Soccer moms are known as their children’s biggest sport fans. During games, they sit on the sidelines and cheer on their kids. But the women’s team in Kiryat Yam, outside of Haifa, has a new phenomenon: a soccer grandmom. For the past nine years, Etti Zaroor, a 55-year-old grandmother of three, gets on the field and plays soccer (or football, depending on where one is in the world) with women who are decades younger than she is.
And if that isn’t enough, the team – coached by Netanela Hajaj – also cuts a wide swath of Israeli society, including two Arab women from nearby Acre and a woman whose family immigrated from Ethiopia. In addition to Zaroor, the other senior member of the team is Rona Salem, 52, who also serves as the team’s manager. Salem works as a rehabilitation counselor and is also a certified soccer coach who coaches a soccer team for adults with emotional and cognitive disorders. Soccer, she says, gives the people she coaches “self-confidence, identity and communication skills.”
When Zaroor was growing up in Kiryat Yam, she used to play soccer with boys in the neighborhood. Contrary to what one would expect, the boys didn’t make fun of her. Instead, they argued about whose team she’d be on because, she acknowledges, “I played well.”
But ultimately, because there were no girls’ soccer teams for her to play on, she switched instead to basketball, which she says has always been considered a more “acceptable” sport for girls. Zaroor stopped playing sports while raising her own children, and currently works as a kindergarten assistant and cook in Kirya Ata. Nine years ago, she saw an article in a local newspaper about a new soccer team for women that was looking for players. She arrived for the first practice on the same day that Salem also arrived. They have been playing together ever since.
Hajaj, who works as a physical education teacher in an elementary school in Kiryat Ata, says that when she was growing up in Nahariya, she also played soccer with the boys on the street. Recognized as an excellent athlete, she won a scholarship at ORT Bialik High School in Kiryat Bialik. When the Israel Football Association decided to establish a women’s national soccer team in 1997 – before there was even a women’s soccer league in Israel – it scrambled to find players.
About 100 women showed up for team tryouts in Ramat Gan, Hajaj says, and the coaches chose her among the others to play. Their first game against Romania ended in an embarrassing 7-0 defeat, but after a number of years of gaining experience, Hajaj says with pride, “we did better!”
Her father, who took her to the tryouts, then came to every game she played until he developed an eye disease and went blind. “He was very supportive of me,” she notes.
In 2019, the Israeli government pledged to give the same amount of funding to women’s soccer as it granted to men’s soccer teams, but the decision was valid for only one year and since then, the funding has fizzled. There are currently three divisions in the Israeli women’s league. The Kiryat Yam team is in the national division, and it finished in seventh place for the 2020-21 season.
HAJAJ BELIEVES that Israeli women’s soccer is slowly developing, but unlike in America and Europe where there are thousands of girls’ teams, in Israel there is still a “stigma” that soccer isn’t for girls. There is money for boys’ soccer teams but still not enough support for the girls. There are fewer tournaments and clubs, and less media interest in women’s soccer, she says. It is “very sad. I know of really good players who want to come to practice but have no way to get there. Their dreams die.”
Ironically, Hajaj’s nine-year-old daughter doesn’t like soccer. She dances. “I encourage her to do whatever she wants to do,” says the mother.
Salem, the rehabilitation counselor, also had a dream of playing sports since childhood. After working as a pastry chef, she decided to change direction and enrolled in the soccer coaching program at Wingate Institute. After that, she got a job at a Nitzan Haifa group home for adults with emotional and cognitive disorders.
“I’m there every day and sometimes I sleep there and stay with them over the weekend,” Salem says. She often spoke to them about the Kiryat Yam team, and that sparked interest. Seven years ago, she started a soccer team, Nitzan Haifa United, for the people with whom she works. She says that when she travels with her team to meet soccer players in the regular leagues, it is educational for everyone.
“Normative people learn to accept people who are different,” Salem asserts. “They tell me it’s the first time they ever played with people with special needs. And players on our team realize that they have the ability and they feel equal.” Salem notes that the team members’ collective dream is to play abroad.
Meanwhile, on the sideline at the Kiryat Yam soccer pitch, Zaroor, who lost her husband, Shlomo, less than a year ago, says that soccer has been instrumental in helping her through her grief. Her husband had encouraged her to play on the team from the start as did her children. She says that she has never cared if other people think she shouldn’t be playing soccer.
“If I cared what other people said, I’d be home cleaning and ironing,” she says with a wry smile. When her husband was alive, he liked to go to the sea to fish.
“Fishing was my husband’s therapy, soccer is mine,” Zaroor says. “When I’m playing soccer, I can think of something else. Playing on this team fills me and helps me forget all that I miss.”
On June 20, a women’s squad from Majd el-Kurum beat the Kiryat Yam team 3-0 in the last game of the season. Salem, the team manager, says that her team had already won their two previous games, and undeterred by the loss, the team’s players went for dinner together to celebrate the end of the season. Salem says that there is a real sense of friendship among the members of the team, who often spend time together when they’re not on the soccer pitch.
“We welcome everyone and we’re open to everyone,” Salem says. “Next season, we hope to get even more players.”