Taking kerr of business

"I don’t think I want to do this anymore.” 

In the corner of a locker room in the United States, a distraught Samantha Kerr was inconsolable on the phone with her mother Roxanne in Perth, Western Australia. It was June 2016 and the 22 year old had just returned to play for American National Women’s Soccer League side, Sky Blue FC, after being sidelined for eight months through injury. Towards the end of the game, Kerr had felt a shard of pain once again. 

“I was too scared to tell anyone that I’d hurt my foot again and I was just crying and crying,” she recounted. Teammate Nikki Stanton helplessly watched as Kerr’s distress grew and finally urged her to call her mother. 

“I was too scared to tell my Mum, who I tell everything to, and I just felt like I’d let everyone down,” said Kerr. “She just said to me, ‘Is this what you want to do now? Like, is this how you want to live your life?’ It’s just literally at that point I said “I’m done”. My career was over and there was a sense of relief.” 

In the corner of that locker room in the United States, that could have been the end of the Samantha Kerr football story – a story that over a decade had taken an unknown teen from Fremantle to stadiums across the globe. 

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Originally written for FourFourTwo Australia