NaRi Shin sat on the sidelines of a community soccer field in New York City, watching as about 25 women kicked a soccer ball around. Every so often, they glanced Shin’s way. Their captain had told them the U-M assistant sport management professor would be there. But many of the players were still surprised that she had traveled hundreds of miles from her Ann Arbor base just to see them, a group of South Korean immigrants who had started their own recreational soccer team, during their weekday practice.

“I just wanted to go there and show them that I’m a real person, and I’m genuinely interested in what they do,” Shin says. “Showing up is important not only for research but also for human relationships. Showing up is more than half of what you do.”

Shin did have an ultimate goal: to figure out what had motivated these Korean women to join this ethnicity-specific soccer team and how their experiences contributed to building cultural capital — in this case, an environment and relationships that allowed them to thrive in their new country. As a qualitative researcher, she wanted to tell these women’s stories but to do so in a collaborative way that benefited them, ideally providing community organizations with insight into how to better support immigrant women’s sport teams.

“I want to look into these communities from a different perspective, rather than the perspective already established by white scholars based on their research on white communities,” says Shin, who is a Korean immigrant herself. “Because they are different communities, and they build their communities in their own way.”

Shin knew these soccer teams had arisen last year after a popular South Korean reality TV show featured female celebrities playing soccer. Historically, women’s sports have not been considered as significant or serious as men’s sports in South Korea. So highlighting women’s sports on major Korean networks was a watershed moment, prompting women’s soccer teams to spring up in South Korea but also in sizable Korean enclaves like the New York metro area.

During interviews Shin conducted over the two weeks she spent in New York and New Jersey, she learned that many of the soccer players hadn’t worked after immigrating to the United States, focusing instead on supporting their partners and raising their children. They were so preoccupied that they’d lost their own identities and gone looking for a way to get them back.

One of the participants tried Pilates, yoga, and kickboxing, but each gave her only a surface-level connection. Joining an immigrant women’s soccer team, where everyone spoke the same language as her and shared a common story, felt much more genuine. Learning how to play soccer with her peers was something outside the home that she could focus on, practice, and eventually become good at while building strong relationships with the other players, giving her “a strong motivation for a life,” Shin says.

“When you immigrate to another country, it’s really hard to identify what you can do well,” Shin says. “Because you don’t speak the language. You don’t know the culture. You don’t know the system. So barely navigating everything is just your expectation. And so, for the last 20 years, they have lived like that, and then they finally found something they can learn to excel at without masking their true selves or trying to fit into something that is different from their own culture.”

Shin has started to analyze the qualitative data she’s amassed and plans to visit the teams again in April or May, when the weather’s a bit warmer, to conduct more interviews.

But regardless of the ultimate results of her study, the soccer players have already inspired Shin to reconsider how she spends her time outside of work.

“As an immigrant academic, I’ve been immersed in my work, so much so that I don’t do really anything in my free time,” Shin says. “I would just be at home and have a couple of drinks or watch Netflix. But then I started to talk to these people, and they gave me aspirations to do something more than the things I am doing now to find a community.”

“Many of them have full-time jobs and then they dedicate their time to organize these teams and manage the social media accounts and recruit new players and support the new players and try to build a good community,” she continues. “And it made me feel a bit of shame, like what am I doing as a person who has more power and resources? It was an aha moment for me, that there could be other spaces where I can connect with people who share the same passions and commitment.”