Jordyn Huitema exclusive: Seattle Reign star on Christine Sinclair comparisons, Megan Rapinoe's send-off and Canada's bid to defend its Olympic gold medal

That path first crossed with the spotlight when Huitema broke into Canada’s senior national team at the age of 15, before her move to PSG intensified public interest and confirmed her status as a teen prodigy. For some, such attention would’ve been difficult to deal with. For Huitema? “I think I was pretty good at separating that from my life,” she tells GOAL.

“It was almost like everybody was talking about some other person that wasn't even me. That's kind of how I felt. I was just like, 'Oh, I'm me, I'm a small town kid from Chilliwack. Alright, they can keep talking'. It wasn't anything that got to me, it wasn't anything that was super exciting to me. It was really cool, obviously, to hear those things and I think the biggest thing too, they always said, 'Oh, she's going to be the next Christine Sinclair', but I wanted to just be me. I just wanted to be Jordyn.

“She's a person you can't replace, genuinely. You can't replace her and you can't do what she did for the game again, because it's already done and it's past that point. I didn't want to be another her. She's an amazing human, an amazing player, but I didn't want to be her 2.0. I want to just be me. I think that was something I brought into everything I did, so it was pretty easy to get through that.”

Such a mentality has helped Huitema be part of two historic soccer teams: the first PSG side to win the Division 1 Feminine and the first Canada side to win Olympic gold in soccer.

But to achieve feats like this takes real dedication. Like most athletes, Huitema has had to make serious sacrifices, leaving home at the age of 14 to be able to realise her dreams. “My journey was definitely a little different,” she says. “It brought a lot of different challenges, unexpected challenges, and it also brought me to a place in my career that I wouldn't have got to had I not taken those paths.

“Honestly, it's been nice to kind of travel the world and experience so many different cultures and different ways of life as well. I think that's a big thing about playing in Europe, so I'm glad that I got to enjoy that. But for me, it's always just been a very simple game and it's something that I enjoy and love to do.”

Huitema’s passion for the sport, her place at its highest level and tendency to break new ground all make her an ideal candidate for New Balance’s growing roster of athletes, then. As the brand looks to expand in women’s soccer, the Canada star is a huge signing, joining World Cup winner Claudia Zornoza, NWSL champion Rocky Rodriguez and rising American star Michelle Cooper, among others.

“They have huge names that they support and sponsor and being added to that list is an honor,” Huitema says. “I think there was a piece of women's soccer missing, and wanting to push that forward as well and wanting to help them do that, plus them supporting my own profile and pushing me forward.

“I think [women’s soccer is] definitely an area that we can push and that we can really grow, which is going to be amazing. I'm happy to be kind of one of the kick-starters. They already have some other female soccer players as well, but to help kind of push them in the direction that I know that they deserve to go in, and that we can get this to become very globally exciting, is really cool.”

Huitema doesn’t discuss this career news from Paris, but rather the West Coast of the United States, having made another rather significant move in the weeks that followed PSG’s first league title. After so many years away from home, she is now back near Chilliwack again, having signed for the Seattle Reign midway through the 2022 season. It takes only two-and-a-half hours in the car for her to be back where she grew up, which is nothing on a continent the size of North America.

“I definitely wanted to play in the NWSL,” Huitema says, reflecting on her decision to leave France. “I had been talking with my agent and it seemed like a good fit for me, and I was definitely keen to get back close to home. It'd been a while, I'd travelled to Europe a lot, I'd been playing for Paris but also for the national team and we had a lot of camps all around Europe, so I think my time in Europe at that point was coming to an end and I just felt like I wanted to return home.

“Seattle was just a great fit. Laura Harvey as a coach, she's an amazing human, and her and I fit really well. I think my ideas of how I wanted to play and everything, my life in general, fit really well with Seattle. It was pretty quick.”

Having spent so much time at international level with Sinclair and been a team-mate of Brazil icon Formiga at PSG, the move meant Huitema got to rub shoulders with another great of the game, in Megan Rapinoe. That’s not a bad trio of names for her to have already called team-mates at 22 years old.

Despite the pair both being forwards and the elder Reign star surely having plenty to share with her younger team-mate in that sense, Huitema’s memories of spending time with Rapinoe, in what were the final 18 months of her career, are not really from the soccer field.

“We're all able to watch her, how amazing she is on the field, and I can say that over and over, how incredible she was to play alongside and how much she pushed the team to be better,” Huitema says. “But I think the coolest part to experience, especially with players in general, is them away from the field, them as just people.

“We spend most of our time as just people and humans in day to day life, so I think if you're a great player, I think you should be an even better human. I think those standards still hold to life. And she was, she was definitely a person like that, so to be able to witness that and have some jokes with her, she's just honestly an amazing person. That for me was more so the highlight, to kind of see into her life. To be in the behind the scenes and get to know her was the cooler part for me.”

Huitema and the Reign came so close to giving Rapinoe the perfect send-off, only to fall agonizingly short in the NWSL Championship game in November. To go one better will be a huge motivation for the team in 2024, even if Rapinoe has since moved on, and it is not the only group Huitema is part of that will be driven by disappointment this year.

After all, despite being the reigning Olympic champion, Canada suffered a devastating group-stage exit at last year’s World Cup. Huitema admits that, at the time, the mood was rather low. However, upon reflection, that perspective changed and spirits are higher as the team looks ahead to defending its title at the Games this summer.

“The World Cup was a crazy tournament. I mean, it is, it always is,” she says now. “I think we had a good performance against Nigeria where we just didn't put away goals and obviously missed a penalty kick. Then we had a good performance against Ireland, we were able to fight back and come back from that game. Then we just tanked it against Australia. We just absolutely dropped the ball, had a bad day, and one bad day in the office is, ‘You're being sent home’, which is tough in a tournament like that.

“We were definitely off the mark in the game but I don't think we were as far off in general as how we felt when we left the World Cup. I think when we left that early, we were like, 'Wow, we suck'. But there was more to take from it than just that. We couldn't hold ourselves too down from one really poor performance, which is kind of what the World Cup was for us. Those big tournaments, you have to show up every game otherwise you do get sent home. I think that was the reality of it.

“There were little tweaks that we had to make moving forward and we made those, and I think that our team is moving forward in a really good direction. We have a pretty good track record at the Olympics, I think that's like our tournament that we shine in. I'd like to kind of get steadier with the World Cup, but I think that we're in a good place and the team is in a good mindset.”

But even though Canada bounced back from that World Cup exit with a good CONCACAF W Gold Cup campaign earlier this year, even though the team has only lost once in 90 minutes since that defeat to Australia, and even though it goes into the Olympics in France this summer as the reigning champion, it is likely that Bev Priestman’s side will be an underdog. That is how it always is with Canada.

“I think we're kind of always looked past,” Huitema ponders. “Even when we won gold, nobody really expected us to do it. The only people that thought we could were us. Honestly, it played into our favor because then we just went and did it! But I think in general, whether we'd won the World Cup, I still think that the world kind of removes Canada from being in the running.

“It's a little insulting! But at the same time, I'll take it because if you want to treat us like that, we'll just be the underdogs then. We have that attitude that we know we're good and we're there to compete, just like anyone else. We're a top-10 team in the world, we're there for a reason, and if you want to keep acting like Canada's not good, that's fine.”

The United States is the only nation in history to have defended its Olympic title in the women's tournament, so for Canada to do so would be quite an achievement, especially just 12 months on from that shock World Cup exit. But Huitema speaks with a quiet confidence about the progress made in the past year, of the integration of new players, the growth of partnerships on the pitch and the consistency in the team.

That’s when GOAL notes how poetic it would be for her if she and Canada surprised everyone again. After all, the gold medal match will take place in Paris, where she started her professional career, where she would transport half a dozen suitcases back and forth between a hotel and a storage unit every few weeks, where she prepared accordingly for her first major tournament.

Huitema takes a moment to consider it and visualize what that could look like. “Going back to where it all began kind of, and doing it again,” she says, pausing again. She doesn’t add anything more, makes no big prediction or note to watch this space. Instead, she bids farewell and leaves the interview with that possibility lingering.

If Canada was to do it, it would have to do so as a serious underdog, following on from that World Cup disappointment and considering how heavy a favorite Spain is for Olympic gold. But it was hardly the favorite last time around.