Young North Vancouver soccer star Rachel Jones learned a lot from her mom, Karen, her first coach in the sport. Strangely, how to play soccer well was not one of those things.
"When she was six years old they needed a coach for the peewee team," says Karen. "I just volunteered, I didn't know how to play soccer. I started reading all these books and I just became a motivational coach. I kept her involved and she fell in love with it."
She wasn't learning soccer from a superstar but Rachel says she loved it nonetheless. In fact, as the coach's talented daughter, she became somewhat of an assistant coach.
"She read, like, Soccer for Dummies and was coaching the team and I was like her demo person," says Rachel, now a 17-year-old Grade 11 student at Sutherland secondary. "She knew I was a good player but she made me work for it. It was awesome having her there beside me."
Rachel eventually moved on - "When she got to be about Grade 6, people who knew how to play soccer took over," says Karen - and now everyone who sees her knows she's a good player. On Saturday, March 15, Jones will hit the field as one of the star players for Team Canada at the FIFA U-17 Women's World Cup. They'll be in tough right off the bat against Germany, the fourth-place team from the last tournament held in 2012.
The match will be one more high point in a soccer career that is really taking off. Jones, born and raised in North Vancouver, first fell in love with the game when she was four years old and her mother let her tag along with her six-year-old brother who was taking part in a soccer program.
"He had a camp and my mom just dropped me off at his camp," says Rachel. "I just joined in."
A couple of years later mom and daughter were teaming up for a North Shore Girls squad and, by age 10 or 11, Rachel's natural athleticism had earned her spots on local gold and metro teams. Rachel, in fact, could have been a track and field star - she set a few North Shore records in the middle distances before opting to focus her attention on soccer. In 2012 the Vancouver Whitecaps FC Girls Elite team added her on as an underage player and her game continued to blossom under the guidance of North Vancouver-based coach Jesse Symons.
"That's been huge," says Rachel. "(Jesse) has had such an impact on my life. The way he coaches, it makes me want to work hard. This program has been huge, it's stepped up my game so much."
Her play stood out so much that the national team came calling, bringing her in for several youth camps. Last summer she made her debut in a national team jersey, again playing above her age group for the national U-20 team in a friendly against Norway.
"It was so cool," Rachel says of pulling on a jersey with the Maple Leaf on it. "It was crazy. I always imagined playing for Canada but it never really hit me that I was playing. It was an amazing experience."
Things got even more serious last October in Jamaica when Rachel joined the national U-17 team at the CONCACAF championships looking for one of two World Cup berths available at the tournament. The girls knew they were in tough with only two spots available and elite teams like the United States and Mexico to contend with. Canada, in fact, lost to the U.S. in round robin play but still made the playoffs and earned their ticket to the World Cup with a 5-0 semifinal thrashing of the host Jamaicans.
"It was amazing," says Rachel. "The first goal we were so pumped and then they just kept coming. We were like, we got this. It was awesome."
The U.S. team, meanwhile, lost a shootout against Mexico in the other semifinal and failed to qualify for the World Cup. Mexico then went on to beat Canada in another shootout in the final, but both teams walked away with the big tickets. Rachel, playing a speedy attacking and defending style from her outside fullback position, was named to the tournament's all-star team.
Now she's in Costa Rica and ready to take on the world.
"It's crazy. I never thought it would actually be happening," she says. "I remember going to CONCACAF thinking, 'Oh yeah, this is CONCACAF, this is big.'" This, she knows, is so much bigger.
"Just thinking about it - we're going to the World Cup - it's huge."
