The shot is low and hard, grazing the keeper’s fingertips before the ball slots neatly into the back of the net. Cheers erupt from the sidelines, and a vuvuzela sounds its long, gooselike honk. The goal-scorer’s teammates pull her into a sweaty, euphoric group hug.
The scene could be from just about any recent rec soccer game in South Africa, except for one thing. Every player on the field is eligible for a senior discount. A few are in grasping distance of age 80.
Off the field, many of the women have extraordinarily challenging lives, heading families shredded by poverty, addiction, and AIDS.
Why We Wrote This
A story focused on
Older women in South Africa are often overlooked. Beka Ntsanwisi brings them together to care for themselves and their soccer teammates.
But on the field, they are simply athletes, sprinting for a breakaway, faking out the keeper, punching a throw-in out of the air with their forehead.
“You go home too tired to remember why you were stressed,” says Selina Malungana, who took up soccer two years ago at age 70.
This league is the brainchild of Beka Ntsanwisi, a former gospel radio DJ who has dedicated much of her life to an unlikely cause. She wants to coax women in their golden years onto the soccer field.
“Who would think to do something crazy like that?” Ms. Malungana asks. “But it was a very good idea.”
Lightening the load
The idea for a soccer league for older women took shape in the early 2000s. At the time, AIDS was tearing through this part of northern South Africa, ferociously but quietly. “No one wanted to speak about it,” Ms. Ntsanwisi remembers.
She wanted to change that, so she began encouraging listeners of her popular radio show to call in and share their stories about HIV.
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