This article is the first in a three-part series.
For DiDi Haračić, very little in life has come easily.
The Angel City goalkeeper was born in Bosnia on April 12, 1992, less than a week after the simmering conflict in the disintegrating Yugoslavia had boiled over in that country.
Her birth, in the middle of the night at a hospital in Sarajevo, was rushed in more ways than one. “We lived in the center of the city, so the hospital wasn't far away,” her mom, Anica, remembers. “But still, snipers and grenades and everything. I was in the hospital probably by 2:00 and gave birth by 2:30.”
Almost immediately, she took the newborn DiDi home. “The doctor said, ‘you can’t stay here, it’s not safe,’” Anica says. They swaddled the baby from head to toe—so completely that Anica lost track of which end was her head—and went home. Not long after that, the hospital was shelled.
Because DiDi’s dad, Izet, was fighting in the war—he was in the Bosnian Special Forces—Anica was by herself when she took DiDi and her two-year-old sister, Anja, to the unfinished basement of their apartment building, where they sheltered from the bombings outside in a hole in a corner wall. They hid there with other women and children from the building for ten days before Anica decided they had to leave.
She took the two girls and left at night, having sold the family’s belongings to scrape together enough to pay the smugglers and border guards they’d encounter on the journey. She remembers waiting overnight and through the next day in a nearby school because traveling during the day wasn’t safe. A bus with 45 seats arrived; there were hundreds of women trying to leave with their kids.
“We all had to somehow go in the bus, so some people would just throw their kids inside without them going,” she remembers. “And I—I can't. I'm going with my kids, whatever happens. So I took both my girls. No luggage. No money, no passport, nothing. And we made it through the night. I don't know which way the driver took us. I don't know how he got us out. I mean, he's a hero.”
Once out of the city, they took a meandering route: east to Serbia, then northwest to Croatia, where they stayed with a friend for some months. Finally they made their way through Hungary to Germany, which had started accepting refugees.
“If I was to stay in Bosnia,” says Haračić, “I probably would not be sitting in this room right now.”
Twenty-nine-years later, Haračić was about to start a new season with NJ/NY Gotham FC, where she’d been traded from the Washington Spirit two years prior. She’d signed her first pro contract with Washington in 2017, but had played only 15 games in that time.
That first contract had itself been hard fought. Haračić had been around the Spirit organization since she was in college at Loyola University, playing for the reserves each year while she was off school in the summer. After college, she’d gone undrafted, but was picked up by the Western New York Flash early in the 2014 season—where, thanks to a knee injury, she would only play one game. She was waived at the end of the season.
Next came a six-month stint with Krokom/Dvärsätts IF, in the Swedish fourth division. She badly needed minutes, which she got there; what she didn’t get was any keeper-specific coaching. That lack of training had been a perpetual frustration for Haračić: she’d had none in high school or club soccer (though that wasn't unusual at the time), and a limited amount in college.
Frustrated with the on-field situation in Sweden and feeling isolated in a country where she knew no one and didn’t speak the language, Haračić returned home and spent 2016 as an amateur training player for Spirit. She got sporadic minutes playing for the Reserves, and was sometimes added to the first-team roster when starting keeper Stephanie Labbé was unavailable (at the time, the league allowed teams to use unpaid amateurs as national team replacement players).
“I would still train with the full team,” explains Haračić. “I would get less reps on certain days. If a player needed someone to hop in goal to practice shooting, I would be the one who stepped in.”
And of course, that training wasn’t paying the bills.
“I would go from Spirit training to coaching middle school girls, to my high school girls, to club soccer,” Haračić remembers. “Middle school and high school was every weekday. Club soccer was two or three nights a week. My days would be like, 7 a.m. to 11 p.m., and I'd wake up and do it all over again the next day. And that was just to get by. To live paycheck to paycheck and not be able to save.”
In early 2017, then-coach Jim Gabarra finally sat the 25-year-old down and said, “‘You've worked so hard for this club. You deserve to have a contract.’”
Still, Haračić mostly rode the bench that season, and again the next. She got something of a fresh start when she was traded to Gotham in 2019—but not unlike her situation in Washington, the top of the depth chart was firmly occupied by one of the top keepers in the world, Canada international Kailen Sheridan (in a pure coincidence, Sheridan and Labbé are both Canadian and have both been the No.1 for their country at different times).
Then, of course, the pandemic happened.
After all that, going into 2021, Haračić was considering hanging up her cleats. “Mentally I was starting to kind of go downhill,” she remembers. “It's hard. Every day you're telling yourself, ‘you're a good player, you're a really good goalkeeper,’ and you're just trying to grind and get to a place you know you can get to.”
“I remember calling my goalkeeping coach from home and crying, and I was just like, ‘I don't know if I can do this anymore,’” she says. Haračić was eight years into trying to build a professional career, with little to show for it.
“He pretty much said, ‘I need you to give it one more year,’” Haračić says. “You don’t know what’s going to happen.”
That season, the stars would align.
When Anica says she doesn’t know how the bus driver managed to get out of Sarajevo, this is what she means: on April 6,1992, the day usually considered the start of the Bosnian War, some 13,000 Bosnian Serb soldiers encircled the city. Much of the country’s terrain is rugged, and Sarajevo lies in a small valley ringed by mountains—a nightmare to defend from invaders.
Though the attackers held a positional advantage and were better armed, they were greatly outnumbered by the forces of the newly independent Bosnian government defending the city. It was a recipe for a prolonged, bloody stalemate, which is exactly what happened.
By May 2, Bosnian Serb forces had cemented a total blockade of Sarajevo, the start of the longest siege of a capital in modern history, which was to involve constant shelling that damaged virtually every building in the city. Snipers perched in the hills shot at anyone on the streets—armed or unarmed, adults and children alike. Thousands of civilians were killed.
If Anica had delayed just a few more days, the family would have been stuck in the city, which was becoming a deathtrap.
In Germany, the family was safe, but life was difficult. Anja was old enough to have some memory of that time. “We were poor,” she says. “We struggled really hard. You had food coupons [from the German government], and that's how you survived. It wasn't enough. You'd go to soup kitchens and people are cutting in line in front of you or kicking you out of line, and by the time you get up there, there's nothing left.”
Nonetheless, “my memories of Germany were playing in a courtyard with friends,” she says. “They're actually pretty positive, for the most part.”
Anja attributes that to her mother’s resiliency and positive attitude.
One day not long after the family had arrived in Germany, they were staying in a small room with no kitchen. “There was only a coffee machine there,” Anica remembers. “I didn’t know what to make. We had a little bit of milk and one garlic and [some] bread. I put a little bit of milk and water through the coffee machine and I put the milk and garlic inside and I made it like soup.”
What for Anica was a moment of ingenuity in the face of hardship became a happy memory for Anja. “When I was much older, I asked my mom, ‘when are you going to make that garlic soup again?’ And I find out she made this thing in a coffee pot! I had no idea.”
Anica was shielding her daughters from a grim reality: she’d had no contact with Izet since leaving the country, and no way of knowing if he was alive. “I don’t know how to explain [the feeling],” she says. “I don't know if a person becomes numb, or if you just go with the flow. I wasn't by myself—a lot of refugees were with me, most of them women with kids because men were not allowed to leave the country—all going through the same thing. We had one or two TVs available, so we would watch the news and if there was a massacre or something, see if we could recognize anybody. And of course you can’t.”
Anica says she rarely thought about the possibility that Izet had been killed. “You just focus on your kids and try to see if you can change something,” she explains. “Maybe find a job, go to school to learn German, put the kids in school, and just try to organize your life [however] much you can, because you don't know how long you're going to stay there.”
After two years, Anica got a call. “The police or somebody came and said, ‘Are you Anica?’” she remembers. “I said, ‘yes.’ They said, ‘we have your husband, he’s alive.’”
Continue to Part 2 here.