Tatiana Lourenco Shiber '19 Recruiting Profile

My name is Tatiana Lourenco Shiber and I am from Portugal and Greece and I was born in South Africa. I consider myself fortunate to have grown up overseas and gone to school with over 56 nationalities, where I learned about so many different cultures. Moving to the USA in 2014 was a very hard move, but it was again another situation that made me realize the power of sport, it has the power of bringing people together, being a soccer player made it easier. Moving clear across the world has influenced who I am as a person and player as it made me closer with people and it made respect everyone even more.

I clearly remember when I started playing soccer, it was with my father, I was about 5 and I fell in love with it. I never stopped playing with a soccer ball, so my parents decided to find me a soccer club to join. When they started looking for a soccer club they were amazed that there was no girl’s teams for me to join in Qatar. But that did not stop my parents, they approached a boys’ soccer club and convinced them to let me try out. That was the beginning of me being the only girl playing on a boys’ soccer team for over 8 years. At the beginning it was an obstacle as the boys treated me differently and didn’t really challenge me as I was a girl. After several years has passed in that club they began to respect me and treated me equally as I took them on no matter what circumstances were in the way. After playing in that club for four years I moved on to the pre-academy boys’ soccer which has never happened in that club. Playing soccer for so many years on a boys team taught me to be strong, fast and focused. After playing on this amazing club for 8 years, more girls joined the club and they formed more girl’s teams, but I continued playing on the pre-academy boys’ team and also started playing on the girl’s team. A moment I will never forget was In 2011 I was awarded Player of The Year and was presented my award by the amazing Dutch player Frank De Boer. With Qatar being awarded the 2022 world cup, it opened the country up to so many more soccer opportunities. I was able to do two amazing training camps in 2012 I did the Chelsea Football Club Camp and in 2013 I did the Paris Saint-Germain Football Club camp, which were amazing.

In 2013 I was ask to join the Qatar National Women’s Youth team, and trained with them, but decided not to join this amazing women’s team as I would need to take on the Qatari passport in order to play on the team.

In 2014 I moved to America. Once I entered high school my main academic goal was to work hard and to succeed a 4.0 gpa. Moving to America was hard as the grading system was completely different compared to the British curricular. It took a while to settle in but my first quarter of freshmen year was amazing as I had received a 4.3 Gpa and it has been growing ever since. My main goals in college is to play soccer and to learn to become a physical therapist. The skills I possess in soccer is my technical skills, shots and my passes. Life has never been and never will be fair, but overcoming challenges (games, opponents, your own record) — the fundamental core of sports — is the key to making it through.