Ruth

Harker

Ruth Harker grew up in Bridgeton Terrace, a north St. Louis neighborhood that no longer exists. It was consumed by airport expansion. She came from a single-parent household where her mother, Kathy, raised four children on her own. Organized sports weren't a given; she held off on soccer until high school to spare her mother the cost, then worked to pay her own cab fare to get to and from games and practices.

In her freshman year, at 14, her coach moved her into goal after realizing she didn't have foot skills. While still in high school, she traveled to Europe with the Trammel-Crow Women Team and played games in Sweden and Finland. After high school she enrolled at UMSL — a Division II program that competed against Division I opposition — where she set career records that still stand more than four decades later. That trajectory — from first touch to the college record books in roughly eight years — ran almost entirely through St. Louis, and would put her in position to vie for a spot on the first-ever USWNT.

In 1985 she was invited to the U.S. Olympic Sports Festival in Baton Rouge, where the best players from across the country had been assembled and from which the inaugural USWNT would be selected. She was voted MVP of the Festival and chosen as one of only two goalkeepers for the national team. "All I was thinking is 'What? This is so surreal,'" she said of the moment her coach told her.

On August 21, 1985 she came off the bench against Denmark in the United States Women's National Team's first-ever international match, at the Mundialito tournament in Italy. She started the next two matches. The teammates she played alongside — Michelle Akers among them — would go on to define the first generation of the USWNT. The program had not existed before that year. Harker puts it plainly: they “turned the lights on” for the future of women's soccer in America.

The team that assembled for the 1985 Mundialito did not continue — when the tournament ended there was no league to return to, no next season. Harker was 22. She stepped away having represented her country in the program's first-ever matches. Afterward her mother revealed that she had been blind in her left eye since birth, a fact Ruth kept from coaches, teammates and national team medical staff throughout her entire career.

What she has done since the game ended carries the shape of her own story. She grew up with limited means in a neighborhood that no longer exists, started playing late, and spent her entire career carrying a secret that could have been used against her. She knows what it is to feel shut out — by circumstance, by health, by the assumption that the game isn't for people like you. Her post-career work has been directed at precisely those kids: service on the Easter Seals board, volunteering with the YMCA and the Mathews-Dickey Boys and Girls Club, mentoring young female athletes, using her soccer connections to support children navigating health challenges and personal adversity. "My job is now more important to give back to those who need it," she has said. The kid who earned cab fare to get to practice became the person who makes sure others can get there too.