Georgia Cloepfil ’14 scores on soccer and literary fields with The Striker and the Clock
by Callisto Martinez ’26
After ten years filled with travelling overseas to play on professional soccer teams, jotting down notes in her spare time, attending an MFA program at the University of Idaho, and coaching soccer at Whitman College, Georgia Cloepfil ’14 returned to Macalester to give a book talk on the culmination of her athletic and intellectual pursuits: The Striker and the Clock (2024).
On Nov. 19, Cloepfil read from her memoir — organized into 90 short segments for the 90 minutes of a soccer game, plus two sections for halftime and overtime — and answered questions about her athletic and writing journey in the DeWitt Wallace Library’s Harmon room. The event, co-sponsored by Macalester’s English and Athletics departments, drew a variety of attendees with an array of questions, ranging from ones discussing the barriers placed upon female athletes before they even step on the field to questions about the significance of soccer, and team sports more broadly, in sports literature.
Before Cloepfil could begin with her reading, English Department Chair Matt Burgess introduced Cloepfil with an appraisal of her literary and athletic achievements and a story from teaching a creative writing class with Cloepfil. Burgess read an email that Cloepfil wrote to him explaining she would be absent from class due to a soccer game and would be happy to discuss how she could make up for the absence.
“Well, you made up for it,” Burgess said, before handing the mic to Cloepfil.
Cloepfil began reading from minute 6 of her memoir, a section on missing penalty shots that is partially set on Macalester’s own soccer field. Detailing penalty shots she missed over the course of her career, each of which she remembers vividly, Cloepfil wrote in her memoir that “the entire game unfolded around my missed shot.” After a different game, when Cloepfil’s high school team was able to recover from the missed opportunity, minute 7 of The Striker and the Clock reveals that one of her teachers wrote: “‘A girl who can write like this ought not worry about goal kicks.’”
In light of the “brawn not brain” stereotype, or belief that athletes are less inclined to intellectual and academic achievement, and vice versa, The Striker and the Clock carries a core goal of untangling the relationship between the physical and mental hardships and skills required of athletes and those required of writers. Cloepfil described part of the challenge of writing about soccer as translating “wordlessness to words” and noted the contrast between creating something that lives in one’s head, as in writing, and thinking about and with one’s body, a skill required in soccer. Although Cloepfil’s journey as a writer and path as an athlete have often been framed as mutually exclusive, she believes the two are inextricably linked.
Cloepfil began jotting notes on her experiences while playing in Australia, but did not have the capacity to transform her journals into a full memoir until after she stopped playing professionally. Inspired by an audience question about the physical hardships of being a professional athlete, Cloepfil explained more, stating that the workflow of a professional athlete doesn’t leave mental or physical energy for producing a full book. She also highlighted some of the mental blocks in how she remembers soccer that created hardships in writing. Cloepfil shared many sports writers’ difficulty to translate the moments of adrenaline, tension, and achievement within the game to paper. She explained that some athletes actually experience a psychological blackout when they score a goal or otherwise put points on the board, while others may remember it from a third-person perspective.
Another difficulty that Cloepfil encountered was how to organize her stories, lessons, and insights into a cohesive narrative. Cloepfil described the perpetual beginnings of soccer in her memoir — getting off a flight in a completely new country, Australia, Sweden, and South Korea being the three Cloepfil traveled to as a soccer player, and meeting an entirely new set of coaches and teammates. Combined with commentary on how the athlete can never truly reach their “end goal” because one achievement opens opportunities for further improvement, this led Cloepfil to organize her memoir in a way that leans into this invigorating and yet sometimes frustrating or intimidating relationship between time and sports.
This discussion of new beginnings and travel sparked questions about the intercultural nature of soccer from the audience. Cloepfil responded by explaining that she primarily focused on cultural differences through the lens of playing in women’s sports, which are not only underrepresented in media but also often underpaid and under-resourced, in a global capitalist landscape. In Korea, Cloepfil received greater pay, but noticed that the culture saw playing soccer as more of a duty than a dream.
“I think it’s really hard to reconcile those things when I talk about, you know, yes, women should be paid more to play sports; it should be equal pay,” Cloepfil said during her talk. “Also, something fundamentally changes, when you’re paid to do something that you really love, about your relationship with it.”
Cloepfil also addressed further inequities between men’s and women’s sports, particularly in how female athletes are expected to deal with pain. Reading from her memoir, Cloepfil honored her mother’s journey as an athlete before Title IX protections came into effect for female athletes and questioned the expectation for women, even outside of athletics, to endure through serious pain and hostile environments. Highlighting an example of a gendered distinction between pain and endurance, Cloepfil supplemented her reading by discussing how male soccer players frequently use “flopping” — a practice of laying down on the ground in apparent agony after a simple touch from a player on the opposing team — while women are often scrutinized for showing genuine pain on the field.
Some audience members responded to Cloepfil’s insights by sharing their own experiences of sexism in sports, with several addressing that this gendered double standard surrounding pain and endurance emerged in their elementary school years or before.
In her time as an assistant coach for Whitman College, and through her writing process, Cloepfil has discovered that although she finds coaching highly rewarding, she still misses being in the game. However, having published a memoir about soccer has also created novel moments in coaching. Cloepfil recounted that during preseason, her players greeted her with a reading of her memoir. Another time, Cloepfil went to comfort a crying player during halftime who in turn told her “I’m just trying to think about your book!”
Concluding her talk by answering a question about the publishing process, Cloepfil shared that she originally entered her MFA program with no aspirations towards writing about soccer but found herself bringing the growing collection of soccer-related essays to workshop in her third year. The Striker and the Clock spans a wide range of time in Cloepfil’s career as an athlete, from her childhood to her professional years, placing her novel in perfect position to enlighten readers of many ages, life experiences and athletic interests.