Nothing Left to Prove: DiDi Haračić's Remarkable Journey to Angel City (Part 3)

This is the third in a three-part series. You can read the first two installments here and here.

Izet was close with both his daughters, but he shared a special bond with his youngest. An exceptional athlete himself, he and DiDi were always either playing or watching sports. He was her first coach, and he loved taking her to Washington Capitals games, where she would pay special attention to the goaltender, Olie Kölzig.

DiDi’s earliest “goalkeeping” experience was when she was about nine years old. “In our old house, we had a long hallway,” she remembers. “We'd shut all the side doors and I would get a stick, a baseball glove, and a hockey mask.”

When a Caps game was on TV, she’d find her dad watching from his recliner in the basement and wait. “I would sit next to him with all my gear ready, and he would have this smirk on his face,” she says. “At every timeout or commercial break, I'd get in the doorway in the hall, put on my gear, and he'd literally kick a mini soccer ball at me. That’s kind of how my goalie career started.”

Izet was in many ways a formidable man. His career in the armed forces began at age 14, when he started at a military academy. As he worked his way up the ranks, he competed in multiple sports: soccer, boxing, skiing, judo, and, of course, bobsledding. With the Special Forces, he participated in mountain and water rescues.

But to his family, he was just Izzy. “He had all these crazy accomplishments and you think, ‘this can't be real life,’ you know?” says Anja. “But at the same time, he was the most loving human being you’d ever meet.”

There’s a clear demarcation in the Haračić family—Anja looks like Anica, and DiDi looks like Izzy—that serves as a visual reminder of the unique connection DiDi and Izzy shared. Anica and Anja never quite understood their relationship, especially when it came to sports. 

When DiDi was “a nugget” (her words), Izzy coached her soccer team, which was sometimes a source of conflict. “My mom and sister, they always stayed out of it, but they were like, ‘I don't know why he's coaching her. It's not working’” DiDi says. “We're both hard-headed and stubborn. If he thought I needed something, I would tell him he was wrong because I always thought I was right.”

“He was always giving me a hard time,” she continues. “He was like, ‘Well, if you want to get to this point, you have to do this, you have to do that.’ And I'm like, ’You're so annoying!’”

DiDi suspects now that Izzy was hard on her because after everything the family had been through, he didn’t want her to waste her potential. “All of [my parents’] work that they went through,” she says, “I think was to get me to a really good place in my life.”

“This is the thing,” explains Anica. “They are the same, okay? You know, when you're the same—”

Anja finishes her mom’s sentence. “You butt heads all the time.”

Saying Izzy was important to DiDi, that he was a central figure in her life, is like saying oxygen is important for living things. It’s true, but it’s such an understatement as to be almost meaningless.

“As soon as she opened her eyes, even as a little girl, she would say, ‘Where's Daddy?’” remembers Anica. “I was like, ‘Excuse me. You've been in my body for nine months!’”

Izzy, DiDi says, was her biggest fan. He was the first person she’d call after training sessions and games, the person whose honesty she trusted over everyone else’s. He was the first family member she came out as gay to. 

“They couldn’t live without each other,” Anica says simply.

“I was at work,” DiDi remembers. “I coached at an all-girls private school. I was playing for Spirit at the time. And I remember we took a water break, I went to my phone, and there were so many notifications and text messages.”

She knew what was happening without reading them. “I still have that one text message from my mom, which was my dad's last breath.”

“I think if you've ever gone through it,” she says, “maybe people can relate and understand, but it just never feels real.”

It took a long time for DiDi to stop picking up her phone to call him, and a longer time to feel anything but a black knot of grief on his birthday.

“You could tell that my sister lost a huge chunk of herself,” says Anja. “I think the thing she misses about my dad the most is that sometimes she just needs to hear him tell her, ‘you're doing great.’”

In the wake of their loss, DiDi and Anja have grown closer. “I feel blessed to have partly become that person where she'll call me,” Anja says, “and we'll have our conversations. For myself, too, it's been huge for us to be able to have that relationship.”

“I think now I'm to the point where I celebrate his days,” says DiDi. “This year I got a cupcake and I blew a candle out while I Facetimed my family.”

Not long after the phone call where DiDi’s former coach told her to keep grinding for one more year, Gotham’s starting keeper, Kailen Sheridan, picked up an injury in preseason, leaving the door open for Haračić to prove she deserved to start.

“I knew I had to make it count,” she says.

Gotham had a new goalkeeping coach that year, Daniel Ball, who was to play a central role in Haračić’s career.

“Minus my goalkeeping coach from home,” she says, “Dan is the first coach who has given me an opportunity.”

“I think it's sometimes hard for people to admit,” she continues, “but I think you do need one person to believe in you. As much as you can believe in yourself, sometimes you need someone to lean on and someone to tell you you're good. So that was a turning point of our relationship. I remember looking at Dan and thinking, ‘I can trust this person.’”

This part of the story is different in Ball’s telling from Haračić’s.

“I think it's a very nice thing for her to say [about me],” says Ball, referring to Haračić’s oft-repeated assertion that he was the first coach to give her a chance. “But there was an opportunity and she took it.”

“We had a really strong group of goalkeepers,” he remembers. Haračić wasn’t the clear No. 2 above the 22-year-old Mandy Haught (then McGlynn); with the Challenge Cup approaching, she had to earn the starting slot in training.

Ball was honest with Haračić. “We had a couple of very frank conversations,” he says. “I didn't think she was fit enough… I don't really beat around the bush.” That honesty forms the foundation of the two keepers’ relationship.

“DiDi had the experience,” Ball continues. “Another one of our assistant coaches, Becca Moros, was a big advocate of DiDi. So we went with Deeds, and she stood on her head. She was phenomenal.”

He remembers one save in particular, against Thorns forward Christine Sinclair in the Challenge Cup final, that showed what Haračić was capable of.

With Gotham clinging to a 1–1 draw, an unmarked Sinclair made a central run and received a sideways ball from forward Morgan Weaver. Sinclair (who happens to be the most prolific international goalscorer in the history of the sport) took one touch with her right foot and then lined up a shot toward the far post with her left as she entered the 18. Haračić dove left and blocked the close-range shot to keep the score level.

Including the six Challenge Cup matches, Haračić got 13 games in 2021—nearly as many NWSL games as she’d played altogether in the previous seven years since college.

“I just remember telling myself, ‘Build your resumé,’” she says. “That was literally the highlight every day in my journal: ‘Build your resumé, build your resumé.’ That was me telling myself, ‘someone's going to see me and it's going to pay off.’”

In the end, the only people who needed to see her were already in her orbit. When Angel City hired Gotham’s Freya Coombe as head coach for their inaugural season, Ball came with her as goalkeeping coach.

“Dan gave me a call, and he was like, ‘What are you feeling?’” Haračić remembers. She thought about it for a few days. “Then I think I just had a moment of clarity and I was like, ‘fresh start, just go.’”

After Angel City’s inaugural home opener last year, Haračić looked into the stands. It had been a dream night, from Vanessa Gilles’s third-minute goal to the team’s gritty defending until the final whistle. Even the weather cooperated, with clear skies and the temperature hovering in the low 60s at kickoff. Haračić made three saves, one of them an impressive diving block of a one-touch strike from near the penalty spot. It was perfect.

Almost.

“This team and that stadium—it means the world to me,” Haračić says. “Because it was six years of grinding. For him not to see my first full year as a starting goalkeeper—and I know he would be so proud—that's what still hurts.”

Ask Haračić how she got through those years of grinding, and she’ll say she kept going because she had something to prove. To herself, certainly, and to anybody who didn’t believe in her ability. But you get the sense that the one big thing driving her is knowing where she comes from. “So much of what I do,” she says, “is because of my parents.”

Anica and Anja are still DiDi’s biggest fans; Anja says she can’t watch Angel City games in the same room as her kids because she can’t help cursing. But DiDi also knows Izzy is still watching out for her.

Despite not being raised religious, she says she prays before every game:

“Dad, God, please keep me healthy, keep me and my teammates healthy, and allow me to showcase my talent.”