Beegee arrived with The Ball into Washington DC and immediately got on a bus and metro to take him and The Ball to Audi Stadium. Even as he was flying from Frankfurt to DC, it still wasn’t sure if the Spirit Crew could meet up with the Nigerian and even the US Women’s National teams after their match that night in DC. Karli and Andrew had been attempting to pull strings to make it happen since meeting up with Rebecca Roux at the Equality Summit in London at the end of July. Just as it appeared to have hit a dead end, as luck would have it, we were connected (by way of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center or UPMC) to Randy Waldrum, the Nigerian National Team Coach. He then connected us to US Soccer. And before you knew it, The Ball was hanging out in the press area and even dancing in the Nigerian Women’s Team locker room, directly after their narrow 2-1 defeat to the USA.
The backdrop was also a historic occasion for football or soccer as it is known in the USA. On this very day, in the sold-out stadium, the USA Women’s National Team signed their equal pay contract with the US Men’s team.
Cindy Parlow Cone, the first female President of U.S. Soccer, spoke to this significant moment in sporting history:
„This is going to affect more than just soccer. This is going to effect other sports and other businesses. It will be some time before we realize the ripple effect it is going to have on everyone. This didn‘t happen over night. This was a long process, about 2 years in the making. Just thinking about tonight and everything that it took to get here from our board to the PAs, I actually wrote down everybody’s name in US soccer who is some way or another helped get this over the line and it was about sixty people. It is pretty impressive what we have done.“
The following day, The Ball was invited to the US Department of State, where Dr. Ashleigh Hoffman, Chief of Sports Diplomacy, signed The Ball and had this to say: „We believe in the power of sport to promote women and to advance gender equality. We all deserve to live in a more inclusive and equitable world and we couldn’t be more happy for the results of last night’s signing by the US Women’s National Team.“