Daniella Sprauer: Take Up the Space

Daniella Sprauer was nine years old the first time she played soccer.

Most of the girls she would line up against later had been on a ball since they were five or six. Daniella came from gymnastics, the only sport she had taken seriously up to that point. The first pull toward soccer was not the sport. It was a friend mentioning there was a spot on her team, and the idea of being on a team with her friends.

Her parents signed her up at VAFC. Parent coaches. No divisions yet. She showed up to her first practice and the ball came to her like she had been doing it for years. Easy. Simple. Natural. The words she uses for it are the words you use for things you do not have to think about.

The two sports collided eventually. Her parents told her she had to pick one and stick with it. She picked soccer because it felt more like a team than gymnastics did, with more people around her and a group to belong to.

Division II

The next tryout placed her in Division II. A lot of her friends went up to Division I.

She had come to the sport late, and now she was watching girls she had played alongside at VAFC move past her into higher divisions. The version of her career that follows is shaped by what she did with that gap. She did not protest it. She decided she was going to play her way out of it, and that is what she has done in some form ever since. Not catching up. Not chasing anyone. Proving by performing that she belonged at the level above the one she was on.

Alvin Prasad ran a couple of training sessions with the Division II group, by coincidence, around the time Daniella was there. He saw her play. He saw another player, Riya Janda, around the same time. He called both of them up to the Metro Fusion 08 team.

Alvin was the first coach Daniella had ever had who was not a parent volunteer. He cared about the kind of fundamentals that take years off your development if no one teaches them to you. How to pass the ball correctly. How to volley correctly. The technical floor she had been missing.

From Metro Fusion 08, she tried out for the Fusion BCSPL 09 intake team. She made it.

The Intake Team

The first couple of years of the Fusion 09 intake group were as strong a stretch of soccer as Daniella has been part of. They sat near the top of the table almost every season, first or second place most years, and the chemistry on and off the field was the kind that has stayed with her since.

She played as a striker. The shape of the game then was simple. Long balls into space. Run them down. Finish. One position, owned all the way through. She was scoring goals.

Speak Up

Off the ball, the version of her at the first year of intake looked different from what came next. She was quiet. She did not speak up. She did not start anything in games. She was scared of being too intense, of someone deciding not to like her, of a teammate getting mad.

Her dad watched her play a game and said something to her about it. She has not forgotten it. He told her she had to be willing to say something sometimes. Be a little bit competitive.

She tried it. She let herself be competitive. She let herself be louder.

The thing she discovered, the part that took some of the weight off, was that the teammates who understood the game just respected it on the field. Off the field, everyone was fine.

The Move

A year before the Fusion 2009 girls BCSPL team folded, Daniella left.

Not after. Before. She made the decision on her own terms, for her own reasons, and those reasons had nothing to do with the cracks that would eventually show at her old club.

TSS was playing the kind of soccer she wanted to learn. More technical. More passing. More movement off the ball. The other reason was exposure. TSS offered new connections and new opportunities, and Daniella wanted to put herself in front of them.

The move was hard. She knew every TSS girl already from playing against them. She had a league game against TSS the week before she emailed the coach, and she had to play that one knowing it was the last time she would be on the other side.

When she got to TSS, the welcome was warmer than she had braced for. No bad blood. No awkwardness. What stays with her from her time on that team, more than the soccer, is the way her teammates have shown up for her. The gifts and texts and hugs in the days after surgery. A group that decided right away they were going to take care of her.

A handful of Fusion players eventually made the same move. Ellie Simons, Natalie Crasto, Amabelle, and Bronwyn for a stretch.

The Hardest Games to Play

The year between her leaving Fusion and Fusion folding was the year she had to play against her old team.

Those games carried a different kind of pressure than the rest of the schedule. She did not play her best in them, and she will say so. The stress sat on her. What she got out of that stretch, eventually, was a skill she still uses. She learned to handle her emotions when a game gets emotionally charged.

Whitecaps

While she was still at Fusion, the Whitecaps brought Daniella in as a part-time player on the Whitecaps 09 team. She trained there for a couple of months.

The Whitecaps environment was tactically heavier than anything she had been part of. Set pieces memorized. Positioning drilled. A dozen ways to press. As a part-time player, she trained alongside the team without playing in many of their games, and that shaped how she made use of her time there.

When the Fusion 08 team played the Whitecaps 09 team, Daniella asked to be on the field for that game. She scored twice and assisted a third. Her team won.

Midfielder

The 07/08 BC Provincial team called Daniella up. As an 09, she was playing up against girls a year and two years older than her, and she kept performing.

When the coaches were putting together Team BC for Canada Games, drawn from the 07 and 08 pools, they had a conversation with Daniella about her role on the squad. They saw more in her than one position could hold. The work rate. The willingness to fight for every ball. The way she read the game. They thought all of it would be even more impactful one line further back, in the attacking midfield.

She had never played the position. She had been a striker for her entire career. Go forward. Receive the through ball. Finish. The attacking midfield was a different game. Cover the middle. Read the press. Find the runs of your strikers and put them in. Track back when the ball was lost. A lot more thinking. A lot more running.

She picked it up. Not perfectly at first, but she picked it up. The things that had always defined her play, the work rate, the willingness to fight for the ball, did not stop being useful in a new position. They translated.

Her aggressiveness, her work rate, her willingness to fight for every ball, those are the things that have always helped her adapt to new positions and styles of play. "I think they maybe saw that and thought it would be impactful in the midfield," she says.

The shift rippled outward. Her TSS coaches saw her play the position with BC and asked her to do it for them too. The striker who had always gone forward became a midfielder who could still finish.

That is the player she is now. Attacking mid by training, striker by instinct. Willing to defend, willing to chase, willing to make the play happen.

Luca

The Team BC chapter belongs to Luca.

He was the kind of coach Daniella had been waiting for without knowing it. Motivational. Organized. The first coach she had ever had who took fatigue seriously. The team filled out app-based forms with their sleep totals and game load. If a player was too tired, she did not play. He treated injury risk like real risk.

He set up the balls hours before practice. He showed up to games early, clipboard out, knowing every player by name before they had finished walking in from the parking lot. He made the whole thing feel professional.

For the 07/08 provincial program, Luca called up one 09. Daniella was the one.

Canada Games

The 09s were not supposed to be at Canada Games. The tournament was for the 08 girls. Daniella played up, took a starter's spot, and finished as one of the top two goal scorers across the entire tournament.

The memory she comes back to first is not a goal. It is the bus pulling in at the venue. Parents from the team had lined up outside, hands raised, making a tunnel for the girls to run through as they came off the bus. The whole team cheered each other into the tournament. The image she returns to when she is asked about Canada Games is the noise and the welcome.

She talks about the walkout with the mascot kids before kickoff. The feeling of standing in the tunnel ready. The whole summer of work pointing at that one moment.

The team had been built around Coach Nico in the lead-up, but a medical issue kept him from making the trip. The girls played for him. After Daniella scored her first goals at Canada Games, the whole team ran to the camera and pointed at the BC bracelets on their wrists. That was for Nico.

Quebec

One of the games she remembers most fondly from the tournament was Quebec.

The result was not what they wanted. The environment was something else. Loud. Aggressive. Everyone on the field meant it.

That is the kind of setting that brings the best version of Daniella out without her having to manufacture it. The edge she has carried around in her game since the year her dad told her to speak up shows up loudest in games like that one. She does not need the room to be friendly to play well. She needs the room to be honest.

"When it's an aggressive environment, you want to compete," she says. "If someone yells something at you, you want to yell something back too. I like it. It brings out the best in you as an athlete, and it helps everyone around you be better too, because you need to compete."

Provincials

Summer 2025. TSS had had a rough BCSPL season. The team had spent most of it mid-table.

The memory in the room going into provincials was from the year before. They had finished first in the league, gone in expecting to win the whole thing, and they had not. The group still felt robbed of that one, and the feeling carried.

That year, with a worse regular season and a chip on the team's shoulder, they were hungry. They beat Surrey FC in the opener. They beat Surrey United, one of the top teams in the league, on penalties in the quarters. They lost to Langley in the semifinals.

The run was the story. A team that had spent the season mid-table played its way back into a provincial semifinal.

For Daniella, the run was also a runway. Canada Games was right around the corner. She wanted to walk into camp having proven on the field that she could still score and impact games.

She walked in.

Burnaby Lake

November. League game. Burnaby Lake. Field five. Turf.

Daniella had been overworked all month. BC training in the week. TSS games on Sundays. She was tired before kickoff and wanted to play the full game anyway.

Second half. The team had moved her into the midfield. A Burnaby player had the ball and was dribbling at her. Daniella stepped in to take it.

Her body went one way. Her knee stayed.

No contact. No tackle. The kind of moment that does not look like anything until you see what came after.

The Burnaby goalie carried her off the field. Daniella was crying as her teammates ran over to her. She told them, before anyone else said it, that it was her ACL. She had felt it. Her coaches confirmed it from the way she had fallen, the way she held her knee.

After the immediate pain, the leg went quiet. At first they thought it might be her meniscus. The MRI told a different story. Partial MCL tear. Full ACL tear.

Luca was at the game. He saw the whole thing. He emailed her afterward to check in, to wish her the best, to make sure she knew he was behind her. She has not forgotten that.

At TSS, her coaches Brendan Quarry and Kevin Booker were checking in too. Texts, support, information. They helped her get in touch with the right physiotherapists and surgeons and made sure she had what she needed to navigate what was ahead.

What She Wishes She'd Known

The injury sat with her and brought up questions she had not had reason to ask.

She had never been an injury-prone player. She had never been taught much about injury prevention. She cannot remember a single warm-up specifically designed to protect knees, and no coach had ever sat down to talk to her about ACL risk in young female athletes. The training research and the prevention protocols, in her experience, have been built around male athletes.

Cleats had never come up either. She was wearing multi-ground cleats on turf the day she got hurt, and she has since learned that those cleats are not as protective on turf as turf-specific ones.

The exception in her career was Luca. The fatigue forms. The sleep tracking. The rule that if you were too tired, you were not playing. The whole structure of his program was built around making sure his players did not break.

If anything good comes out of this year for her beyond the comeback, she would like it to push the women's game to keep building in that direction.

The Surgery

The surgery was in January, after a couple of delays.

Daniella chose the patella tendon graft. The most painful option of the three. By most measures, also the most stable, with the lowest re-tear risk. She did her own research and made the call.

The weeks before became pre-hab. Strengthening the leg ahead of the operation so the rehab afterward had something to work with. The decisions were hers.

Three Months

Three months post-op when we spoke. Walking. Jumping. The week before the conversation, she ran on a treadmill for the first time at a moderate pace. Her first real run since November.

"It feels great," she says. "You go from sitting on the couch, and you lose so much strength in your leg, and then it gets back fast."

Recruiting

Before November, Daniella was on the path.

ID camps were scheduled. American programs were getting interested. She was working toward the NCAA route in earnest, and the conversations had started to look real.

The injury took the in-person looks away. The Canadian coaches who had seen her play before the injury have stayed in. They have told her they believe she will come back stronger. They are not going anywhere.

The challenge is the calendar. The girls' recruiting cycle moves quickly. By spring and summer of this year, many of the top US programs will be done with her class and starting to look at 2010s. The window is closing while she is still rehabbing.

Her plan is to continue leaning into high-level women's environments, including Premier and League One opportunities, as she works back from injury and gradually earns minutes again once she is ready. Grade twelve becomes the year she rebuilds her film. She is also considering a gap year if it gives her the right window to be healthy and back on the field at the level she wants. Canadian university programs are reaching out, and she is listening.

When the time comes to make a decision, she will make it on the things that have always mattered to her. The environment. The coaches. The team. The level of play. Whether that takes her to a school in Canada or in the United States, the criteria are the same.

The Path

A lot of the players who reach this level have grown up wired into the soccer world. Family in the game. Private coaches. Pipelines through parents who played at the highest level. Doors that swing open because someone on the other side of them remembers a last name.

Daniella's path did not have any of that.

Her parents were not in the soccer world themselves. They were the people who got her to practices and stayed in the stands and reminded her, when she needed it, to keep going. She has said plainly that they are why she has kept showing up. The rest she had to make herself. She received Fusion 08 call-ups, though not as consistently. She did not have a name that travelled ahead of her.

What she had was her team. Her coaches. Her family. Her willingness to email people. Her willingness to show up at showcases. Her willingness to ask for chances when no one was offering them.

And the field.

What She Would Tell the Nine-Year-Old

Near the end of our conversation, I asked Daniella what she would say to the nine-year-old who was getting ready to walk into her first VAFC practice.

"I would tell her that things are definitely not going to be perfect," she said. "You need to stay focused on yourself and your path, because everyone has a different path. You can't force yourself to commit at the same time as one person, or maybe get called up the same time as another. Stay focused. Don't be scared to be aggressive or be loud on the field. Take players on."

She paused.

"Take up all the space you can. Play the way you want to play. If you want to be aggressive, then you can play aggressive. Stay focused on your path. Don't drift into other lanes."

Daniella is a key attacking player. She has been one of the top goal scorers on every team she has been part of. At Canada Games, she finished among the top two scorers in the entire tournament. Coaches trust her. Teammates rely on her. The reputation she has built has been built on the field, the way she always said it would be.

Three months ago she could not walk without crutches. This week, she ran.