Tampa Bay added another chapter to its sports history over the first weekend in April, hosting the NCAA Women’s Final Four for a record fourth time. Several hours before that Friday’s semifinal games tipped off, a significant but less high-profile moment for Tampa Bay women’s sports unfolded on a grass field at an all-girls middle school in East Tampa.
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Tampa Bay Sun FoundationTampa Bay Sun player Domi Richardson with students from Ferrell Girls Preparatory AcademyTampa Bay Sun players Domi Richardson, Jordan Zade, and team mascot Solé visited the students at Ferrell Girls Preparatory Academy to lead soccer drills and a pep rally. Their visit was part of the newly launched Tampa Bay Sun Foundation’s partnership with Rise Up Soccer Club, a nonprofit that offers a free all-girls after-school soccer program at Title 1 schools around the Tampa Bay area.
Rise Up Soccer, founder Rachel Jolley, a St. Pete native who played college soccer at South Alabama, launched the nonprofit about two years ago. Jolley says the mission of the four- to six-week program is to connect with girls from communities that lack access to the sport she loves “and bring the game to them.”
“Soccer is the vehicle, but the goal is to provide the opportunity to build courage, discipline, respect, teamwork, and all those things that sport offers athletes,” she says. “Building future leaders.”
Taking a break from leading a group of Ferrell students through dribbling and
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Tampa Bay Sun FoundationFerrell Girls Preparatory Academy students line up for a drill shooting drills, Jolley, who now serves as the Tampa Bay Sun Foundation Program Director, says Rise Up Soccer and the nonprofit arm of Tampa Bay’s first women’s professional sports team made natural partners.
“From the beginning, their vision as a club really stood out to me in the women’s game,” she says. “They walk the walk, they don’t just talk the talk. I think that is really unique and special.”
During the visit to Ferrell Girls Prep, cheers and excited screams spill from the school gym when the two Sun players are introduced. Beaming students pose for photos and dance with Solé. On the field, the students fire soccer balls, some on target, some errant, at a row of pop-up goals. They laugh during a footwork drill where they try to evade Zade while she chases them down to pull the flags at their hips.
Standing in the middle of the action, Ferrell Assistant Principal Eric Turner, an avid soccer fan and the school’s de facto soccer coach, says from the moment in 2023 when the new USL Super League announced Tampa as a charter franchise, he felt the all-girls magnet school and the women’s professional soccer team was “a partnership that needs to happen.”
“It was not only my love of soccer, but just the idea that these young ladies need those role models, those professional athletes to look up to and see there is a path there they can have moving forward,” he says. “It’s important because women in sports, even though they have come a long way in the last couple of years, are underrepresented”
Turner says he would like to see the school and the Sun Foundation build a long-term relationship that touches on areas like sports leadership, career paths in sports outside of being an athlete, and mentorships.
Before stepping inside the school gym to speak to the students, Tampa Bay Sun General Manager Christina Unkel says the franchise has gone through a deliberative process building the business, finding its first home stadium, bringing in players, and developing its mascot, brand, and identity.
“Developing that brand and identity with our platform in professional sports, it’s important to give back to the community,” she says. “Instead of dumping hundreds of thousands of dollars in traditional sports marketing, I’d rather put it in the foundation, into the community, into coming to schools and getting kids excited about sport, fitness, health, and teamwork. I’d rather help enrich the future generation of leaders to know they can be in sports, play sports. It’s see her, be her. Instead of inspiration, it’s aspiration.“
She says that weekend in downtown Tampa shows the potential women's sports have in the Bay Area, with Friday’s NCAA semifinal games and Sunday’s championship game at Amalie Arena sandwiched around the Sun’s Saturday match at nearby Riverfront Stadium.
“This is the vision I’ve always had of Tampa,” Unkel says. “That women’s sports can be here. We say we’re the first but we’re not the last. This is what Tampa can look like with multiple women’s sports.”
For more information, go to Tampa Bay Sun Foundation