The Youth Issue
A Soccer Phenom Puts the ‘I’ in Team
Benjamin Lowy/Reportage, for The New York Times.
By TIM CROTHERS
Published: March 25, 2011
Last spring, Indi Cowie performed her freestyle soccer routine for 76,000 fans during halftime at a Chelsea-Manchester United match in Manchester. But standing backstage at the Green Hope High talent show in Cary, N.C., she was nervous. She may have won freestyle competitions in Rome and shot Sony Playstation commercials in Prague, but she’s not exactly the popular girl in high school. They even spelled her name wrong in the event program. But this 16-year-old nobody does things that no other girl on the planet can do.
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Just before intermission, Cowie took the stage and began juggling a ball with her feet until suddenly she popped it in the air, swished her right foot around the ball twice, kicked it up again, then rotated her left foot around once without letting the ball touch the floor. She bent her right foot back behind her body and caught the ball on the sole of her shoe. “I could feel the excitement building in the auditorium,” she recalled. “I could hear the oohs and the aahs. I could sense the shock.”
For her finale, Cowie lay on her back and juggled the ball over her head with her feet. As they applauded, Green Hope students turned to their friends with the same question: Who is she?
Indi Armstrong Cowie learned to walk chasing a soccer ball. At 10 she played on a coed team and once scored all seven goals in a 7-6 win. By that time, Cowie could juggle the ball 2,000 times without stopping.
The Cowies are Scots who settled in North Carolina, and when Indi was 14, the family went back to Glasgow for the second semester of her sophomore year. While they were there, Cowie tried out for the Glasgow Celtic women’s club and was asked to play with the team.
In her first match, against a Canadian youth national team, Cowie was subbed in at the half and promptly scored three goals. “From the first moment Indi stepped on the pitch at tryouts, I was blown away by how creatively she could dribble the ball,” says Paul Brownlie, one of Cowie’s coaches in Scotland. “She’s just a phenomenal blend of technique and determination.”
But her most remarkable talent, and the one that has garnered her the most fame, is freestyle. “Indi is by far the most advanced female freestyler in the world that I’ve seen,” says Dan Magness, who holds several Guinness world records in the sport. “Her videos include tricks no other girls are doing. My daughter watches them and wants to be like Indi.”
Cowie had never heard of freestyle soccer until one day in 2005 when she met John Farnworth, the freestyle world champion, and he offered to do a demonstration for her. “It was absolutely mind-blowing the tricks John could do with a soccer ball,” she says. “For me, it opened up a whole new world of possibilities.”
She started trying to teach herself an Around the World: circling a foot around the ball during juggling. “I worked on that for about a month, and then one day I finally landed it,” she says. “That moment was so satisfying that I committed to becoming the best I could be at freestyle.”
She practices for at least 90 minutes a day and wears through a pair of specialized freestyling sneakers every month. The family garage is her laboratory.
“There are times when there’s an enormous bang and I wake up at 5 in the morning thinking there’s an intruder in the house,” says Indi’s father, Logan Cowie. “Then I realize it’s just Indi practicing her latest trick.”
Cowie sleeps in a Celtic jersey under a Celtic bedspread. Fitba, slang for football in Scotland, is part of her e-mail address and the license plate on the car she is learning to drive. She carries an orange soccer ball to school every day, but she’s not playing for her high-school team because she thinks she can improve more by training with a boys’ club team. She says her best friend is her 12-year-old sister, Skye, and most of her other buddies come from a Facebook community of freestylers, some of whom she’s never actually met.
“Indi’s an under-the-radar flier, not one of these alpha females strutting around school like a peacock,” says Allyson Lynch, a Green Hope English teacher. “I don’t think Indi fits into a high-school stereotype. You cannot find her in any John Hughes film.”
It hasn’t been easy to be different, especially on the soccer field. “At the beginning of one game I got the ball and beat three girls to score a goal, and my coach pulled me off the field,” Cowie remembers. “He said, ‘You should have passed.’ I said, ‘But I scored a goal, Coach.’ He sat me out for the rest of the half. At halftime he asked me, ‘Are you ready to play properly?’ I said, ‘Sure.’ I did the same thing, and he took me off the field for the rest of the game.” Cowie was 10. She recalls another match during which her teammates screamed at her to pass every time she got the ball. She still scored a hat trick in that game.
Cowie sees herself as belonging to a world where legendary attackers like Diego Maradona, Cristiano Ronaldo and Wayne Rooney are celebrated for their talent and, yes, their selfishness. Her parents think it’s partly the Scot in her: Cowie is stubborn. But she admits that it hurt when she once received an anonymous phone call from a girl saying, “We all hate you”; when she checked the caller ID, she realized that the call came from a teammate.
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“Maybe that’s why I like freestyle so much,” Cowie says, “because I don’t have any teammates to worry about.”
“Girls’ soccer becomes toxic sometimes because there is so much jealousy,” says her mother, Judith. “Over the years Indi would wonder what was wrong with her, and there would be tears, and I’d keep telling her, ‘I know it’s been tough on you, but it’s going to get better.’ She’d say: ‘Will it, Mum? When?’ ”
Perhaps when she goes to college at the University of North Carolina. It has been Cowie’s dream to play soccer there ever since she saw the Tar Heel legend Mia Hamm score a goal and Cowie recognized a familiar and comforting single-mindedness. Anson Dorrance, the U.N.C. coach, is not allowed to comment on recruits until they officially sign with the Tar Heels, but he is known to celebrate selfishness in his players. The Tar Heels have won 21 of the 30 national championships played in the sport. His roster is loaded with players like Cowie.
“All the great Tar Heels are incredibly self-motivated, and they thirst to score goals,” says Dewan Bader, Cowie’s coach with the boys’ club. “That’s Indi, and I believe she has a chance to break boundaries in soccer the way she has in freestyle.”
Which brings up a question for Cowie: If she had to choose between being the best freestyler or the best soccer player in the world, which would she be?
“You mean I have to pick one?” Cowie asks. “I can’t. Both.”
None of the other acts in the Green Hope talent show really had a chance. After intermission, the auditorium was still buzzing about what Cowie did. It was a coming out of sorts. Another performer walked up to her at the end of the show and told her, “You’re my hero.”
The grand prize was a hundred-dollar bill. Cowie promptly gave the money back, asking that it be added it to the funds raised by the show. Her name would be misspelled in the subsequent article in The Green Hope Gazette.
There was a party after the show. Everybody was going. Not Cowie. She found her parents and her sister, and they drove home giggling over the idea that Indi could actually be somebody’s hero. The others then went to bed. Indi went to the garage.
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