The most amazing soccer flip

So, I watch soc­cer. Have all my life. I like women’s soc­cer, because more seems to hap­pen than in men’s soc­cer. But I appar­ently missed this trick. The women are throw­ing the ball in from the side­line with an acro­batic flip to give the ball more momentum.

I was watch­ing the Mis­souri Val­ley Con­fer­ence col­lege women’s soc­cer finals on local cable, between Creighton and South­ern Illi­nois. At one point, one of the Creighton play­ers goes to throw the ball in from the side. She backs up really far, and I think, well, she’s going to try to get it close to the goal, she needs a lot of room to run. Then one of the announc­ers says, very matter-of-factly, “She’s got a good flip throw.”

Then this woman runs up to the line, puts the ball to the ground, flips over it and lands on her feet, using the force of her flip to launch the ball a mile into the air! I had to stop and rewind the TiVo sev­eral times, finally watch­ing it in slow motion. It was just incredible.

A brief search of YouTube this morn­ing points out that I’m pretty late to the party. Not only are there women’s soc­cer teams all over doing this, but appar­ently some guys do, too, includ­ing some­one on Dynamo Kiev back in the early 90’s¹.

If you’ve never seen this (I’d love to see some­one do it live) you owe it to your­self to watch this video of a player from Utah State doing the flip throw. The video says her name is Dana Peart, fwiw.