Former WUSA Star to Play in Mexican Men's League Second-Division Club Celaya Signs 26-Year-Old Dominguez
By WILL WEISSERT
AP Sports
MEXICO CITY (Dec. 16) -- Maribel Dominguez has impressed officials of Mexican second-division club Celaya enough to give her a chance. Now she has the rest of the country to convince.
News of the 26-year-old woman's signing for a men's team on Wednesday sent a mixture of shock and thrill through Mexico, where sports pages and news broadcasts had pundits offering everything from acclaim to admonishment.
Former men's national team coach Manuel Lapuente told reporters his father had told him "You don't touch a woman even with a rose petal... Imagine how I'm supposed to face a woman and have to slide into her. Well, what am I going to do?"
At 5-foot-4, Dominguez is small for a woman's team. Some players in the First Division-A, Mexico's second division, will outweigh her by 65 pounds.
"It's going to be hard. We're not going to compare the strength of a man with that of a women," Dominguez said. "But at least controlling the ball, playing the game, the movements, all of that I can do and do well. It doesn't scare me."
Mauricio Ruiz, vice president of Celaya, said Wednesday night that Dominguez had signed a two-year deal that would take effect as soon as FIFA approves a woman playing in a Mexican men's league.
FIFA has indicated the decision is entirely local.
Armando Magana, general director of two teams in Mexico's amateur national women's soccer league called the deal a publicity stunt.
Ruiz dismissed that claim. "This is in no way about publicity," he said.
Dominguez, who scored 45 goals in 46 games for the Mexican women's national team and played one season in the American Women's United Soccer Association, said she will begin a special training regimen to add weight before next month's season opener. Officials already have designed a special, anatomically correct jersey for her.
"More than anything else, I want to let my work on the field do my talking," Dominguez said. "I want to open doors, prove that in Mexico soccer is not only a men's sport."
Two women played for a men's league in the U.S. in the mid-90s. U.S. national team midfielder Kristine Lilly and Colette Cunningham played for the Washington Warthogs in the defunct Continental Indoor Soccer Association, a league which played on artificial-turf covered ice hockey rinks with six players a side. In indoor soccer in the United States, players are on the field for only a few minutes and constantly replace one another.
Former Warthogs coach Jim Gabarra, who played 14 times for the U.S. national team, said Dominguez's endeavor is unlike Lilly and Cunningham.
"What Maribel's trying to do is vastly different," Gabarra said by phone from the United States. "In the outdoor game you can't play a few minutes and then sit for 10."
Dominguez said she is ready.
"There will be machismo and they will say many things about me, but I'm not going to throw my hands up and cry," she said. "Little by little they are going to realize I can do this."