like, ‘What am I going to do with myself after this?’ You know, like I can do this, but I've been doing it for so long, and I want to figure out something else afterward.”
Upon returning to the United States, Henry turned her focus to coaching and building a community centered around soccer. In their free time, Henry and Cuevas would both participate in local tournaments, and that’s how they formally met Honor.
Honor -- like Henry -- grew up playing in New York and stayed in-state for college when she played for SUNY Albany. Following her time at SUNY, Honor played pro for both Brighton & Hove Albion and Leeds United in England before moving to Israel to play for FC Kiryat Gat, with whom she won the Israeli Women’s Championship.
Thanks to a local tournament in New York, Henry, Cuevas, and Honor “clicked,” and the first seeds of Find Your Football began to grow.
“We knew we wanted to do something,” Honor said. “And I'm like, ‘Yo, I got ideas.’ And then we all kind of came together and collaborated on our ideas and put them into a little jar and figured them out together. We spent hours and hours on this couch or on that table trying to figure everything out. Our early ideas were just making plans to have girls recognize that you can go play pro, you can make a living of it, and we're trying to make a better living for them in the future.”
However, Honor’s own professional experience and the experience of her coaches throughout her career have shown her that playing pro women’s soccer is an uphill battle.
“In college, I really saw the difference, mostly because I saw how my coach [Mary-Frances Monroe] was being treated,” Honor said. “She used to be on the U.S. national team. She was playing for the Boston Breakers at the time, and she was trying to balance being a full-time head coach, playing, and inspiring the next generation of players. Hitting her age now and getting to the spots that she sort of did too, I’ve realized how much of a challenge it is and how few people get the opportunity to make a living wage, and the need to have multiple jobs in order to subsist and do what you really want.”
Those lessons, though, have taught the founders of Find Your Football that there is a need to mentor young women through those challenging moments. The only way to build a sustainable pro women’s soccer system is to guide the next generation of players through the barriers that they will undoubtedly encounter today.
“I feel like growing up, I was always kind of taken care of because that's what I needed,” Henry said. “I was what you would call a ‘scholarship kid’ because my mom couldn't afford for me to play in a league, so coaches took me under their wing.”
In a sense, that’s what Henry has been doing the past few years as a coach and as the founder of Find Your Football.
Like Honor, Henry has also experienced first-hand the challenges of choosing to play pro women’s soccer.
“In Iceland, I don't know if the men got anything extra when it came to training sessions,” Henry said. “I think we got about the same type of resources when it comes to that. But if you wanted family, male players can have their wives, their kids, their own apartment paid for -- all that. They get all of that extra stuff. Even now, even in the high leagues, it's difficult for women to get an apartment or a room on their own, or for the club to pay that extra to make you comfortable with your family.”
Recounting her experience in England, Honor also mentioned how she had to endure playing for teams that didn’t have access to a locker room.
“Even without pay and, and money and things like that, at least give us a locker room,” Honor said. “Is this really how men’s teams get treated?”
For Cuevas, beyond the issue of resources and pay that both Henry and Honor outlined, her main concern is the little time investment that many programs put into the women’s game.
“At the university level, I feel like not enough time is invested into the women's program,” Cuevas said. “Not enough effort, not enough trying to build it. There’s talent, you just got to invest in it. I needed that at that stage of my life. I wanted them to invest in me as much as I was investing in showing up at 6:00 AM for training. I just feel like it’s the bare minimum. It wasn't enough, you know?”
From those conversations outlining the challenges they faced at the collegiate and pro level came the idea for Find Your Football.
As Cuevas puts it, the organization’s goal is “to facilitate opportunities and resources that we were missing, or we didn't know of. Anything to help support these players, both girls, and boys.”
“We come at soccer and football from very different angles, and at the end of the day, it's what brought us together, ” added Lily. “So Find Your Football is a tool that we use to help people find their way. It’s about creating a community, and there's a lot of people joining us on this mission. We're not a club, and we're not about pulling players away from different things. We just want to give them opportunities. We want to bring young girls together. We want to show them that there are professional soccer players that came out of this area. We may not have a professional team, but you can do it. And here are the options. Here's how we'll do it. And we'll help walk you through that process.”
In the end, for Find Your Football, it’s all about making the path easier for aspiring players who are hungry to dive into soccer.
“We're just using all the resources we've gained through playing soccer, playing pro from college, all the connections we might make,” Henry said. “At the end of the day, we're trying to grow football on the whole. We're trying to create opportunities and possibilities for this kid from the Bronx or this kid from Queens that may want to play pro. Maybe I can use my connections to get them into the door.”
The past few years have involved many late-night talks and hard work from the three founders to continue to grow the organization. Whether it’s frequent pick-up games to get young and old players involved in well-structured competition or large-scale tournaments to expand the community of players in New York, Find Your Football has slowly grown into a huge network of soccer aficionados with varying degrees of experience and expertise. Their last event just before the COVID-19 pandemic was an all women’s 5v5 tournament that had a full twelve teams signing up to play, which is a testament to the tremendous reach that Find Your Football has been able to have over the past three years.
Their growth is not over, though, and all three founders agree that there is much left to be done.
“Our goal is to become the football hub in NYC,” said Lily. “And I think our goal is also to create a sustainable ecosystem for women's football -- not only at the professional level but trickling down as well. Being able to bring in creatives, photographers, editors, writers and getting these people more involved so that we can have a cyclical ecosystem where we can pay each other, and we can give each other what we deserve for the work that we've all put in.”
To reach that goal, though, Henry stressed that they “want partnerships and sponsorships to do the things that we want to do here in New York. And that's going to come from local restaurants, local shops, local places with space that we can use to host our events. We are the people on the ground that are in the community. We grew up here, we know what's happening, and we have a pretty good idea of what needs to be done.”
While the past few years have seen the organization primarily focus on women’s soccer, they are committed to working for the benefit of all types of players. No matter how far Find Your Football ends up going, though, all three founders agree that the feedback and support they receive from players, kids, parents, creators, and other members of the soccer community is what fuels them to continue to grow and work for the benefit of all players.
“At the end of the day, we all love soccer. We enjoy just bringing everyone together, the togetherness of it, and just literally not caring about how your day was -- not caring about anything. You're just showing up, and you're enjoying the time with your friends, whether it's a pick-up game, whether it's a girl's tournament, whether it’s a kid's clinic, at the end of the day, everyone's forgetting about anything else. They're just there to play. And they're enjoying the atmosphere, the moment that they're in. And I think that's what we enjoy the most, being able to give that happiness.”
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As for what’s to come, Find Your Football will be hosting Youth Player Pro Pick-Up games in Brooklyn. Space is limited, so click the link here to reserve your spot today for the FREE Youth Player Pro Pick-Up on March 13th.
Keep an eye on these women as they revolutionize football in the community.
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