Sahar El-Hawwari: A game plan

The perfect pitch for women's football

Profile by Yasmine El-Rashidi

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El-Hawwari receiving the IOC world trophy last month

Sahar El-Hawwari has already gone down in the annals of sports history, her name etched on plaques and trophies. And yes, she is inspiring, though it would be a cliché to think this is simply because she is a woman who has succeeded in a male-dominated activity.

El-Hawwari inspires for a far simpler reason: passionate about something, she never faltered in her belief she would succeed.

"How can I describe it," she begins, trailing off almost immediately, fiddling with the papers before her.

"It was an urge," she says, "something that grew in me as a child. My father was an international FIFA football referee responsible for the Egyptian Football Association (EFA) committee, and he also held key posts in the African Football Union. And I was the only girl. And I was attached to him."

She smiles, the assumption being that the rest is self- evident.

El-Hawwari is the pillar of women's football in Egypt, the pioneer, as the media describes her. Not only did she help spread the women's game across the nation, she has given it an increasingly high profile both at home and abroad. Recently, at the Third World Conference of Women and Sports held in Morocco in the second week of March, El-Hawwari was presented with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) world trophy. The award -- the highest accolade for a woman in the sphere of sport -- had never before been presented to an Arab.

"I grew up loving the game, with a passion for it, because like many young girls my father was my ideal."

Much of her childhood was spent on the sidelines of football pitches, wherever her father happened to be refereeing.

"I suppose that's how anything starts. Loving the game, feeling that something is in your system, in your blood. So I followed the game, read everything I could."

"I have two brothers," she offers almost as an aside, "but it was this attachment to my father that made me fall deeper into the sport."

"People found my interest unusual because there was no such thing as women's football at the time. At the time I didn't know how to define my interest, let alone what to do with it. I knew I loved the sport, but what do you do with that energy and passion?"

"I started to ask my father why I wasn't allowed to play football like my brothers, like the men," she says, her delivery moving to fast-forward. The words tumble out.

"I wanted to play, I wanted to practise, I wanted to play professionally, I wanted to be one of the members of the team."

She pauses.

"I was 15 at the time and my father didn't know what to do except tell me that there is no football for women."

It was something El-Hawwari refused to accept.

"When I asked my father he told me that no, actually, there were no written regulations stating that women couldn't play the sport," she says. "But he said that it had never happened, and he asked me how it could ever be done."

The question lingered, and eventually she would find a response. "Something like that turns over in your head," she says, "sometimes for years, before you come up with an idea or solution."

Plans began to materialise several years later, while she was studying journalism and mass communications, inspired initially by the media's power to change and manipulate perceptions.

"That was in the 1980s," she says, "and even FIFA had not yet fully incorporated women's football into the agenda of international sport. The first FIFA world competition for women was in 1991."

The absence of any female presence did little to rein in her ambitions, and with the support of her father El-Hawwari enrolled in the local referee school. It was the first time a woman had joined the programme and her presence was far from uncontroversial though to her it seemed the most natural thing on earth.

"I was perfectly suited to be a referee," she says, "and to be the first. I've always been a challenger, a leader. It started in school, when I was head of the Student Union and involved in a lot of activities. Through that I learned leadership skills."

Not that there were no obstacles.

"It was 1991," she says, her tone changing. "I was watching the [first women's] World Cup, which was being played in China, and it hit me. I said to myself, okay, now it is reality, and I should do something about it. I wanted to make sure that Egypt did not fall behind, that at least on an Arab level we would be the leaders in women's football."

"That was it," she says. "I had a mission. It was like a switch had been flicked in my head and I knew what I had to do. I needed players."

The mission involved a tour of hundreds of clubs as she scouted for potential players.

"I was lucky. Because of my father's reputation I was well received. And I had already heard of girls in different local clubs who were promising players so I started with those, and then moved my search outside Cairo. I went everywhere, to the smallest villages. At times I would find myself in the middle of fields, in the poorest areas because someone knew someone who said there was a girl there who was a great player."

It was a wearisome process, though one lubricated by recognition of her father's name.

"My father had passed away by then, at the end of 1992, just when my idea was getting clearer. I had shared with him my vision, and he encouraged me and promised to help in whatever ways he could. His death reinforced my commitment and you know, during times when things were most difficult I would find myself in some village in the middle of nowhere, and out of that nowhere someone would come and greet me and mention my father's name and offer help. That gave me strength to continue. I felt that my father was present, that he was living because he was still so alive in people's minds. And I was committed to doing this for his sake."

And out of that commitment grew necessary force.

"Power," she picks up. "I don't know where it came from but I suddenly felt powerful. I had just one goal in my mind. Forget about everything, I told myself, this is a mission. It will take me a couple of years and I've just got to do it."

And she did. "For a few years I had no other life," she says. "And I had no choice, really, because I had to do what I did to get to where I have."

She laughs.

"I guess no one ever did that before," she smiles. "And of course everyone thought I was crazy, and all the newspapers were talking about this crazy woman."

"What I did was take these girls from their villages, bring them to Cairo and they lived with me."

The friend recalls arriving at El-Hawwari's two-storey house and finding young girls playing in the garden, and what seemed like a mob teeming inside.

"I gathered 18 girls and they lived with me, most of them, for four years. In my house. We used to train in the garden. I hired a coach, young, so he might be convinced of the idea. And I worked on moulding them into Egypt's first women's team."

It takes prodding for El-Hawwari to talk more about the girls.

"Well yes," she says, with a half laugh. "It was about many things. To start with I couldn't just take these girls out of the villages and train them to play football. They needed to fit into the society they were living in. I was taking them around, taking them to do their hair, to buy clothes, to private lessons, to eat out," she continues. "They were mixing with city people, and meeting other girls. I taught some of them to read and write, which was also a priority. It wasn't enough to take a group of young footballers and coach them. I wanted to create the first generation of Egyptian women footballers. And I wanted them to become international players, to become ambassadors for Egypt and eventually go on to train the next generation, and so on. Football alone was not enough."

It is a story that has sparked massive interest, not least among scriptwriters who have been quick to spot its cinematic potential. Some people recognised that what I was doing was a service to the community, and so they offered help," she says. "Like former Minister of Youth Abdel- Moneim Omara, who let us train at the national stadium for free, and Abdel-Salam El-Mahgoub, the governor of the Canal zone, who hosted us in Ismailia where we held all our training camps. But it was not always pleasant, not always smooth sailing. Not at all."

For the first few years El-Hawwari was subjected to repeated attacks in the media which portrayed her as a mad woman with money to waste.

"But the more they attacked me, and it was mainly the opposition press, the more determined I became. I had a goal, I had a mission, and their attacks only made me adhere ever more closely to my vision. For four or five years I saw no- one. Not my friends, not my family. I was isolated from society."

She pauses.

"But I was right in the middle of it. I had sown the seeds, and they were growing. I was working harder and harder to secure exposure for the girls. I would take them to the governorates during national festivals and they would play, and because of the festivities everything was televised. So people started to see them on TV and then, finally, they began to nod their heads and say 'she actually knows what she's doing'."

El-Hawwari is a graduate of the American University in Cairo, her bachelors and masters degrees are both from the department of journalism and mass communication. Later she completed a PhD in London. When it came to marketing she clearly knew her stuff.

"Even when there was all the negative press," she says, "I realised that it was still important because it was still a form of exposure, and it made people aware of us. Later we would take care of the details."

While her male counterparts were reluctant to give even a shrug of acknowledgement a FIFA executive visit to Egypt in 1995 resulted in an invitation to the Women's World Cup in Sweden. El- Hawwari capitalised on the opportunity and arranged for it to be broadcast live on Egyptian TV while covering the event herself in the national press.

"That was the turning point. I will never forget those moments when I saw the World Cup live. I had a dream, a dream," she says, articulating her words precisely, "that women's football in Egypt would one day be like this, with all the spectators, officials, commentators. It was my vision and I promised myself it would happen -- an Egyptian team in Egypt playing world-class play. And it gave me more energy, made me more determined."

By 1996 her critics began, if only fractionally, to tilt their heads in a different direction as they started to reassess the so-called "iron lady's" achievements. In 1996, when the sport became an official medal event at the Atlanta Olympics, Sahar again made sure it was broadcast in Egypt. The broadcasts were central to her strategy of publicising the game, a strategy that, after years of struggle, led to the founding of the Egyptian Football Association's (EFA) women's football committee with El- Hawwari at the helm.

Since which date each year has brought new milestones.

In 1997 she founded the first women's football league in Egypt and organised the first Arab women's football tournament, in which six countries participated. She was among the first women referees in Egypt, graduating second out of a class of 120 men and six women. And in 1999 she founded the first Egyptian women's championship, with 12 teams competing.

"Every year I felt myself turning a corner. You have to stop for a second and pause and look where you're going. Each year you put another brick on top of the building and you watch it grow until one day it is finished and stands without you. Then, maybe, you can start on another building. "

Sahar's efforts mean that women's football in Egypt is now firmly established on the world football map. In the process she has established the governing bodies, the competitions, training and refereeing programmes, coaching, sports medicine and sports management infrastructure needed to achieve her aims.

"Through it all the image of my father was very much in my head," she reflects. "He gave me extra energy."

That energy has allowed her to take the Egyptian model and adapt it to other Arab countries as she helped Jordan and the UAE organise their first women's football leagues.

"I like to create and I like to feel I'm doing something new," she says. "I didn't want to just create a team. I wanted to develop the game, develop it in tandem with the world. I wanted to do something that would grow and strengthen and spread. Even after I'm no longer here. And still, every year, every award I get, I feel there's more to achieve."

"Every time you get an award you have to work harder -- to justify the award, to take yourself to another level. It's not enough to get an award and sit back. If you do that you go nowhere and you've achieved nothing. It should be an incentive to work harder."

Not least the IOC world trophy, that ultimate sporting accolade.

"It's something I never dreamt of," she says, with the shy smile she seems to sport in all her press pictures.

"Just like when I was chosen as the first Arab member of the FIFA executive women's committee. At moments like those I feel as if I am flying, that I am being transported somewhere else," she laughs. "And it's at moments like those that you reflect on your life and give thanks. But then you begin to really think, and really worry."

Her face breaks into a huge grin.

"All my achievements are in memory of my father. I remember that day when I was 15 and he told me that he didn't know how it was possible to bring women's football to Egypt. Look at where we are now," she continues, her words now coming at a leisurely pace. "But now I have to look at my building again. It's getting quite high. And I have to think of something great to do with it now."

Photos: El Sayed Abdel-Qader