Never Not Having a Good Time

Courtesy EM Dash Photography

Yuki Nagasato was an experience for the city of Louisville. Ultimately it ended up being a brief, one-year experience, but it was definitely a fun one. Today, Racing Louisville traded Yuki back to the Chicago Red Stars upon her request to start a new life in Chicago with her new fiancé. I shouldn’t really say it’s a “new life” so much as it is a return to a life in Chicago. The word “life” seems like a fitting description of Yuki herself. She always seemed to get while “football is life”, football really isn’t life. Life is life. There is so much more to Yuki than football. If you follow her at all on social media, you know that she is a musician, artist, dog mom, fiancée, and maybe chiefly an explorer. She always seems to relish every moment whether it’s on the pitch or off.

I think sometimes it’s hard to grasp what a unique individual Yuki truly is. She played on the first team of a Japanese men’s club, won a World Cup, scored in a World Cup Final, been the top goal-scorer in the Frauen-Bundesliga and painted a commissioned picture for me for Christmas:

When my wife commissioned the picture, Yuki asked her what she would like. My wife told her to paint whatever she wanted. I think it says something about her that she wanted to commemorate her season in Louisville with her teammates.

Every time I look at that picture, which is hanging in my bedroom, I smile. Now I will look at it and smile and maybe be just a little bit sad. However, that sadness will always pass quickly because Yuki stands for joy. She never looked like she wasn’t fully in the moment and always looked like she was having fun. She once smiled after picking up a yellow card for Racing, which is a very Yuki thing to do. I wish her the best of luck in Chicago and continued joy in her football career and after.