Leaving It Behind
Top Canadian prospect in high school. Record-holder for most career goals and assists at Rice University. Played professionally in Europe.
Lauren Rivas has excelled at soccer all throughout her life. While her dedication and perseverance led her to play pro soccer overseas, one day, she decided to walk away.
Rivas grew up in Ottawa amidst winter sports like hockey and ringette, but her heart always belonged to soccer.
“From my very first game onwards, I loved the sport,” Rivas said. “I was always very intense about it. I was that kid that was out there every day, practicing. I would bring my soccer ball to school to juggle at recess, or when the bell would let out for a break, I would just sprint to go play soccer with the boys.”
Her devotion to soccer didn’t stop at playing during recess or playing for club teams in Ottawa. At the time, Toronto was the developmental hub for the best young soccer players in Canada, and Rivas begged her family to let her go train on weekends.
“I’m thankful for what my parents sacrificed to give me that chance,” Rivas said. “From eighth through 11th grade, I was traveling to Toronto, which was four and a half hours away from where I lived, just to train. I would go every weekend from September through April. Most of the time, my mom would take me by train, and we would stay with uncles and cousins. I really couldn’t have the normal weekends that most of my friends had during high school because I had to train, but playing is what I really wanted to do.”
By the age of 15, Rivas was already receiving offers from various schools in the United States to play soccer, and her dream to compete at the collegiate level was within reach. The recruitment process, though, was not without its ups and downs.
“The recruiting process was kind of strange, but also really nice at the same time,” Rivas said. “It was nice because these coaches are pursuing you, but it’s also a bit stressful since you have to be honest with these coaches about the kind of scholarship you need and what you expect when it comes to playing time for each program. That was hard to navigate, especially if you think about how young you are when you're making that decision. I can’t believe I was having those conversations when I was only 15 years old.”
While Lauren received multiple offers from colleges in the U.S., her top choice ended up modifying their offer at the last minute, which left her with only a narrow amount of options to choose from.
“After my top choice changed their offer, I was just reaching out to any coaches that had emailed me in the past,” Rivas said. “And I reached out to Rice, and they still had a scholarship, thankfully. But they told me they needed to know in a week, so I just did the virtual tour probably 500 times and then called the coach and verbally committed. At the time, I was like, ‘Wow, this just worked out really well.’ But it was apparent that God was making a clear path for me to go to Rice.”
At Rice, Rivas’ relationship with soccer and God was tested in ways she never anticipated. While her freshman year was an exciting challenge for her due to the level of competition she faced, her sophomore year was plagued with injuries and unfortunate results on the field. Lauren’s junior year would ultimately be her best year from an athletic standpoint, scoring 14 goals and notching 7 assists in just 19 starts. More importantly for Rivas, though, she would also end up learning a lot about her relationship with God.
“Every year I would sit down with my mentor, and we would set up all my academic goals, my soccer goals, and then my spiritual goals,” Rivas said. “My junior year, one of my spiritual goals was to recognize that I love soccer so much, but that it’s really hard for me to love God the same way that he calls me to -- with all my heart, all my soul, and all my strength. I just love soccer so much that it's so easy for me to put that above my relationship with God.”
“I knew that about myself going into that season. And then the more success that I had with soccer, the more I could feel like my relationship with God taking a back seat and not being a priority. And the same was happening with my classes. I would go to my lecture, open up my laptop, start taking notes, and then I would just go on Top Drawer Soccer to look at everyone’s stats to see how many goals I needed to be Conference Player of the Year, for example. It was bad.”
That 2014 season, Rivas helped Rice win their first-ever Conference USA championship, but the experience was not as satisfying as she had expected.
“I remember waking up the next morning after winning the conference tournament, and one of my teammates was like, ‘I just feel so good. I feel so satisfied.’,” Rivas said. “And for me, I just really didn’t feel that way. In my head, I was just thinking ‘Yeah, we won and that's cool, but it just feels like another soccer game.’”
Rivas was ultimately sidelined for Rice’s first-ever NCAA Tournament appearance after suffering an ankle injury in the week leading up to the game. Rice ended up losing that game 3-0 to the University of Texas.
“I spent all day leading up to the game going from the training room to the doctor, to the training room,” Rivas said. “Finally I just sat down and felt like God was saying, ‘I told you,’ but not in a mean way. I just knew that God's call was to love him more than soccer and that I like hadn't been doing that.”
Even with Rice losing that game, she saw it as a learning experience. No matter how many wins and accomplishments that Rice had in her time on the team, none of it really satisfied her and none of it was more important than her relationship with God.
And while her senior year was a success on the field from an individual perspective, her team was not as successful as the previous season.
“I had a good season that year -- individually,” Rivas said. “But I'd still get bothered when we would lose games and still had that drive where I wanted to win everything. But I also started to recognize that it was not the end all be all, and that there's more to life than soccer and that there's more to soccer than winning -- like my relationships with teammates or my relationships with the coaches.”
After a successful college career where she set a school-record with 39 goals and 28 assists, Rivas looked for opportunities to play professionally overseas, and in 2016 she wound up signing for UMF Selfoss in Úrvalsdeild kvenna, Iceland’s top tier league. From the change in the level of play to the drastic lifestyle changes, adapting to Iceland was a struggle for Lauren.
“When I got to Iceland, that experience was just so different than college soccer,” Rivas said. “In college, you have no time to breathe because you're playing, you're practicing, you're doing school. There's just so much stuff. It's very different when you go to the pro game because you don't have school, so then it's like, what do you do all day? It just wasn’t what I was expecting.”
“It was a hard adjustment going pro, especially in women's soccer since our salaries are just different. In Iceland, the international players are the highest-paid players, and we were still not getting paid that well. You can live off of your wages from the club while you're in season, but if I were to go home and train during the offseason, it would have been really, really hard to live off of that salary.”
When it comes to the experience of playing abroad, Lauren said, “I was really grateful to have the opportunity to play professionally, but it just wasn’t what I was expecting. It was hard, too, because so many of my friends thought it was so cool that I was playing professional soccer, but I think maybe people thought it was a lot more glamorous than it really was.”
When it came to day-to-day situations with her new club, the conditions were also not exactly what Lauren had grown used to while playing at college, which is something she said she “took for granted.”
While she had ideal facilities for training and rehab in college, that all stopped once, she got to Iceland. UMF Selfoss didn’t offer simple treatment like taping your ankles, and at the house the club provided for her, there was no working shower.
“We basically had a bathtub and a car that probably wasn’t safe to drive,” Rivas said.
Eventually, Rivas realized that a pro career overseas was no longer what she wanted to do.
“At one point, I just looked around, and I just knew that soccer wasn’t going to satisfy me,” Rivas said. “I saw a lot of people playing that were a lot older than me, and I knew that if I were to stick with a professional soccer career, I would have to live out of a suitcase for a long time. I had already become tired of friendships that lasted less than a year because you're only in that place. The past four years of my life had been all of these short term friendships, and I knew that my lifestyle playing pro wasn’t going to satisfy me.”
Looking back at the decision to leave her pro career behind, Rivas doesn’t seem to have any regrets. In fact, she’s actually proud of her decision to walk away from the game she once loved.
“We were at the end of the season in Iceland, and I was healthy. There was no reason that I couldn't keep playing, but I chose to walk away from it. I'm so proud to have made it that far because it was always my dream to play pro, but I think I'm almost more proud of walking away from soccer,” Rivas said.
“In the end, it was my choice, and it was not a decision I would've made before I was a Christian or before I knew the goodness of God, and how much that relationship could satisfy me.”
After returning to the U.S., Rivas has continued to stay involved with the game, even if she walked away from pro soccer. For the past four years, she has been working with the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, a sports ministry that works on middle school, high school, and college campuses sharing the gospel and helping coaches and athletes learn more about God and how competing can be a way to honor God. In addition to her job at the ministry, Lauren has also been working as a volunteer assistant for the Houston Baptist University soccer team.
Rivas’ climb through the ranks as a talented young prospect to her pro experience in Iceland and now mentoring and coaching a new generation of athletes has given her a wide perspective on the challenges in women’s soccer, and some of those barriers have already been broken.
“When I was growing up, there wasn't a women's pro league in the U.S., so I really didn't know much about women's sports,” Rivas said. “And then also, no one was doing that. I didn't know anyone who had played pro on the girls’ side of things. It wasn’t really normal. The NWSL didn’t come around until I was much older, and even in its early years, it wasn’t a sure thing that it’d last. I just didn't know much about the opportunities we could have. I knew you could play pro, but I didn't really know what that looked like.”
Although she’s glad to see that a path to the pros is clearer for girls today, she still wishes there were more opportunities for women to play at a pro level below the NWSL -- especially for international players living in the United States who face even greater barriers to play in the top division.
“Sometimes it's tempting every once in a while to try to play pro again because I still really like to play,” Rivas said. “But it’s frustrating because there’s just the NWSL, and then the next best thing is just a big jump lower. It's just been hard to find good soccer to play.”
Even though Rivas is still involved with soccer these days, I asked her if she regrets stepping away from pro soccer after dedicating so much of her life to playing the sport.
“It's not the end all be all,” she said with a sense of peace “I love soccer, but it's not everything, and that's okay. It’s a part of my life, but it doesn't need to be everything.”
Words by Pablo Bayona Sapag
Photography & Interview by Diana Hernandez
