Puma and WPS make a great team

After another weekend of play, the Los Angeles Sol (7-1-3) remain atop the WPS standings. Camille Abily and PUMA spokeswoman Marta lead the team with six and four goals respectively.

Just prior to the start of the Women’s Professional Soccer season, brand PUMA and WPS announced an exclusive partnership making PUMA an official founding partner of the new league and an official sponsor of all WPS franchises.

The multi-year partnership makes PUMA the official sport and lifestyle apparel, footwear and equipment supplier of WPS, including the official WPS Match Ball. In addition to on-field performance wear, PUMA will outfit the athletes and teams at all WPS-related events, activities and WPS appearances in sportlifestyle apparel. This partnership kicked off last month and will see PUMA collaborating with WPS to enhance the game of women’s soccer and will act as the foundation in the PUMA Women’s category.

That’s just the start for PUMA, which will have its name and logo on the league’s balls, uniforms, goalkeeper equipment, even sports bras. “Women’s soccer is on a tremendous growth pattern in the U.S.,” says Jochen Zeitz, chief executive of PUMA. “This is a huge opportunity for us.”

PUMA’s decision to join forces with WPS is part of an effort to target its marketing to young women. The company already has a footwear deal with Brazilian star Marta Vieira da Silva who is widely recognized as the best female soccer player in the world and currently playing for the Los Angeles Sol. PUMA also has a deal with U.S. national team player Leslie Osborne, who will be playing for FC Gold Pride.

Given PUMA’s name recognition and reach in soccer, the deal is a milestone for the new women’s league, especially amid a global recession.  Kudos PUMA. And Kudos Abily and Marta for bringing such energy and excitment to the game.

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A Journey from One Uniform to Another

I grew up a soccer player. The baggier the uniform, the better. My teammates and I were always coming up with new and creative ways to make a baggy uniform look cool…tie the sleeves up with pre-wrap, roll the shorts, tuck in only the front of the shirt and let the back hang out, etc.

It never occurred to us to ask for a smaller size. Not that we could actually acquire uniforms that fit. Everything always came in men’s sizes, and even a men’s small is too big for a 12-year-old girl. Instead of taking the smallest uniform we could get and still have it be too big, we took the men’s size large and found ways to make it look “cool”.

Among me and my soccer friends, tiny shorts and short dresses were for girly-girls. We spent hours putting our hair in tiny braids in order to look fierce, instead of spending hours using a curling iron to look pretty.

When I got to college, I still had that soccer swagger. But I was running cross-country and track now; no more soccer for me. And in cross-country and track in college, you wear these things they call “buns”, a sneaky way of saying “bikini bottom”. And your uniform top is not an oversized jersey or even a loose singlet (if you’re female); it’s an elongated sports bra. You get in trouble by the officials if this elongated sports bra doesn’t touch the top of your buns when you stand still on the starting line. (Apparently, they are OK with the entire leg and usually part of the rear end showing, but not the navel.)

The question from my college teammates was “why don’t you want to wear the buns?” when I thought the question should be “who in their right mind would want to wear the buns?” According to them, the buns made them feel fast and look sharp. Of course, most of these women were much smaller than me and they looked great in the buns and glorified sports bra. I’ve always been the bigger one of the group if the group is a bunch of distance runners. I fit right in with soccer players with my big quad muscles and wider shoulders. But as a distance runner, I’m on the large side.

So while I hated to admit it, my aversion to the tight outfit was largely due to body image issues, another thing my baggy soccer uniform had hid (in addition to my body). Not only does a camera add 10 pounds, but try getting a picture taken when you are running in a tight outfit and every loose piece of skin or fat is flapping in the wind and every muscle is flexed. It’s not a “pretty” picture. Especially when you look at your teammates’ and competitors’ pictures and they make it look good.

I got away with wearing a loose singlet and shorts for most of my collegiate career because the equipment room did offer a few such outfits, and I was always quick to grab them first. I only had to wear the buns and tight top when I was running on a relay and we all needed to match and I was outnumbered 3-1. I would spend the evening before examining and re-examining myself, having to get more pumped up to wear that outfit than to run the race.

But after I graduated and eventually signed with New Balance, I realized that in the professional track & field world, buns and a crop top (a sports bra that is NOT elongated much if at all) were considered “professional” attire. Shorts and singlet had a connotation of “sloppy” and “unprofessional”. No one told me that to my face, but it was obvious.

As I wrestled with having to come to terms with my hesitations (OK, fears) about running around in plain view in so little clothing, I decided to look at other female athletes competing in track & field in these outfits and view them as critically as I view myself. What I learned was that you can almost always find a flaw somewhere. Where I had seen only perfection before, I now found flaws simply because I was watching from a different perspective.

Then I observed how these women carried themselves. I think it is fair to say that the biggest stars of our sport are the sprinters. They are beautiful and strong and fast. They carry themselves with pride, heads held high. And yet in mainstream society’s view, their muscular quads and shoulders would be considered less than ideal and grounds for backing off on the weights or at least covering themselves up. But is that what happens? No!!

It all started to make sense: these women were proud of the bodies they’d worked so hard for. Their legs carried them down the track at record speeds. Their 6-packs were the result of years of ab work that was done not to look “pretty” but to perform at their highest level. They didn’t look at themselves through the lens society uses; they used their own lens and guess what the result was? Other people began to use that lens too. Confidence is a powerful asset.

Taking another look at my fellow distance runners, I realized that I wasn’t the only “bigger” one. We actually came in all shapes and sizes. Yes, many distance runners have a small bone structure and are very lean. But there are also those of us with more muscular thighs or wider shoulders or a thicker torso. Your body is your body; if you’ve taken care of it and trained hard, it’s going to be what it is. I needed to be proud of my body for what it could do, not for what it looked like.

Now don’t think for one second that this was an overnight transformation. Body image is a tough monster and it takes time to get it under control after a lifetime of letting it control you. But finally, three years after exhausting my collegiate eligibility and turning professional, something clicked. After a terribly disappointing 2007 season, I realized I was beating myself up once again, blaming everything from my training to my weight for my failures. And I wanted it to stop, once and for all. So I went and got my belly button pierced. If you have your navel pierced, you can’t keep it under a shirt all the time, right? You have to be proud enough of your body to show it off a little.

This little “rebellious” action was more liberating than I had imagined and 12 months later, I found myself giddy with excitement as the New Balance crew handed me a brand new bright pink pair of buns and crop top to wear just for the Women’s Steeplechase Final at the Olympic Trials. I was excited to wear it, excited to show what I could do, proud of my body and proud of myself for all the hard work that had been put in, year after year. Proud that I hadn’t quit the year before, despite the fact that I had felt so far from reaching my dream of going to the Olympics. I didn’t make the Olympic Team last summer. But by training for that goal and overcoming much disappointment and self-doubt along the way, I had grown more than I had ever anticipated. And I’m never looking back.

Let the quads flex!

WPS unveils new Puma uniforms

The stars of Women’s Professional Soccer (WPS), including three-time FIFA Women’s World Player of the Year, Marta, number one WPS draft pick and Olympic Gold Medalist, Amy Rodriguez, and US National Team midfielder and Women’s World Cup bronze medalist, Leslie Osborne, unveiled the league’s Puma designed home and away uniforms in New York last night at a high-profile fashion presentation.  

Appealing color combos were on display but the skorts got a thumbs-down from many fans.  Kristine Lilly and Hope Solo appeared on the Today Show this morning and said the skort is a “wrap” and just an accessory so hopefully we won’t be seeing them on the field.

TV personality and two-time Olympic Gold Medalist (swimming), Summer Sanders hosted the fashion show, while designer and winner of TV’s Project Runway Season 4, Christian Siriano added to the excitement by designing his own fashion interpretation of a home and away uniforms inspired by the colors and materials from of the league’s uniforms. The WPS uniforms will be put to the test in the WPS Inaugural Match on March 29th in Los Angeles, California when the Los Angeles Sol takes on the Washington Freedom.

Siriano has been a long time friend of the PUMA brand, designing outfits for musicians such as Estelle and Lady Gaga using existing PUMA fabrics and pieces. For this special uniform unveiling, in true PUMA fashion, Siriano designed his take on the home and away uniforms by infusing his style, personality and charm with the PUMA sportlifestyle DNA and female athletes in mind.

“This is the first time I’ve ever designed for athletes – it’s perfect because I always design for strong women in my Ready to Wear collections and professional athletes definitely have to be tough in mind, body and spirit,” said fashion designer Christian Siriano. “These soccer players are amazing and I love it!”

For those in the LA area, the Los Angeles Sol is hosting a free public event on March 8th where you can check out the new kits and meet the players.

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