This week, TribalFootball.com speaks exclusively to team captain Jaclyn Sawicki of expansion side and league leaders Western United, who grew up in Canada but now plays for the Philippines as they prepare for their first WWC final this summer.
Explaining her perspective on Western United’s fantastic start to their inaugural season, in which they won their first seven games, mostly while recovering from a leg injury, Sawicki said: “Western United have a good core of players from Calder United in the NPLW [the second-tier state league level throughout the country].
“The foundation was quite strong. They brought in experienced players from abroad [including 2019 American Women’s World Cup winner Jess McDonald and American Hannah Keane, who played at San Diego State University and for clubs in Germany, Portugal and Spain] and mixed well. We’re still trying to figure things out [for a team style]. It was a good level of play and with high intensity and competition. The Calder girls welcomed the new players; Some of us had a lot more work experience but everyone was willing to help and no one felt above the other.”
Sawicki has never played for an NWSL team. She said that when she went to college in Canada, she felt she had to go to an American college to have a chance of being drafted, and with her Polish passport she had plans for her professional career anyway to go abroad.
Jaclyn Sawicki (white uniform) in action for the Philippines women’s national team at the AFF Women’s Championship which she won in July 2022 in Manila while hosting.
Photo courtesy of Raymond Braganza (RVBraganza on Instagram).
Regarding the new Canadian women’s professional league, which is scheduled to start in 2025, she said: “It took a long time. I’m curious how it will be – the standards, the salaries.”
She also wondered why the eight Cpl [Canadian Premier League] Men’s teams did not start women’s side. This is a very good question that we will explore in our future discussions with the Canadian League officials. We suspect the Football Association of Canada and the CPL – which will start its fifth season in May – felt that creating a women’s league in addition to the eight-team men’s league could jeopardize the entire enterprise, which was also struggling with two seasons amid COVID, limiting fan support and revenue streams.
For a 30-year-old, Sawicki had a non-linear approach to her career, even playing recreational soccer while working full-time in British Columbia in recent years in the recreational and health/sports field.
She said that the Philippine Football Association [PFF] has actually approached her twice in the last five years: “The PFF contacted me in 2017 but I turned down the opportunity to focus on my club career in Japan at Chifure AS Elfen Saitama.”
She then played two seasons in Sweden with Assi IF before returning to Canada. The PFF then reached out to her again in February 2022 after the team had qualified for WWC 2023 at the AFC Women’s Asian Cup in India the month before and she wanted to help them achieve greater success.
She sees this first appearance at a Women’s World Cup as an opportunity to build the game at home, especially at the younger ages, such as at the U-17 and U-20 national team levels: “The PFF has started developing to restructure youth, so it is [making the Women’s World Cup] is not a one-time qualification, but becomes a permanent thing. [With the] U-17 and U-20 national teams, younger players [will have] play opportunities in one [age group] Women’s World Cup.”
This strategy will help the entire Philippines national team to be less reliant on North American diaspora like Sawicki as the team that qualified at the January 2022 Asia regional qualifiers has only six native players, 17 of them from their diaspora come.
Sawicki actually played internationally for Canada at U-20 level, including at the U-20 Women’s World Cup in Japan in 2012. She played once for the full national team as an injury-time substitute against USA in September 2011 (1-1). -1 tie). She is also qualified to play for Poland by descent and holds a Polish passport. She was invited to a week-long Polish women’s national team camp in 2013 and then traveled on to Russia for a tournament with a Canadian university all-star team.
She explained why she finally chose the Philippines: “To put it simply, it just felt right. Despite having stints on the Canada national team and going to a U-20 World Cup, I never felt like growing up in a Canadian home—[I] just developed within the Canadian sports system. My mom has been my biggest supporter throughout my career, and I’ve never been good at expressing my appreciation for everything she’s done for me. I guess that was my way of showing gratitude and telling her I’m proud to be Filipino.
“Of course I’m also proud to be Polish, but I believe that everything happens for a reason. Somehow, when I visited the camp with the Polish national team in 2013, I knew right away that it didn’t feel like it should. She described her week in Poland as, “Tough, there was a big language barrier. I didn’t know enough to have a conversation and the coaching staff wasn’t very fluent in English.”
Sawicki was an inspired acquisition from Western United and the Philippines, bringing important international experience and a passion for the game to both sides.
Tim Grainey is contributor on tribal football. His latest book, Beyond Bend it Like Beckham, is about global women’s football. Get your copy today.
Follow Tim on Twitter: @TimGrainey
Source: www.tribalfootball.com
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