Le Takes Unusual Path to Harvard

Sitting on a park bench by the Coliseum, Harvard’s home football field, sophomore Mai Le smiles as she remembers her time playing football in high school. Le, a two-year starting kicker at St. Xavier’s Prep who now plays forward for the Crimson women’s soccer team, remembers how her coach, Darrell Lewis, begged her to play kicker starting in tenth grade.

“I was asked at the end of my sophomore year if I wanted to try out,” Le said. “I thought it was a joke, but he wrote in my yearbook that he still needed a kicker and was dropping a lot of hints about it at the end of the year. I talked it over with my parents and my dad was thrilled. He had three daughters and he never thought he’d have a football player.”

Although Le’s dad grew up in Vietnam, she said that going to Notre Dame cultivated his love for football early on and he supported her throughout her entire career. Her mom, who doubled as Le’s high school soccer coach, was a little worried about Le getting injured, but agreed to let her play.

Le kicked extra points, field goals, and kickoffs for St. Xavier, starting 10 games over her two-year stint on the team. Lewis said that beginning in her second year there were students from the boy’s soccer team looking to get her role, but that she was able to beat them out for the position because of her focus and discipline on the field.

“We had other soccer boys who wanted to be on the team, but Mai was the most mentally tough person we had,” Lewis said. “She was the best kicker on the team, guy or girl.”

ALONE IN THE PACK

Lewis said that although Le was the only female player on the team, there was not the tension one would expect. Although Le occasionally had to dress in a different locker room for road games or come dressed to the bus rides, he added that Le’s work ethic quickly earned her respect from her teammates.

“Mai was so athletic and humble and hardworking that there wasn’t as much awkwardness as there could have been,” Lewis said. “The male students had a lot of respect for her, and she was the type of leader that you want to be as a student-athlete, committed and doing a great job in the classroom and doing everything you want to do on the field.”

According to Le, while there were certainly awkward moments—at certain times she had to face the corner of the locker room while waiting for a player to alert her that the team was done changing—the team embraced her as one of their own.

“They were really accepting of me from the beginning,” Le recalls. “In the huddle, they would say ‘Nobody touches Mai, she’s like our sister.’ The freshmen would call me an older sister and ask me to sing them lullabies. When I started hearing other stories about the experiences that other girls had playing football, I realized what a special environment I was in. I was so lucky.”

Not wanting people to change how they played against her, Le wore her hair inside her helmet her junior year on the team so that opponents could not identify her by her sex. By her senior year, Le’s competitive side took over and she began to use her sex to her advantage in games, wearing her ponytail out and coming to warm up without a helmet to make sure other teams recognized it.

“My first year, I put on all my pads over my head and didn’t want people to register it,” Le said. “Senior year I began to realize guys who play football are much more conscientious about it and began to use it to my advantage.”

FROM SPORT TO SPORT

In the fall, Le would juggle both football and soccer by going to football practices earlier in the afternoon and club soccer practices late at night. Although both games feature eleven members on each side, according to Le the environment is very different between the two.

“In football, everything is prepared beforehand,” Le said. “Unlike soccer, which is much more free-flowing, everything is a set piece. It’s definitely an interesting contrast between the two. The culture of football is so unique in some ways because it’s almost like the military with the emphasis that it places on personal value. Everyone can step forward and be a leader in soccer, but in football everyone has a specific role and is disciplined enough to play within it.”

A sweeper for her high school soccer team, Le said that the kicks she took for the football team were similar to some of the long balls she would play in soccer. However, the California native said that playing football made adjusting to some aspects of soccer more difficult.

“After football season, I couldn’t shoot at all,” Le laughs. “I would go and just be kicking field goals over and over for an hour or two hours at a time during the season and when I got back to playing soccer, every shot would go way over the goal. Football definitely affected soccer much more than soccer affected football.”

SPECIAL MEMORIES

Lewis said his favorite memory of Le’s time at St. Xavier’s was her first PAT attempt in a game, where she was sandwiched on both sides by rushing defenders but kept her focus on the football, splitting the uprights with the kick.

“Just like Mai, she didn’t take her eyes off the ball and kicked it right through,” Lewis said. “She would never focus on the players around her—just on the ball and her kick.”

Although Le talks about hitting a 45-yard field goal in practice, she said her favorite memory of playing football was the only tackle that she made in a game.

“There was one player on the other team Coach told me not to kick it to,” Le remembers. “Of course, my kick ended up going right to him—literally, the ball dropped into his hands. He ran through the entire team and he was going down our sideline and I ran over and I managed to bring him down. I have never seen a boy get on his feet so fast.”

Ironically enough, Le said that she only began to practice tackling drills after she executed it in a game.

“The coach made sure that I was in tackling drills from then on,” Le said. “I laid out a freshman in the first drill but I’m hoping I never have to tackle again, that way I can keep my 100% streak going. Nobody has ever broken [a Mai Le tackle].”

MOVING FORWARD

Entrenched on the girl’s soccer team at Harvard now, Le has brought the same qualities that led her to success in high school, according to teammate and blockmate, sophomore goalkeeper Bethany Kanten.

“I think what really separates Mai as a good teammate is that her work ethic is crazy,” Kanten said. “She works harder than any other person…and you know she will bring one hundred percent every day. She’s never going to let herself go through the motions; she’s always trying to get better.”

Back at Xavier Prep, Lewis added that Le started a tradition, and that although nobody has had her success at the varsity level, the team has employed female kicker for portions of every year since she left.

“Girls have tried to follow suit,” Lewis said. “One started when she first got there but her father stood in the way of her continuing with football. She was a soccer player and unlike Mai’s family, he didn’t want her doing anything other than soccer. We’ve had people asking about it, and this past year we had an incoming player that was planning to play before tearing her ACL. We hope that she’ll be back this year.”

Le, who wrote about playing football on her college application, said that she learned a lot from playing football that went beyond the Friday night lights. A four-year captain and Most Valuable Player of her high school soccer team, Le explained that football taught her a lot about being on a team.

“It was such a defining moment for me playing [on the football team],” Le said. “I learned how to be totally team-oriented and not about myself. In high school, every player who has some measure of success in these sports begins to be placed on a pedestal, and it was actually much better preparation for coming to college sports than my team dynamic in soccer.”

Le smiles when asked if she considered playing football in college, responding that although she learned a lot from playing football at St. Xavier’s, she never seriously contemplated trying out for the Crimson and is reluctant to mention it even to her current teammates.

“I don’t mention that I played football in high school to [my teammates],” Le said. “It’s a very team oriented kind of mentality in soccer, and, that being the case, I don’t want to promote individuals above the team.”

Fresh off of practice, Le is fittingly dressed from head to toe in her Harvard soccer outfit, her current focus. Looking towards the football field, she adds one final comment.

“It’s a fun fact to drop, but that’s not why I’m on this side of the river.”