The work is paying off for budding superstar Kerolin
The work is paying off for budding superstar Kerolin
Brazilian and Courage attacker talks about World Cup, NWSL, and the value of support.
Most professional athletes are like us. They are out of breath after they run, they sweat as much as couch potatoes, they cramp, they get tired.
There are exceptions, or at least athletes who do not appear to be fully mortal. Kerolin is one of those exceptions. The North Carolina Courage attacker glides on the field. She never looks out of breath. Her face generally has a placid expression, and she appears to barely break a sweat in the muggy summer conditions, casually chewing gum while she awaits her next scoring chance.
Fresh off a stellar June with the Courage, capped off with NWSL Player of the Week and NWSL Team of the Month awards and her first selection to a World Cup roster with Brazil, Kerolin is hitting her stride in 2023 and recently spoke with local reporters about that, plus the realization of a long road to reach the World Cup.
“I’m very excited being on the Courage because I think how the team plays, first I think I can do nothing alone because I think the quality helps me so much,” Kerolin said during the interview, in English. “I think how the team plays now helps me do a better job. And also, we like working together because you need to work hard to do a good job on the field.”
With the departures of goalscorers Debinha and Diana Ordoñez in the offseason, Kerolin, entering her second season in North Carolina in 2023, suddenly became the attacking focal point for a rebuilding squad. But rather than sit mired at the bottom of the table, the team has slowly built into a surprise juggernaut at this point in the season. Kerolin’s eight goals are pacing the team, and the Courage currently sit atop the NWSL regular season standings.
While it’s taken a bit of time for the team to coalesce around her, Kerolin said the physical demands of the Courage and the quality of the NWSL have helped her game. Head coach Sean Nahas has said throughout the season he’s challenged the “world-class” Brazilian to step up, and player and team are simpatico, Kerolin noting, “I am very proud about the team.”
When it comes to her exploits for her country, most 23-year-olds would be fresh-faced and wide-eyed entering the biggest tournament in the women’s game. But Kerolin’s journey has been different than many at her age.
Starting out playing for a series of teams in her native São Paulo, Kerolin was given the breakout player award in 2018 in the Brazilian top flight and turned heads in the Copa Libertadores Feminina, South America’s biggest club competition, before her career was derailed in Feb. 2019, when she failed a doping test and was banned from the sport for two years.
While no one could deny Kerolin’s talent, having her career grind to a complete halt just as it was taking off could have threatened it permanently. Fortunately, Kerolin said she got a great deal of support, including from Brazil head coach Pia Sundhage.
“Pia is great. She is a great coach. I want to say thanks to her because when I don’t have a club to play on she called me into the national team and believed in me,” she said.
In discussing her ban, Kerolin has not forgotten the help she got to pull her through that difficulty.
“Yeah, I think like it was a very hard time because I play soccer so I can’t do what I love. But in these two years with no soccer I just like have, for sure, hard time because I can do nothing. I learn in this time, I can do nothing. Soccer is what I love, what I have to do because I can do nothing different. So for me she's very important because I'm going to do national team early because I have no team, it's very hard and Pia, she looks for the physical so much, she thinks it's very important your physical [levels] be good for the national team,” she explained.
It wasn’t just Sundhage who kept in touch with Kerolin, but the legend of Brazilian soccer, who the Courage player admitted to modeling her game after.
“So for me this is very important because [Sundhage] just trust me. And also other people, like Marta told her, ‘Look for Kero, she's a special player. She's nice. She helped us so much. So look for her.’ That's — for me, it's very important because Marta is the queen, Marta is the best player. She's, like, talking about me when I'm not in there. So for me, it's very important for me, I love her because she really trusts me and like, she changed my life.”
Kerolin has pledged to try and win the World Cup, for Brazil, yes, but for Marta in particular, heading to her sixth World Cup tournament this year. And while Kerolin blithely admitted in this pre-World Cup interview that she hadn’t really dreamed about playing in the competition when she was a kid — “Actually, no, because like, when you're a kid, you just like playing and we have fun,” she noted, claiming she hadn’t even considered it until about five years ago — the emotion she showed when her name was called by Sundhage, to Brazil’s squad, during a party with family and friends, was palpable.
For now, the Courage will have to carry on in the short term without their star, but if things go right in Australia and New Zealand in the coming weeks, Kerolin’s life could once again change in big ways, and her cool-as-a-cucumber style on the field could make her one of the breakout global stars of 2023.
Great story! Thank you!