NEW YORK – Crystal Dunn’s career is itself a snapshot of the recent history of women’s football. Eleven years after earning her first cap for the U.S. Women’s National Team, she is a Women’s World Cup winner, an Olympic gold medalist and a U.S. and England champion, to name just a few of her accolades.
It makes her an obvious choice as an honoree on Tuesday at Empowerment on the East River, a unique event organized by Black Players for Change, an organization founded by MLS players in 2020. Dunn’s trophy crop only scratches the surface. about the impact she has already left on the game. The 32-year-old has not only had a front-row seat as women’s soccer in the US, a predominantly white sport, has become more diverse over the past decade. As one of the few Black veterans in the USWNT, she has played a key role in leading the shift.
“I feel like I rarely celebrate myself,” she told CBS Sports on Tuesday. “Everything that has been said about me tonight makes you realize that you have inspired people. You have actually done so much good just by playing football and I don’t think I ever do that.” [these] moments for granted.”
Of course, Dunn is quick to admit that black people have existed in the sport for a while, long before she made her national team debut in 2013. Many, including BPC co-founder and president Earl Edwards Jr., are pointing the finger at USWNT goalkeeper Briana. Scurry as one of the first visible black players on both U.S. national teams. She was the starter in the U.S. opening match of the 1999 Women’s World Cup, a 3-0 win over Denmark in a sold-out MetLife Stadium, then known as Giants Stadium. Edwards acknowledged that Scurry not only played a key role in the team’s 1999 Women’s World Cup win, but that she was the only Black player on a roster that ushered in a new era in women’s sports.
“In ’99 I was seven years old and playing football, but there was no dream at the time to go pro,” said Edwards, a goalkeeper for the New England Revolution. “MLS had been around for three years and wasn’t that mainstream yet. Even watching Premier League games and stuff like that wasn’t mainstream in ’99, so attending a sold-out football event at the American Football stadium was my first real experience with high level football and it was that ’99 women’s team and Briana Scurry was the representative at the time and she’s a huge hero of mine to this day.
The inaccessibility of soccer in the US was not just limited to a lack of airtime at the time. Dunn said her parents’ move from Queens to the New York City suburbs on Long Island served as her introduction to the sport and is one reason why she and her Black colleagues feel the need to build courts in communities of color. Dunn’s experiences as a young athlete also fuel her desire to give back.
“I was the only black girl on the team for a long time, until I was about 15,” Dunn said. “It takes a long time for me to navigate a space where I’m learning the fundamentals of this sport, but also learning about my identity, learning how I fit into the world and there were some growing pains.”
The challenges of being a Black woman in American soccer later extended to her experiences on the national team.
“Even the way I navigated the national team was not easy in some ways,” she said. “I’m a dark-skinned girl. I wore my hair in braids. I had my hair in certain hairstyles that didn’t look like everyone else’s, and how I was marketed or how I felt like I was the world was seen is something I had to navigate, and there [weren’t] lots of people I could ask for advice. I had to rely solely on agents and family members and friends to show who I was as best I could without being judged by the world.”
Dunn admitted that in her early days with the national team, she didn’t feel comfortable wearing her hair naturally, but in a period of increased diversity in the locker rooms of the USWNT and NWSL, the stigma she once felt fortunately is a thing of the past.
“I guess I just got older and said, ‘Okay, I just don’t care anymore.’ … It felt so liberating,” she said. “A lot of black women are judged by their hair. The way you wear your hair can make someone look at you and take you seriously or not take you seriously, and I think when I talk about marketing, those are things that play into that. I wear my hair in a natural style – people will think this is not nice for the fan base, or things like that. There are a lot of things you think about as a child that you shouldn’t do. You should just show up and play football… I can’t stress enough how important it is to have more women of color on teams because those conversations don’t feel comfortable anymore because there are so many of us in a locker room where we can talk about her talking and it’s not such an odd topic of discussion.’
The USWNT is currently a symbol of the growth that Dunn observes. She was one of several Black players on the team that won Olympic gold last summer, including a front line that stole the show. Trinity Rodman, Sophia Smith and Mallory Swanson scored ten goals between them in Paris and may now be the new faces of a team that looks more like the country it represents. The increasing level of inclusivity has only served the USWNT well, Edwards argued, an important way for the team to continue its already groundbreaking legacy.
“Having athletes like Crystal and some other girls on the team who have come through the ranks and are able to provide the representation that is lacking on the national team has been a great transition and something that has benefited the team .” said Edwards. “It’s not just that they represent and benefit from that, but what they provide on the pitch is on another level and as a country we are reaping the benefits of our women’s national team continually being at the top pedestal.”
As sports locker rooms become more diverse, both Dunn and Edwards have identified that there is room for growth in leadership positions. People of color are still underrepresented in coaching roles within football, as well as in the front office and other positions of power, although this has not stopped some from taking meaningful steps. Wilfried Nancy of the Columbus Crew became the first Black coach to win the MLS Cup in 2023, while Seb Hines became the first Black coach to win a trophy in the NWSL when the Orlando Pride won the NWSL Shield on Sunday.
Edwards recently had the chance to ask a former teammate, Kevin Molino, about Nancy and also talk to the head coach himself about the impact he has had as a trailblazing coach in MLS.
“I pulled Moline aside before I went up to him and said, ‘Yo, what’s he like? Is he cool? He seems really cool.’ He tells me, ‘He’s cool, but the most important thing is he gives everyone respect,'” Edwards said. “The way Kevin Molino, a black player, could brag about his coach, I had never seen that. I then approached Wilfried Nancy directly and only praised him. I told him he does such a great job, I love everything he does.” , what he stands for, what he stands for and told him I had a lot of respect for him. He was almost floored by it, you could tell I. He really appreciated the comments, but even in that interaction I could feel a relationship that is innate and difficult to describe, but it is representation that I am talking about.”
Representation, Edwards noted, was equally important to Pride’s triumph.
“He gets a lot of credit because he’s the first black coach and you hear his accent so you know he’s English. He’s Native American,” Edwards said of Hines, his former teammate at MLS’ Orlando City. “He has a great family, but the family structure he has, the person he is and the background he has allows you to interact with so many different people. For what it’s worth, his wife is white and so the multicultural build of his household alone means he can hang out with probably every player on the team. Somehow I’m sure he can find a way to handle his team and that will result in a club hungry for a winningest trophy. trophy out there.”
Dunn acknowledged that there is a sense of camaraderie among black professionals in soccer because of their shared goal of creating a more equitable sport, something she thinks about much more these days than adding to her overstuffed trophy cabinet.
“We’re all rooting for each other. We all want success because when someone does something great, you’ve opened the door,” she said. “It’s been a challenge, I have to say. Being a woman of color in football hasn’t been easy. It’s been really isolating at times. It’s been a challenge in so many moments and I think the most important thing for me is that I feel that I’m going to leave the game in a better place.”