When Thembi Kgatlana buried the ball in the back of the net during South Africa’s first-round Women’s World Cup match against Spain in 2019, it was more than just another goal. The aftershock of her impeccably placed shot reverberated throughout the country, igniting passion for the sport and subverting long-established societal norms.
“The cultural impact was massive,” says Fran Hilton-Smith, former South African team head coach and a driving force behind women’s soccer on the African continent for over 40 years. “The game has just exploded, and it’s changed the mindset about what’s possible for women. A lot of parents are now seeing that it’s okay for their daughters to play.”
It took 21 years for the South African women’s team, affectionately known as Banyana Banyana, to qualify for the World Cup. At every stage of that arduous journey, Hilton-Smith has been there, often breaking new ground. She has served as a coach and manager for the national team, the sole female FIFA instructor from Africa, the only woman and South African on the Confederation of African Football’s Technical Development Committee, and the founder of the continent’s first soccer academy for girls, the High Performance Centre (HPC). The bulk of the national team are HPC alumni.
It’s a significant shift from the status quo when Hilton-Smith began her career. At the time, few women played. she says. “I joined one of the few women’s teams that were around in the late 60s.” With apartheid firmly in place, men’s teams who attempted to have inter-racial matches were pursued by police but women’s teams who did the same were left alone by simple virtue of the fact that no one was paying attention.
At the end of her playing career, Hilton-Smith transitioned into coaching. At the time, South Africa was subject to an international sporting ban because of apartheid. “We’d been suspended by FIFA for twenty years,” she explains. “When we were re-accepted in 1993, we were ready to get involved in competition because we’d been playing.”
But just lifting the ban was not enough to assure a position on the global stage. For the first eight years of World Cup qualification, the entire African continent was allowed only one slot. In 1999 one more was added and by 2019 there were three.
“I started pushing FIFA to allow more positions for Africa,” Hilton-Smith says. “Eventually, we got three. That’s why we were able to qualify for the World Cup in 2019 because there were more opportunities.”
As head coach of Banyana Banyana in the early 2000s, Hilton Smith noticed a trend. Off-field problems related to their families and hometowns were impacting the players’ on-field effectiveness. “There would be all these issues,” she says. “I’d take them to the national team camp, feed them, fix them up, and then they’d go back home to the same thing.”
The solution, she believed, was to keep them full-time. “During my travels overseas, I’d realized that academies were a very important part of development,” she says. “I approached the lottery board and federation board here. Fourteen years ago, I opened the High Performance Centre for 25 girls who were good at school, really good at football, and many of whom came from disadvantaged backgrounds.”
Once accepted, candidates live at the academy, have medical and nutritional care, maintain a 100 percent pass rate, and play soccer every day. “The cream of the players come from the Centre because of the attention they get,” says Hilton-Smith. “I firmly believe it’s one of the reasons we qualified for two Olympics, two U-17 Women’s World Cups, multiple CAF tournaments and finally the World Cup. It’s really paid off in developing players and improving the national team.” A total of 18 players from the HPC have become members of Banyana Banyana since 2003.
The HPC is the only academy of its kind in Africa, but that may soon change. Other countries like Namibia, Botswana and Zambia are exploring ways to replicate the model and create more opportunities for training and competition. Within South Africa, Hilton-Smith’s goal is to create an academy in each of the country’s nine provinces.
She’s also emphasized the importance of women’s coaches, particularly black women who make up so much of the country’s population. “I’ve pushed to make a difference and ensure that women’s football is a women’s game,” she says. “Whenever they conduct a coaching course here, I’ve made sure that at least 50 percent can be women.”
Her efforts have paid off. Within South Africa, 25 women have their CAF class A coaching license – more than the rest of the continent put together. Every national coach is female, and Banyana Banyana head coach Desiree Ellis has been nominated twice for African Coach of the Year.
For women’s football to continue evolving in Africa, the key is competition, Hilton-Smith maintains. The World Cup happens just once every four years and the African Women’s Championship every two years. “Aside from that, there isn’t much competition, so the teams disband and don’t play at all, except for in South Africa because we have SASOL sponsored,” she explains. “That’s bad when it comes to the World Cup because if you take any team from Europe, they’ve all been playing each other. You have to compete to get better.”
Starting earlier by including soccer as a regular part of physical education in schools would also make a difference. “In Germany, Sweden, and Denmark they start at age five or six,” Hilton-Smith notes. “If we had football in all the schools, they would get that early grounding, which I know they have in the United States.”
One dream: to have a women’s football league with sponsorships and support equal to that of the men’s league. In subcultures with religiously based restrictions on women’s clothing, a futsal league would allow them to play indoors. More funding for developing women coaches and administrators will also be key, she contends.
Hilton-Smith’s career is not over but if it ended tomorrow afternoon, she’d be satisfied. “The fact that we’ve qualified for two Olympics and finally the big cherry, the World Cup, that we have women coaches, 97 women administrators I’ve developed, women referees who are in FIFA and CAF, I’m happy with that,” she says. “Women’s football development in South Africa, Africa and many countries in the world has been my life’s journey and I am happy with what has been achieved.”