In a fun twist of fate, the new coach is none other than Reiner Kulti. But, and that was a big juicy but, Kulti is nothing like Sal and everyone knows and expects him to be. The story starts however, with an announcement of a new assistant coach for a twenty seven year old Sal’s WPL soccer team- the Pipers. He married when Sal was seventeen and in anger, she tore down all his posters from her walls. Then Kulti got divorced (but the damage was already done for the passionate teenager in love/hate with him), won more world cups and player of tournaments, allegedly got injured and retired. Of course, while Sal was busy perfecting her game, Reiner Kulti rose as an international superstar and became a world renown celebrity. So with the single minded focus of a girl on a mission, she played football, put her heart, soul and life into it, till her dream took a life of it’s own. Sal dreamed of playing with Kulti one day, no matter how out of the world her dreams looked like. Covered her bedroom walls with Kulti’s posters, wrote him fan letters declaring she was his #1 fan, had an imaginary relationship with him and informed her parents that one day she, Salome Casillas, was going to marry Reiner Kulti. Sal did what the best of us with a childhood obsession, that stretches into teenage, do. This was going to be the longest season of her life.Ī seven year old football nut (I won’t call it soccer because I am not American and everybody other than Americans calls the sport football because see, foot meets ball is football) Sal watches the debut of a nineteen year old German footballer Reiner Kulti on TV, watches him score an impossible goal and take his team to victory, and she is hooked for life. “Sal, please don’t make me visit you in jail. Or the murderous urges he brought out in her.

Nothing could have prepared her for the man she got to know. So she isn’t prepared for this version of Reiner Kulti who shows up to her team’s season: a quiet, reclusive, shadow of the explosive, passionate man he’d once been. Sal had long ago gotten over the worst non-break-up in the history of imaginary relationships with a man that hadn’t known she’d existed. It didn’t take a week for twenty-seven-year-old Sal Casillas to wonder what she’d seen in the international soccer icon-why she’d ever had his posters on her wall, or ever envisioned marrying him and having super-playing soccer babies. When the man you worshipped as a kid becomes your coach, it’s supposed to be the greatest thing in the world.

“Trust me, I’ve wanted to punch you in the face a time or five.”

Mariana zapata kulti