Georgia Cloepfil is an adjunct professor of Rhetoric, Writing and Public Discourse and the assistant women’s soccer coach at Whitman. Cloepfil has been at Whitman since 2021. She attended and played soccer at Macalester College before spending six years playing soccer professionally in six different countries. After getting an MFA at the University of Idaho, Cloepfil wrote a literary memoir, “The Striker and the Clock,” which details her experiences playing soccer professionally. Cloepfil sat down with The Wire to discuss her past experiences and her current career at Whitman.
How long have you been playing soccer? What made you choose soccer as a career path?
I’ve played since I was around three years old. I loved it. I played all sorts of sports growing up … I always knew I was gonna play in college, whether that was D1 or D3 was a big decision point in my life. But I chose a D3 small liberal arts college ’cause I wanted that sort of academic environment too. That choice led me to being a standout player on my team and left me feeling, at the end of my college career, like I still had room to grow. I had a lot of confidence and I had a lot of love for the sport still, which doesn’t always happen, especially if you go into more rigorous programs. I had a lot of friends [who were] better than me that stopped playing when they were in school. So I just loved it still and wanted to do everything I could to keep playing for a long time.
As I understand it, you played for your team at Macalester, and then you traveled all over playing soccer.
Yes, I went to Australia and then Sweden, and then Korea, Lithuania, Norway, Seattle … A season in every place, basically.
What brought you to Whitman specifically?
I really value the balance of the student athletes’ lives [here]. They get to be themselves and have all these adventures and also be extremely intense and dedicated to their sport… I was so lucky that the job came up, and the timing worked out, and that this gets to be my first experience coaching.
When you were playing soccer, did you picture coaching as a career path?
No, not at all. Day to day, I just wanted to score goals and play on the best team possible. It’s such a singular mindset… I’m a really achievement-oriented person. I feel like that’s common with athletes, and that is also what helped me continue writing to the point where I got to publishing. You have to have a level of endurance in that coaching. To be engaged with more developed players is really what is enjoyable, and it’s hard to get those opportunities. So I feel really lucky.
You coach a women’s team here at Whitman. Do you feel that there are specific challenges to being a mentor for women’s players in this specific sport?
I’ve never coached men. I would be curious to see how that would be. Part of the thing I love about my job, especially in the role of an assistant coach, is that I get to be quite emotionally close [with the players] … People, especially women, are going through intense emotional highs and lows. Their lives have been invested in this sport, and as a team, they’re losing and winning as an individual. They’re coming up against struggles, injuries, not getting playing time … I have dealt with almost all of these things myself based on how long my career was … It’s definitely a challenge. It takes a really high level of emotional intelligence to be able to be a real help in those moments. But I hope that that’s one of my strengths.
I think another part of coaching as a woman is [that] the expectations are that coaches will yell and discipline … That sort of masculine framework for coaching is slowly being dismantled. That’s being understood as like … it’s actually not great to shout at people to motivate them. It’s actually okay to bring more “feminine characteristics” into that space, whether you’re a man or a woman or a non-binary person. All sorts of characteristics are helpful.
Do you feel like that’s something you’ve learned as you’ve had this job?
Totally. I have chilled out because of this job. As a player I was really intense and wanted the discipline … You sort of realize that that doesn’t suit all the people here, and it doesn’t suit the character of this team. I have learned a lot from the head coach, who had a ton of experience before she came to this job, about responding rather than just imposing your style of leadership.
You wrote a memoir, “The Striker and the Clock,” about your experiences playing soccer professionally. What compelled you to write that? Was that something that you always thought you would do?
There’s sort of like the twin loves of my life … Writing and soccer. I always knew that after I quit soccer, I would try and go to grad school and dedicate myself in an equal way to writing for some time to see if I could do that. While I was playing, I was taking all sorts of notes because that’s how I process the world, is through sentences and images and writing. I published an essay when I was in Korea about my time, and then that just kept growing while I was in grad school and throughout the next five to seven years …
[“The Striker and the Clock”] was a book that I really wanted to read while I was playing that spoke to more of a literary experience and a more nuanced experience than just a straightforward sports memoir … It’s hard to find good sports books now. I know of a few of them, but I just felt that that was something that could be written.
Do you think you would ever write another book?
Oh, I’m working on it … It’s about language acquisition and mythology and development and writing. I had a baby, so it’s sort of about tracking her acquisition of language and selfhood and my relationship to writing and ambition. So it is a really different subject, but I feel like it encounters a lot of the same questions I did in the soccer book.
You were an RWPD professor. How was it to balance that position with coaching soccer?
I was very thankful for the opportunity to get to do both, because that’s my ideal state … Not thinking in soccer, the sort of like spacious freedom of that and being around people who are experiencing joy and then also thinking about words and reading in books. So the ability to both, it’s the perfect representation of the liberal arts experience.
Are there lessons that you learned throughout your career that you wanna pass along to the players here, or that you feel like you have been passing along?
I feel like the most common conversation and the most challenging conversation I have with [players] is that a lot of them are coming up against a real struggle in soccer for the first time in their lives. Maybe they have come from being the best player on their team, and now it’s more competitive. I played on teams. I was training with the Seattle Reign FC, with Megan Rapinoe on that team. Did I really think I was gonna take her spot? I don’t know.
Even if you aren’t getting on the field, even if you aren’t scoring goals, there’s always gonna be this goal you’re working towards, and then there’s setbacks … It’s really hard to keep showing up as yourself confidently and believing in yourself when you’re being told that you need to do more or do differently.
But in my writing life that has been so true as well. It’s like rejection after rejection, and you just have to believe: I have something that I need to say, and I’m gonna keep doing it ’cause I love it.
What’s the biggest piece of advice you could offer to young soccer players and to young writers?
The relationship that you need to have with the thing to keep going is that you really need to A) believe in yourself and B) love the thing. Like as a soccer player, you need to be out there sprinting in the morning. You need to be out there with the ball. It’s not very glamorous, and if you don’t enjoy those things or have a deep drive in you, how are you actually gonna do that? Same thing with writing. You just kinda have to keep doing it. It’s invisible work that’s not gonna be rewarded for a long time. But if you love the thing, you need to cultivate your relationship with it and just believe in it. And then I think good things will come.
