“When I was younger, I wouldn’t want to try anything new,” she said. “Before the game I was crying because I didn’t want to play, but obviously my parents forced me to play, and right when I stepped on the field, I loved it.”
Growing up and playing alongside her sisters Kacy, two years her senior, and Sandy, a year younger than her, Jessie’s passion for soccer grew quickly. Even as a kid, her desire to train, to get better, to learn, consumed her.
“Out of the three of us, she definitely had a knack for soccer,” Kacy said. “She’s always had such a passion for it and just anytime she could, she had a soccer ball with her.”
Right, left, right right left. For hours Jessie would play in her yard alone, juggling as the hot Florida sun beat down. All that practice, especially as a child, was done with one goal in mind.
Jessie wanted to play for the United States women’s national soccer team.
As she got older, Jessie’s career took a normal trajectory. She played for recreational teams, eventually moving up to travel and school clubs.
Her first year playing in high school, Jessie finished with 18 goals and 6 assists. But again, as it had earlier in life, her desire to be great drove her to the next level.
In 2012, Jessie — then a sophomore— upped her game even further. Behind her 24 goals and 12 assists, she led George Jenkins High School to the state championship game, only to lose in the title matchup. It would be the last time she played with Kacy, who moved on to Florida State as a four-time first team All-State player.
But Jessie still wasn’t good enough.
Breaking out
By her junior year, Jessie had finally arrived in the way everyone had been waiting for. The middle Scarpa sister, with 48 goals and 27 assists, almost single-handedly carried George Jenkins High School back to the state championship game, only to fall short in consecutive years.
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As she poured in the goals, the scholarships followed. Another game-winner, another hat trick, another prestigious collegiate offer: Stanford, nearby Florida State and finally UNC.
Coach Anson Dorrance knew who he wanted the first time he watched her.
“I think her strength coach had come to a team camp that I ran with a younger team back in the day, and so this is a guy I trusted and he kept encouraging me to watch this kid play, and I went over there and she wasn’t on the field,” Dorrance said. “There’s was actually another girl on her team who I kind of liked a bit, but he said ‘No no no, stick around until Jessie gets into the game, I think you’ll be really impressed.’
“So all of a sudden Jessie does go into the game, and I’m intrigued because I’m seeing a lot of these wonderful pieces in her game, and then a good friend of mine, Jim Blankenship, started telling me about her versatility and the fact that he could play her absolutely anywhere. This is a guy I trusted, and so I kept coming back to watch her play.”
His persistence paid off. When Scarpa visited UNC in the spring of 2013, she knew right away.
“Just getting here to the campus really sold me, I mean I fell in love with it right away and I just knew it was the right place for me to be,” she said. “We were driving home, and I knew I was going to commit there.”
But how soon she’d be there — that’s something she never could have imagined.
Standing strong, but on one leg
After that game in Brandon before her last year of high school, an MRI confirmed what Jessie already knew: Her ACL was torn, ending her senior season before it ever began. George Jenkins High School would not be winning the state championship, and if they did, they would have to do it without their star midfielder.
She had options. Stay and finish the school year, looking on from the sidelines, or leave and get a head start on the rest of her career.
She made the only choice that made sense for her end dream, the one she’d had since she was a little girl juggling alone in the yard.
“Full-team, that’s the goal,” Jessie said.
And so she left, graduating in the winter and enrolling at UNC in the spring of 2014 to rehab.
For the next six months, Scarpa woke up before class every morning and went to physical therapy, refusing to skip a session. With practice going on at the same time in the morning, she rarely saw her teammates, if at all. Those first few weeks in Chapel Hill were more lonely than not.
But with her childhood ambition now within reach, she stuck it out and eventually her diligence paid off.
On Aug. 22, the middle Scarpa was rewarded with an experience months in the making: her first collegiate soccer game, a 1-0 home loss to Stanford. But it didn’t matter that she only played 50 minutes, it didn’t matter that she had no shots, it didn’t even matter that Dorrance played her — a goal-scoring machine in high school — at defense.
Scarpa was officially back. And while she has yet to register a goal for UNC, Dorrance hopes that sometime this year, sometime soon, everyone will get to see the same spark he sees in Jessie.
“I coached the US national team for eight years, I won the first women’s world championship so I know all the qualities these kids have to have. I also know a potentially great player when I see one, and Jessie is that player,” Dorrance said. “She could truly be an elite collegiate player with no question, but my dream for her and her dream for herself is beyond that. I think she has the potential to be an elite international player as well, somewhere.
“If she’s ambitious, and she appears to be, and if she’s hardworking, and she appears to be, and if she’s coachable, and she appears to be, she’s gonna make it.”
All she has to do is stay healthy. And then, for Jessie Scarpa, the best is yet to come.
sports@dailytarheel.com
