Rachel Yankey – Black History Month x Worcester City Women FC
In our final article in celebration of Black History Month, summer signing and forward Jacqueline Corazza expresses how former Lioness and Arsenal legend Rachel Yankey inspires her in her journey as a footballer and as a Black woman.
I kick things off by giving my credits and purest admiration to this leading woman, Rachel Yankey. By leading, I mean that she leads future generations, inspiring young girls like us with this skin colour!
Her story touches my heart deeply because so many girls can relate to the discrimination she has suffered when trying to do what she loves, being overlooked in every way and working harder because she had not been given what she really deserved. In particular, I speak of the difficulties she finds in playing the sport of football, as she talks about in her autobiographies and her interviews, Rachel was not given the opportunity to play with a women’s team until later on in her life. From a young age, she was forced into pretending to be a boy. She cut her hair short to avoid being recognised as a girl, and, as a result, she was allowed to play.
My story is similar, and hearing her story makes me feel as though I am not the only one. Back in my home country, Italy, where this love for the sport bloomed, I managed to get into boys’ teams. After a few years spent playing with them, I was rejected and not allowed to play and completely withdrew from the sport. Consequently, I dropped out of football for some time. With no available women’s team for me to play in, it made me fall into a loss of identity. It made me hate my identity and hate being a woman because I thought I was the problem. At the time, I didn’t know any female figures, especially those who were black, for me to be able to follow in their footsteps. I cut my hair and pretended to be a boy just to play football and join in with the boys as, like Rachel, I was overlooked.
Eventually, I fully overcame that period of my life, as Rachel did, and knowing that this figure exists makes me keep going relentlessly in this dream of mine. Rachel Yankey, this great star, has managed to show every single Black girl that there is hope and show that we can actually achieve things, and this is so important for girls in the future. She teaches us to look inside ourselves and see the value and the power that we have. This fire that we OWN as Black WOMEN.