Jake Crim knew this injury was different from the moment it happened during a routine game with his team, Stumptown AC, in 2021. In an innocent backpedal run, it was barely noticeable to the untrained eye that Crim had tripped over his own feet. He hit the ground almost immediately, curled in a ball and grasping at his ankle.
Crim went on to play eight more games that season, but was left with three torn tendons, seven torn ligaments, a bone spur in his right ankle and the eventual end of his soccer career.
“Our high school soccer coach went through something quite similar, where he was a really good semi-professional player,” Rohan Sharma, a friend of Crim’s, said. “And then he had both his knees banged up pretty bad, so he transitioned to just the coaching side and physical education stuff for our high school team. So, I think he kind of leveraged our coach as well, as a resource because he had gone through this sort of a similar path.”
Crim, 26, joined American University women’s club soccer as their new coach this season as a way to get himself re-involved with soccer. An AUWCS player, who is also a family friend of Crim’s, confidently recruited him at her family's Fourth of July party this past summer. As the first non-student coach the team has had in years, he helped lead them to a successful 6-1-1 overall season.
AUWCS had one main goal when bringing Crim on board: find a balance between messing around with their friends at practice while also being a competitive, winning team.
“He's just really knowledgeable about soccer,” Brenna Cassidy, president and co-captain of AUWCS, said. “He wants us to do well. He wants us to go far, and he's just fun.”
Following his initial injury in 2021, Crim endured multiple surgeries in an attempt to gain back the mobility he once had; AUWCS players recall the long scars on Crim’s legs.
The years were going by, and the physical therapy continued, but his mobility still wasn’t what it used to be. His ankle still, “wasn’t quite right,” according to Crim.
Still not ready to leave the game, Crim kept playing soccer for the National Independent Soccer Association’s Chattanooga FC during the 2023 preseason, but eventually turned down an offer to play on the team full-time to get another clean-up surgery. This time, Crim was left with nerve damage in his leg and a permanent departure from the game.
He moved back home in 2023 to his parents’ house in Sandy Spring, Maryland and started working as a personal trainer, occasionally dog sitting for friends and family too. He was doing anything to distract his mind from the lack of soccer in his life.
“It was like a loss, and it still is a loss,” Crim said. “And so, I basically removed myself from soccer for a year.”
Crim was born in Ohio where he first started playing soccer at just four years old, following in his parents’ footsteps. The couple met in a co-ed soccer league in their thirties and quickly passed the love of the game to their son.
The family relocated to England in 2007 where a young Crim attended professional level games. When he eventually moved to Maryland for middle and high school, he was playing both club and school-affiliated soccer.
Long-time friend and former elementary school playground rival, Sharma, remembers one of Crim’s first injuries, a broken arm during their 11th grade championship game.
“He has had a knack for getting injured a lot,” Sharma said. “I remember he was pretty bummed that he didn't get to play in the championship game.”
In his senior year of high school at Sandy Spring Friends School, Crim went through a growth spurt that improved his soccer abilities and ultimately led him to Oberlin College in Ohio. There, he played on their Division III team until he decided to leave after his sophomore season to pursue soccer more seriously.
From here, Crim found himself in Reno, Nevada, playing semi-professional soccer for the Nevada Coyotes FC in 2018. For about a year, he would get up for 6:30 a.m. practices and then work the rest of the day at the local Starbucks.
He eventually moved back to the D.C. area in 2019 where he was invited to play for Loudoun United FC’s preseason. After six months with the Virginia-based team, Crim was without a team for the following season, so he got in touch with a former roommate from his days in Nevada.
Together, they decided to move to Uppsala, Sweden to play for Vaksala SK. In the fall of 2019, they lived with old friends and family, until Crim tore the patella tendon in his left knee.
He went in for surgery on March 11, 2020, and he recalls it as the day the coronavirus pandemic shut the world down. He spent the next year in and out of physical therapy, tunnel vision on recovery.
He persisted through the injury and was back in the game in 2021 where he played for Charlotte, North Carolina team Stumptown AC. It was during this season that Crim would face his career-ending ankle injury.
“In some ways I think it was kind of a good thing because I would have kept trying to play soccer until the wheels fell off,” Crim said. “So, the fact that they did fall off, kind of took that out of my hands.”
In his professional career, Crim’s coaches heavily focused on tactful skills and working together as a team, rather than spending the practice time getting the team in shape. Now, this is a method that Crim brings to AUWCS practices.
Players recall the “line of confrontation,” a concept introduced by Crim where the team has to be on the same page about whether they will push towards the ball or hold back when playing defensively. The goal is to avoid creating a gap between strikers and midfielders.
“He understands how to defend, he understands how to attack,” Sharma said. “So, that’s also given him a pretty good grounding as a coach.”
Crim views coaching as a way to ease himself back into the game with no goals in mind just yet. However, the values of the team make him happy to return for another season.
“It was cool to see the girls really committing to the concepts,” Crim said. “And really working together to make sure that it wasn't just individuals, but that the whole team together was improving.”
This article was edited by Penelope Jennings, Delaney Hoke and Abigail Turner. Copy editing done by Luna Jinks, Emma Brown, Nicole Kariuki and Sabine Kanter-Huchting.
