Interview Transcript


Part 1: Football Story


Lucy 0:00

Hi! I'm Lucy from Passion FC and welcome to the career series. Today I have Tang Han with me. She is a team member of the Chinese national football team from U14 to U18 and currently a student athlete at the University of Cincinnati's women soccer team which competes in Division 1 of NCAA and thanks for joining us in our career series. To give a little bit more context, we hope to show women footballers that having passion in football can provide you with opportunities in your career as well. Today's interview will be done in Mandarin, but English subtitles will be available. The first part of this interview is self-introduction, including your experience, your background stories. Then the first question is can you briefly introduce yourself, for example, where are you from, where do you go to school now, what are you doing now and so on?

Tang Han 0:57

Hello everyone! My name is Tang Han, I'm from China. I'm currently studying and playing for the University of Cincinnati. I'm a sophomore this year. I've been playing football for 10 years. I also played for the U14, U16, U18 Chinese National Women's Football Teams.

Lucy 1:16

Ok, great! Then I want to ask you how you started playing football?

Tang Han 1:20

It's actually very interesting. Before I started playing football, I didn't really know much about football. I started practicing karate when I was six, and I practiced karate for five years. Since I was very fast as a kid, and I got selected by my elementary school's female football coach, then he wanted me to try football. Actually, I didn't know what football was at the time, but then after trying I thought football was interesting and new. Therefore, I went home and talked to my mom about it. The coach then also asked me to try and go compete in games because he found out that I have the speed and I’m always able to score goals. So, he thinks I'm pretty good. At that time, since I come from Sichuan, I was selected by the coach of Sichuan Province. They convinced my mom to let me continue to play football because they thought I was good. At that time, my mom was hesitating too because she liked karate and she wanted me to continue practicing karate because I have won two championships in karate. I had purple belt in karate, so pretty high level. So, she didn't want me to give up karate. But then when the coach of Sichuan team came to talk to my mom, she thought maybe it's also good to try something new. Although Chinese football is relatively unpopular, the Chinese women's football team is pretty decent. However, my parents were divorced at the time, and both my dad and the relatives on his side all didn't want me to play football. They felt that Chinese football is so overlooked, why do I still want to play football? They even verbally abused my mom. But my mom still respected my ideas. She asked me if I wanted to continue to practice karate or play football, and then I thought I want to try something new. So, I said I want to play football. Since then, I pretty much started my football career.

Lucy 3:37

So why do you love football so much? What do you love the most about football?


Tang Han 3:42

Well, football is very attractive. Except for its competitiveness on the football field, its physical confrontation, its technical aspect, I think It's more beautiful when off the field. Like 28 different people are put together, your hearts must be united. So how to unite? It’s to unite the minds of 28 people and try to do the same thing together. We work hard to accomplish one goal together. When you train, the thing that make football so attractive is that from your life so many things will impact and inspire you. So that's the reason why I always like football.

Lucy 4:30

Ok good, so now we have the last question of this part. In your whole football journey, from when you started as a kid to later, now, have you encountered any big difficulties individually? Or what kind of big difficulties did your team encounter as a whole? And how did you get over it?

Tang Han 4:51

In China, there is a big sports meeting called the National Games of China. It's called the National Games for short. So, at that time we were like in 7th or 8th grade, I joined Sichuan's semi-professional team the first semester of 8th grade. At that time, there were 20+ teammates together, living together every day. We used to go to school over there too. But we didn't go very often. So basically, we were together every day living together, training and eating together, sleeping in a dorm for four people. It was about 2012, 2013, our provincial team began to train together for the National Games in 2017. That game was very important. It's because of this competition, so we were all gathered. In the process if you play better than others or like you perform well, during this training process, you can be chosen to be part of the U17 or U20 team. So, you can go participate in some international level competitions, playing against South Korea, Japan, North Korea, and so on and compete with girls aged between 14-16. Then it was National Games in 2017. We played very hard, and they all thought that our Sichuan team was a dark horse. But the thing is nobody would have expected that in the last game, the game we had to win, unfortunately we were tied. At the end there was a penalty kick, but our penalty shooter missed, so we ended in a draw, which means we didn't make it out of the preliminaries. So basically, in the prelim stage we couldn't even finish our own dream and goal. Since then, our whole team just felt like everything's changed and everyone collapsed. Everyone felt so frustrated because at the same time, after 2017, we would have more options.


After 2017, some of us could choose to go to college, and some people can choose to go continue to play football. Yes so basically everybody wanted to accomplish one goal while all of us are together, do a great thing together. However, we still lost that game, then felt like all of our dreams and all the things we wanted to do were destroyed. The whole team also entered a slump, for myself also, I entered a slump too. My dad knew that I wasn't successful in the National Games in 2017, so he was kind of sarcastic to me. At that time, maybe I had bad temper, so I fought him hearing him saying those. So, at home my relationship with him was completely broken. In the team, we didn't want to play football or play games too. However, in 2017, my luckiest time also came. That is Gao Hong, the head coach of the U17 team, selected me to play in the Asian Cup in Thailand. So basically, when my team didn't make the National Games, I followed coach Gao Hong to play Weifang Cup. Then we won the first place. So, Weifang Cup is like a friendly tournament, international friendly tournament, participating teams include Japan, the United States, Canada. The American team was very good, but we still won the game 5:4. We won the first place, at the same time, in our Sichuan team the players' emotions were out of control and fought with another team. Also, since it was pretty serious, all the videos of them fighting were handed over to the Chinese Football Association. Then among our Sichuan team, nine people were suspended, four of them were suspended for 2 years, five for 1 year. Being suspended means you can't play in the national games. It was tough. However, at the time I was at Weifang Cup tournament, and I also got first place at the tournament. To compare to them, it's a huge contrast. After I finished the National Youth team's training, I went back to Sichuan team and I just felt weird. Because my teammates thought I just wasn't there. If I were there same thing would have happened to me, being suspended, because they thought I would have fought for sure too. So yes I just felt a difference there. My relationship with them at that time was very bad, and I didn't know what to do. But I couldn't do anything about it anyways because at the time my only goal was to be in Thailand and be able to qualify in Thailand to help the Chinese National team win the game in order to get the "ticket" to the FIFA U-17 World Cup. At that time, I have also experienced a lot in Thailand, but in the end, we didn't get the "ticket". Anyway, it was a pity.


Stay tuned for our second segment: Career in Football