TUSCALOOSA, Ala. -- Cat Whitehill woke up one fall Sunday in China. A defender for the United States women's national team, she was competing for her country at the 2007 Women's World Cup. She was also from Alabama.
So as teammates sought out breakfast, she tuned in to a college football game kicking off on what was still Saturday night back home.
Every Thursday growing up in Birmingham, Whitehill and her dad stopped for breakfast on the way to school. They opened the newspaper and made their picks for the week's football games. At the end of the season, the loser bought dinner, a wager that continues to this day. Whether from home or in the stands, she watched. She cheered for Florida or Georgia, her parents' alma maters. She lived college football.
"That's what you do on Saturdays in the South," Whitehill said, neglecting to mention that the rest of the days of the week are defined primarily by their proximity to Saturday.
The only woman raised in Alabama to play for the U.S. national team (Mia Hamm was born in Selma but was introduced to soccer after leaving the state), Whitehill is both exception to and embodiment of the rule when it comes to sports in the footprint of the SEC.
Football overshadows everything in the fall. And it is difficult to grow in the shadows.
The SEC, flush with football money, is fertile soil for many women's sports, from the historical success of basketball to the recent and rapid ascent of softball. It is a power in women's gymnastics and produces champions in golf and track and field. Disparate as those sports are, they exist largely outside football season. That is not the case for volleyball and soccer, the team sports the SEC sponsors in the fall. In those sports success has been the aberration, reserved for a few schools on the fringes of the conference footprint.
Despite the same recruiting turf and passionate fan base, SEC soccer and volleyball don't win titles. Or at least, during a 2017 fall in which SEC teams spent time at No. 1 in both sports and nine SEC soccer teams made the NCAA tournament, they haven't yet. The same cultural obstacles that slowed women's sports nationwide lingered longest in Southern falls.
Those obstacles are only now fading.
Kevin Laux pondered the reasons on a warm Saturday morning at the Mountain Brook soccer complex in a posh Birmingham suburb. The sun barely up on a day that would see it set over a football game at Bryant-Denny Stadium in Tuscaloosa, the parking lot already was near capacity for a youth soccer tournament that Laux helped run for Birmingham United Soccer Association. A Louisianan by birth and an Alabama resident for more than a decade, he stood near a tent selling replica jerseys for soccer stars from Neymar to Carli Lloyd. But far more prevalent on the adults milling about were clothes bearing the logos of Alabama, Auburn, Georgia and other SEC schools.
"Quite frankly," Laux said, "it's football."
And it's not a predicament the Crimson Tide alone face, but soccer and volleyball generally, in a swath of the SEC footprint, from west of Atlanta and north of Florida through to the Texas line.
Ed Allen had no ties to the SEC map when he walked away from a recruiting class at the University of Tulsa that included one of the most highly regarded players in the country in order to take the volleyball coaching job at Alabama in 2011. What attracted him, salary boost notwithstanding, was the school's brand name made by football.
"There have been some nights [I'm not sure] I thought that was a good decision, to be quite honest with you," Allen said. "But Alabama is a unique place. It's a place that there is such history to it, most of which was created by Bear Bryant. It has a mystique to it that was intriguing. I thought it was a sleeping giant, and we proved it to be that."
Awakened perhaps, but it is pushing it to call Alabama or any SEC school a volleyball giant. So often the SEC outlier, Florida spent parts of this season ranked No. 1 in the country and has made seven appearances in the final four. The rest of the SEC has just three all-time final four appearances, the same as current members of the Mountain West.
The conference has 12 Sweet 16 appearances in the past decade, 11 by Florida or Kentucky.
So in a midweek match this fall, Alabama and Arkansas competed not as dual Goliaths but as programs hoping to find a place in the top half of the conference standings.
The Tide lost an epic third set by a 32-30 score but gathered their nerve to win the final two sets and the match. For a young team, it was a performance to build on. But that core the Tide hope will produce more postseason appearances is almost entirely imported. To compete at a high level is to eschew much of the South in recruiting.
"Volleyball is not good in the South," Allen said. "If you look at my roster, I have [two players] from the state of Alabama. I have nobody [from states] that touch the state of Alabama on the roster. So I've got to go pull from all over the country -- Texas, Florida, California, Indiana, Illinois -- areas that are hotbed areas."
The same is true for the Crimson Tide soccer team, which had as many starters from Spain as Alabama when it lost to Tennessee the night after the volleyball match in front of a crowd outnumbered by those playing intramural flag football on the adjacent fields.
"There's not an abundance of great players," third-year Crimson Tide soccer coach Wes Hart said. "There's maybe one or two every year, and you're fighting over that player with Auburn and every other school in the country."
It is difficult for the SEC to produce soccer and volleyball champions when a wide swath of its footprint doesn't produce soccer and volleyball players.
According to data from the National Federation of State High School Associations for the 2016-17 academic year, Alabama ranks 21st overall in the total number of students participating in high school sports. But within that overall mark, it ranks 19th for boys and just 27th for girls. It is a similar story in Mississippi, which ranks 24th overall in participation but drops to 29th for girls, and Tennessee, 26th overall but 31st for girls.
While states like Pennsylvania and Minnesota have almost one female participant for every male participant in prep athletics, Alabama ranks last in the nation with almost two boys for every girl. Mississippi, Tennessee and even South Carolina are close on its heels.
The national average is 1.34 boys for every girl participating in high school sports. The last time that national rate was equal to Alabama's current rate (1.85) was 1988-89.
Not surprisingly, given the sport's place of prominence in the culture, football is at the root of the disparity. Only eight states had more participants in high school football last year than Alabama. Nearby states also far outpaced what their total population would suggest. That concentration of time and resources, of interest, sucks oxygen out of the air for much else in the fall, which for girls is the high school volleyball season and height of club soccer season (like much of the SEC and a little less than half of the country, soccer is a spring sport for Alabama high schools).
The result historically was a lack of infrastructure for sports beyond football. In a story that sounds more like women's soccer in South America than the American South, Whitehill played on boys' teams until eighth grade simply because there weren't club teams for girls in the area. That was roughly 20 years ago, not the dawn of the Title IX era.
"My club coaches for most of my career were dads; they weren't necessarily soccer coaches," Whitehill said. "My dad was my coach for a while. I think if there was such a thing as a 'Coaching Soccer for Dummies' book ... my dad did the best he could.
"He was a football player, and the other coaches that coached me were football players. A lot of us were taught to boot it as far as you can, that was kind of how Alabama was."
A premier youth soccer club like Birmingham United serves approximately 7,000 players at all levels and ages and fields more than 80 competitive teams -- double the number of competitive teams of even five or six years ago, according to executive director Andrew Brower. And yet Birmingham United is still the only offering in the Elite Clubs National League for the states of Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi. U.S. Soccer's recently launched Girls Development Academy doesn't have a club in any of those states, either.
The only starter from Alabama on the Alabama soccer team much of this season, Nealy Martin will now sometimes find her dad watching European soccer games when she comes home. But when she grew up going to Auburn football games and wearing a cherished Bo Jackson jersey, he was another of the soccer novices learning the game on the fly to coach his daughters. It wasn't until she moved on to Birmingham United that soccer became more than a hobby.
From Whitehill to Martin, times change. But slowly.
The only in-state starter on the Crimson Tide volleyball team, senior Leah Lawrence used to commute two hours each way, several times each week, to play for a club team in Nashville. The commute isn't as long for Gabrielle Deas and her dad, Jay, but they drive nearly an hour each way from Tuscaloosa so that Gabby, now 16, can play club volleyball in Birmingham.
Born and raised in Tuscaloosa, Jay played college baseball. He is a boxing coach who works with current heavyweight champion Deontay Wilder. The family is Crimson Tide faithful, and he and Gabby have made Saturday pilgrimages to Bryant-Denny Stadium. Sports have long been a part of his world. But that knowledge didn't extend to volleyball until Gabby came home from playing at school with a different kind of excitement in her voice.
"Once she made the team and started showing some aptitude for it, I was just having to learn from step one," Jay said. "I'm still learning. There's still a lot about it I don't quite understand that I'm trying to figure out, with all the rules and whatnot. But it's been a lot of fun to watch and see her get excited about it."
Gabby goes to tournaments and volleyball camps across the South and beyond. Tall and no stranger to work from hanging around with her dad in a boxing gym, she has drawn interest from college programs. She wasn't in the stands for the Alabama-Arkansas midweek volleyball match, but she did watch at home, volleyball more readily available than ever. As the Tide rallied, she called in her dad.
Just as he used to watch baseball, boxing or football with his dad.
Those gender conventions matter, too. It matters that neither soccer nor volleyball have robust histories as men's sports in the South, not to any substantial degree at the high school level and certainly not in the SEC. There are no men's volleyball programs in the conference and Kentucky and South Carolina are the only two that sponsor men's soccer.
Again, times change, and the marketing success of Atlanta United in MLS points to new demographics for at least men's soccer, but women's soccer and women's volleyball are still redundant terms through much of the South.
"Everyone here grows up thinking they're going to be the quarterback at Alabama or Auburn," said Birmingham United's Brower, who turned down a chance to play small-college soccer to attend Auburn. "The reality of that is that's not happening [with soccer] for most kids."
That hasn't prevented growth. Florida won the SEC's first and only soccer title in 1998 and is regularly ranked. Auburn fields consistently good teams under longtime coach Karen Hoppa. Mixing geographically with the ACC's rich soccer lineage, South Carolina has become not only a consistent success on the field but among the nation's attendance leaders.
A record nine SEC soccer teams made this year's NCAA tournament. Highlighted by Vanderbilt's upset of Ohio State in the first round, six remain.
"I think that it's probably a unique opportunity for women to really make a name for themselves because you're not right next to a men's program and competing for the same crowds," South Carolina coach Shelley Smith said before a game at Ole Miss this fall. "If you want to see soccer in your community here in Oxford, you're going to come out and see these women play. It is probably a help to the women's game -- SEC soccer is women's soccer. I think it's a neat thing for women. I think it has helped build something."
It has just taken a long time to carve something out of the wilderness.
Softball faced similar obstacles when the SEC began to compete in that sport two decades ago. Yet there, in the blink of an eye in terms of athletic evolution, it equaled and arguably surpassed the Pac-12 as the deepest and best softball conference in the country.
As with soccer and volleyball, that required outsourcing to stock rosters. But now the region not only produces stars like Team USA outfielder and Crimson Tide alum Haylie McCleney but is so deep with talent it hosts hidden gems like Ole Miss pitcher Kaitlin Lee. And as a map full of new softball stadiums suggests, the SEC had the money and passion to support that growth -- in the spring.
Football is a cornerstone of a culture slow to embrace fall sports competition. But football is also the financial engine that makes SEC soccer and volleyball programs sleeping giants.
Hall of Fame softball coach Yvette Girouard built a nationally relevant softball program in the South before the SEC ever got involved, taking the school now known as Louisiana-Lafayette to the Women's College World Series on a budget that left her in charge of things like mowing the field. But when LSU approached with SEC resources, she jumped.
"Without SEC football, SEC softball is not as good as it is," Girouard said. "It's because of the money generated. With that SEC football money now, you see the best facilities in the country. ... I think it's the No. 1 reason SEC softball is so good. We can never thank football enough."
But she never had to go head-to-head with the cash cow for a region's attention.
"It's kind of just become a way of life around here for any sport other than football," said Alabama redshirt senior goalkeeper Kat Stratton, an all-conference selection who grew up in Tupelo, Mississippi. "Anyone is going to get overshadowed by football, but in the end we all are serious about our own sports. It's kind of cool to fly under the radar."
But flying under the radar is antithetical to SEC schools. Stratton recalled the feeling of satisfaction when her Mississippi club team would beat a team from another region with a better pedigree, teams unable to deal with a rugged, physical style of play that she said is similar to that played by SEC teams. But if it's a role a team like the Crimson Tide embraced in upsetting Florida State this season and eventually reaching the tournament for the third time ever, it isn't the way the SEC does business. It isn't why someone like Hart, a former MLS player and a rising star in the coaching ranks, left an assistant's position at Florida State that provided him with a national championship ring. The SEC has the means to be more.
"This was the type of place where if you win games, if you show progress, they're going to look after your program," Hart said of Alabama. "If you look at softball and gymnastics, tennis and most recently golf, if you look at all these other sports that are successful, it's not like we're just a football school."
Except that in fall, that is what SEC schools have been. Football schools in football states.