{"id":22428,"date":"2015-08-24T11:58:02","date_gmt":"2015-08-24T18:58:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/?p=22428"},"modified":"2015-08-24T11:58:02","modified_gmt":"2015-08-24T18:58:02","slug":"in-iran-a-womens-soccer-revolution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/2015\/08\/24\/in-iran-a-womens-soccer-revolution\/","title":{"rendered":"In Iran, a women\u2019s soccer revolution"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Wall Street Journal – TEHRAN, In a country where women aren\u2019t allowed to attend soccer games, the sport is taking off at the youth level\u2014in part thanks to an Iranian-American.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Women, and women\u2019s sports, still face stiff winds of resistance in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Hard-liners supported by the highest echelons of government oppose women even watching the country\u2019s most popular sport, much less playing it in public.<\/p>\n

But quietly, there is something of a women\u2019s soccer revolution going on here. And one of its leaders, of all people, is an Iranian-American.<\/p>\n

Katyoun Khosrowyar, 27, moved here at age 17. She has captained the Iranian women\u2019s national soccer team, lived through a battle over the wearing of head scarves on the field and, last year, evacuated a team of young Iranian girls from earthquake-ravaged Nepal.<\/p>\n

Khosrowyar\u2014Kat to friends and fans\u2014now holds a seat on the sport\u2019s national oversight board, in addition to coaching the national under-14 team. While the women\u2019s national team has struggled in top-level international competition and is currently in the process of being reconstituted, the sport is taking off at the youth level. Four thousand Iranian girls now play soccer in Iran\u2019s women\u2019s and girls\u2019 leagues, up from none in 2005, according to the country\u2019s soccer association.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe biggest challenge we have is the lack of leader coaches,\u201d said Elahe Arabameri, who recently took over as the national head of Iran\u2019s women\u2019s soccer programs. \u201cShe\u2019s just one, but she\u2019s got a great future.\u201d<\/p>\n

Khosrowyar and Arabameri hope the nuclear deal recently struck between Iran and six world powers will open Iran to the world again, ushering in a new era for women\u2019s sports that includes foreign corporate sponsorship deals and cooperative arrangements with European and perhaps even American soccer programs.<\/p>\n

That would be a far different world than the Iran of today, where women aren\u2019t allowed to attend soccer games. \u201cIn all of Tehran, maybe there are a thousand women who want to attend a soccer game,\u201d said Hamid Reza Taraghi, an adviser to Iran\u2019s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. \u201cPublic opinion is just against this.\u201d<\/p>\n

After the Islamic revolution swept aside the secular-minded Shah\u2019s regime in 1979, women\u2019s sports were virtually abolished by the cleric-led government.<\/p>\n

For more than two decades, riflery was the only international sport Iranian women could compete in internationally. It passed muster because it could be done individually and while fully covered, including wearing the head scarf, as is required of all women in public. Taekwondo also caught on for similar reasons.<\/p>\n

Soccer remained off-limits, but some women took up futsal, a similar game played indoors. Small futsal clubs for women quietly proliferated in the early 2000s.<\/p>\n

Then in 2005, Jordan invited Iran to send a women\u2019s soccer team to compete in the West Asian Football Federation Women\u2019s Championship. In a huge boost for women\u2019s sports, the Iranian government agreed to form a team. The hunt for talent began in futsalclubs.<\/p>\n

That is where Khosrowyar was discovered, newly arrived from America.<\/p>\n

As a senior in high school in Oklahoma, she traveled to Iran to visit relatives. The warm reception she encountered at 4 a.m. from family\u2014some of whom she had never met\u2014when she arrived at the airport in Tehran helped convince her to stay.<\/p>\n

She spoke no Farsi, but she had played soccer. She found a futsal club through a friend of her mother, and then jumped at the chance to try out for the national team, becoming its youngest member at the time at age 17.<\/p>\n

Despite only two months of training, the Iranian team finished second in that Asian Games. The government established a formal women\u2019s youth program the following year.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt just took off,\u201d said Khosrowyar, who became captain of the national team in 2008. \u201cIt was word-of-mouth, newspaper and magazine interviews.\u201d<\/p>\n

One important element came much more slowly: television. At first, TV shows, all state-controlled in Iran, avoided showing any images of women playing soccer, even when they were fully covered in tightfitting uniform hoods to conceal their hair. But eventually short clips began appearing on sports programs.<\/p>\n

Headwear deemed sufficiently Islamic by the government has long been a challenge. While Iran\u2019s team always wore its special full-body covering uniforms when traveling, many foreign teams declined to play in Iran because they were required to wear head-coverings on the field.<\/p>\n

The Iranian women\u2019s program found a way around the problem when the government allowed it to stage its home games in a special stadium set aside for Iran\u2019s Christian Armenian community. The government had previously granted permission for that community to use the field without requiring women to wear head coverings. Playing there, the Iranians wore the head-coverings; visiting teams didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Head covering became an even bigger issue when the team aimed to take part in the 2012 Olympics. In the qualifying rounds, international soccer authorities banned the team\u2019s head-covering uniform. The team was disqualified in June 2011 when it declined to give up the uniform for a match in Jordan.<\/p>\n

\u201cEverybody was crying in the locker room,\u201d said Khosrowyar, who had returned to play on the team after receiving a master’s degree in chemical engineering. \u201cIt was devastating.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the ban galvanized popular support for the women\u2019s program in Iran, creating a bonanza of publicity, including clips of women playing soccer on television. The country\u2019s conservative president at the time, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, adopted a populist streak and took up the cause.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was a huge shift,\u201d said Khosrowyar. \u201cNow everybody knew about us.\u201d<\/p>\n

Iran protested, and international soccer authorities ultimately came up with a compromise that allowed the Iranian women to play covered.<\/p>\n

Today, Khosrowyar coaches Iran\u2019s first under-14 girls national team. In April, she was in a locker room in Kathmandu, Nepal, delivering a pregame pep talk when an earthquake hit. Khosrowyar had to rush the team out onto the playing field for protection. She then spent the next 24 hours getting them to the airport and back home.<\/p>\n

\u201cI realized that if I looked scared, they would be scared, and if I looked confident they would be confident,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Arabameri, the new head of women\u2019s soccer nationally, said that the experience was a harrowing one for the team. But like many of the challenges Khosrowyar and women\u2019s soccer has overcome, she said it would make the sport stronger.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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