She might be the toughest athlete in Dallas. I’m talking about the Canadian, Rylee Foster, the goalkeeper for Dallas Trinity FC.
If you don’t yet know, Dallas Trinity FC is our city’s professional women’s soccer team. Now in its second season, the team plays in the Cotton Bowl. I’ve been to several games so far, last year and this, taken my family. If you like sports, it’s a fun, inexpensive night out.
On Saturday, the team will help close out the State Fair as it hosts Club América from Mexico City in the inaugural State Fair of Texas Clásico. It’ll be a huge game, maybe the biggest in the team’s history.
In August, before the game against Brooklyn FC, just before kickoff, I spoke with Jim Neil, founder and CEO of the team. He talked about the team with intense passion and pride. Not a passive owner, the guy is definitely bought in. His whole family is bought in. Most of the Neil family works for the team in some capacity.
He told me about Foster, the team’s new goalie. “She’s great, such a fighter. She’s really fun to watch,” Neil said. “Oh, and she’s also hard of hearing. She wears hearing aids but not during the game.”
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Foster comes from a family with disabilities. Her mother is deaf; her sister, like her, is also hard of hearing. Foster is the first athlete with hearing loss to sign with a Division I professional women’s soccer team.
But that’s not why I think she might be the toughest athlete in Dallas.
Like so many professional athletes, Foster is a journeyman: Liverpool, Everton, Durham, from England to Phoenix to Dallas. To give your mind and body to such a physical game takes a special sort of human. I’ve been around enough professional athletes to know that it takes something special to endure that kind of life, that for most professional athletes such a life is far more arduous than it is glamorous.
But that’s also not what makes her Dallas’ toughest athlete.
You see, in 2021 she was on holiday in Finland, her first real vacation in years, when she almost died in a car accident. The weather had turned, her seat belt failed, and she was thrown through the windshield. She broke her neck in seven places. One second a world-class athlete, in the blink of an eye she was fighting for her life.
Dallas Trinity FC goalkeeper Rylee Foster nearly died in a car accident. Contributing columnist Joshua Whitfield says her comeback makes her the toughest athlete in Dallas.
Dallas Trinity FC
Which is why, when I got a chance to sit down and talk with her recently, before anything else, I couldn’t help but ask a simple question: “Why didn’t you quit?”
That question might have revealed more about me than about her. Incredulous that anyone wouldn’t call it a career after such a terrible accident, I couldn’t immediately understand why on earth she simply didn’t go home and play it safe the rest of her life. Lucky to be alive, lucky to walk, why didn’t she just quit?
“To quit is too easy,” she told me, taking a deep breath, leaning back in her chair. Her words would have sounded like a cliché if it weren’t for what she’d been through.
Of course, she admitted there were days she wanted to quit. For a long time, she was fighting merely to regain whatever her new normal would be. Only gradually did the idea that she might return to the field take shape in her mind. But by then it was a different sort of passion than had driven her before.
“There’s a burning desire in me,” Foster told me. Talking about her faith and her family, what she called her “core foundations,” she said, “we worked our butts off,” her entire family, to get where she was. “I come from people with disabilities,” she said. Working hard, and working hard for one another, was simply the way her family lived. Foster’s sister put her own schooling on hold to care for her in the hospital. What Rylee has achieved, they achieved together. What Rylee suffered, they suffered together.
On the inside of Rylee’s left arm is tattooed the words “You’ll never walk alone,” the Liverpool FC anthem. She got the tattoo to honor her late grandmother, yet it now honors more.
But the accident also caused her to rediscover her own will, her own desire, at least in a new way. Supported and cared for by family and friends, as she got out of bed, free from that medical contraption called a halo after five months, free from the neck brace five months after that, she asked herself, “Who do I want to be?”
“This is my calling,” she told me, talking about her journey back to soccer. “Now, I get to write the script,” Foster said of her newfound sense of purpose. “This time it was about me.”
That’s what I mean when I say she’s got my vote for the toughest athlete in Dallas. Maybe a miracle, certainly a lot of grit, Rylee Foster is one of those rare athletes who, once you know their story, you can’t but feel lucky to watch them play. Because hers is a toughness that’s not just physical. It’s interior, spiritual even.
Rylee Foster knows who she is. She’s playing the game for herself. And I don’t know, it’s just that seems to me to be the whole point of the game, the discovery of self. I mean, isn’t that what sports reveal, our character? That’s why I call her tough.
The last question I asked Foster was about the difference between playing soccer at 7 vs. playing soccer at 27. Is there a difference in her joy now as compared to then?
“Oh, gosh yes,” she laughed. “My version of joy now is fullness of life.” Now she plays the game with a wisdom and thankfulness she certainly didn’t have when she was younger.
At least not before she became the toughest athlete in Dallas.