Swanson: Revisiting an interior designer’s relentless pursuit of her pro soccer dream

When I met Michelle Ruano last November, she had plenty of time to talk because she couldn’t practice. Shin splints.

So we chatted and watched her United City FC teammates train. And I tried to wrap my head around the fact that this woman who hadn’t played collegiately and only a little on the youth club circuit, could, at the not-so-tender age of 33, suddenly land on the international soccer stage.

How could such an athlete slip through the cracks? Why hadn’t there been playing prospects beyond adult amateur leagues for this Costa Mesa resident who was talented enough to be immediately inserted into the Guatemalan team’s starting lineup and then recognized right away among the Best XI in a critical CONCACAF qualifying tournament?

Why? Well, life. The world and those slowly eroding limitations on women in sport. But also choices, good and bad. Luck and fate … and so I wrote about it, thinking the whole time: OK then, what’s any of our excuses?

“‘One day’ is just an aspiration or a dream; ‘Day One’ is reality happening,” said Ruano, a versatile defender and full-time interior designer, on that evening last year, while we watched United City practice until no one else was left at Downey’s Discovery Sports Complex.

“So for me, my dream as a 6-year-old was that one day, I’ll play professional soccer. As a 33-year-old, these are my Day Ones: I made a national team, had an international start, I made Best XI; I’m potentially going into a transfer window to play professionally – signing my first pro contract.

“These are all huge Day Ones; they’re not little day ones,” she added. “It’s not like, ‘Man. I tried quinoa salad for the first time.’”

That’s where we left off. With United City’s founder Steven Hawthorne, an out-of-the-box-thinking Englishman with a background in the soccer business, knocking on doors until they’d crack open for Michelle and his club’s other dedicated players. Like Darielle O’Brien, a defender from Fontana who caught on this season with the National Women’s Soccer League’s Utah Royals.

At this time last year, Hawthorne was describing Ruano’s situation like this: “She’s like a vintage car that was left in the garage; she’s raring to go and she does not have the miles she would if she’d been playing pro for 10 or 15 years.”

It’s a different pitch now: “I’m super-stoked to be back,” Ruano, now 34, said last week. “It’s just fine-tuning, like restoring an old car. Got all the good parts, now let’s get it running.”

A YEAR OF TRIALS

Rewind to last Thanksgiving. Ruano was in Guatemala, preparing for a CONCACAF W Gold Cup-qualifying match against Jamaica and trying to ignore the stubborn pain in her shin.

Medical personnel there wanted to run a scan. She was afraid of what it might divulge so she begged them to let her wait until after the match — to which she gave a good 70 minutes before her coaches pulled her with Guatemala leading and on its way to victory. Her disappointment was tempered by a standing ovation from the crowd at Estadio Nacional: “Little old me,” she said. “I’d never had anything like that.”

As promised, Ruano had imaging done as soon as she got home. The bad news came quickly: “You have a stress fracture in your tibia; you need to stop.”

Of course, there’s stopping and then there’s Ruano’s version of it, which was doing anything she could safely do to try and maintain her fitness before February’s W Gold Cup qualifier in Carson against El Salvador and four of her United City teammates.

On Feb. 17, I went and watched Ruano, at about 80%, play all out for 90 minutes before an overflow crowd of more than 1,500 at the Dignity Health Sports Park Track. She broke down in tears afterward, overcome either by the magnitude of the moment or by the sting of the 3-1 loss, she wasn’t sure which.

Then it was “full steam ahead.” Training and playing six days a week. Heading in for injury prevention exercises after work on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. In April, she flew to New Jersey for Guatemala’s friendly against Colombia, then the No. 23-ranked team in the world. Ruano’s side lost 3-0, but it didn’t allow a goal until after halftime.

“I was doing great,” Ruano said. “I felt fit again, and then …”

It hurts to type this.

“… I decided I wanted to tear my ACL.”

It happened during a United City match on April 28. She texted three days later, angry: “National team game in 3 weeks gone… August transfer window gone …”

The whole improbable dream … gone?

I mean, the idea of a professional team signing a 33-year-old with so little experience playing against top competition already seemed far-fetched.

But a 34-year-old coming off a torn ACL?

I won’t lie; I thought this might be one of those days that never comes.

Naturally, Ruano thought differently: “Fortunately, unfortunately,” she said, “still committed to the quest.”

Which brought her to Sweden on Nov. 4, a full participant in training with the pro team Kristianstads DFF. It was almost five months since she started jogging again, and four months since she’d kicked a ball again. Just about three weeks since her return to action in 10 minutes with United City.

After much deliberation and consultation, Ruano opted against surgery, letting her torn right ACL – confoundingly “the most asymptomatic torn ACL ever,” she called it, because she could pivot and lunge and step up and down and change directions almost as if nothing was wrong – heal with just rehab. She could always go back and have surgery if it didn’t work, she reasoned. But it did, with help from her team, including United City’s Dr. Daniel Choi.

And now she was finally back, back again, in Sweden for a weeklong trial alongside her United City teammate Amber Marinero (former South Hills standout and one of Ruano’s friends on the Salvadorian team). She told the Kristianstads folks about her ACL, she said, and they told her that her age wasn’t an issue: “They like the balance of the older players as well as the youth.”

Nothing about the experience disappointed: “Getting a taste of what it’s like to be a professional, all the demands, what it requires to be an athlete at that level was addicting,” Ruano said. “I want to do that, to be that person. I want to live that life.”

She got word from Hawthorne that she and Marinero were impressed, that they “were better than they thought we’d be” coming from a United Premier Soccer League and not the NWSL.

If that’s not the story of Ruano’s soccer life – or part of it.

The more important moral, I think, no matter what happens now, whether she gets called to play in Sweden or Italy or wherever in that next window, or ever, is Ruano’s perseverance.

Her can’t-stop, won’t-stop utter unwillingness, against all the odds, to give up on trying to turn those “one days” into Day Ones.

Whoever heard of a 34-year-old rookie?

Who cares; she’s going for it.