On a cold weeknight, tucked away in Cantelowe Gardens (a place most students will never visit), UCL Women’s Football 3s are quietly putting together one of the most impressive seasons in the University’s football programme.
Match by match, they’ve built momentum, an impressive sense of community, and an extremely impressive roster of victories — yet their success rarely reaches the ears of the student body, despite even being promoted in the Leagues last year.
In a university culture that often prioritises elite performance and visible prestige, teams like the Women’s 3s reveal a different (and equally vital!) side of sport: one rooted in community, resilience, and belonging.
This year’s captains, Catarina Reis Messa and Katherine Auerbach, have united an already close-knit team into an unstoppable force. A brief look at their Instagram reveals win after win.
The 3s victories can no doubt be attributed not only to their prowess and skill on the field, but their own likenings of their team to a family.
It is the first thing you notice when you see them together — shoulders, barks of laughter and gentle ribbing — even at 21:00 on a freezing, rainy January night.
Catarina nodded enthusiastically when I asked if anything has changed since last year, “the biggest change for us is that we’re now not the lowest team — we have the 4s, and the 5s — but we’ve also improved a lot, as a team. Skill wise, we’ve definitely gone up a few levels.”
Katherine agrees, adding “we play two competitions a week now, instead of just the one. Which is great for us - it means we’re a lot more competitive.”
But, for the 3s, winning competitions is not the main goal. “We just want everyone to be part of the team and have a good time,” Katherine said, “we want people to come away from this feeling like football was one the biggest parts of their university experience.”
Catarina grins at this, “Football genuinely means everything to me. This is definitely the part I’m going to miss the most about uni, and you just feel so good after every training session - and every match. It’s like a family, we see each other three times a week, go to training and socials together. We bonded really quickly, and everything happens together. We win together and we lose together.”
For Isabel Campos Abreu, winner of last year’s golden boot and player of the season, this sentiment definitely reigns true. “Football has been a large part of my uni life in the past two years. I love our team and love spending time with everyone which is why I look forward to our matches and training every week.”
Thea Howarth, another member of the team, adds “other teams can all see how close we are. We are all genuinely friends, and we do things outside of football together all the time. We all attend socials because we all love spending time together.”
I also got to speak to their coach Gwen about her experiences - “the best thing about coaching them is that there is a great mixture of people from different countries. The way they come together and interact with one another, the camaraderie they have. They’re just such a fun loving bunch. It’s very easy for people to come into the team, they’re very welcoming.”
Gwen also remarked on the team’s improvement during her three year tenure at UCL; “There’s a nice nucleus of players that have been there for that course of time, and it’s really good to see how they’ve grown not just as players, but as an integrated unit. We’ve really created a structure where everyone feels comfortable to contribute. I think it’s really good that everyone feels as though they can question what’s going on — everyone’s football intelligence has increased a lot, and it’s great to see.”
The 3s host a whole variety of players, from freshers all the way through to postgrad students. I also got to speak to Sarah Qassam, a masters student studying law, and Ella Bradshaw, a first year studying BASc.
“It’s an escape from all the readings and academics,” Sarah says, “the way I’ve come from another university, and immediately assimilated into this group where I can just get out and forget about academics for a while. It’s really given me a sense of community.”
Women’s football has, of course, been historically underrepresented, and UCL is no exception to this.
Until last year, the University did not even have Women’s 4s or 5s teams at all, meaning that opportunities for women to play competitively were significantly more limited than for their male counterparts (the men currently have 7 competitive teams, and the massive Red Star team, too).
The recent expansion of the women’s programme marks an important step forward, but it also highlights how late such developments have arrived, and how much of women’s participation in university sport has long depended on overstretched squads and under-recognised commitment.
Ella, despite being new to the UCL, is only too aware of the lack of recognition from the University — “we definitely don’t get enough coverage, particularly the lower teams. Don’t get me wrong, it’s better than I’ve had before. My old school didn’t even have a girl’s team, I had to play with the boys. So, obviously it’s better now but... It’s a pretty low standard to have. When I was applying, women’s football wasn’t even a selling point. You hardly ever see it on UCL’s Instagram.”
Thea and Isabel also point out that they don’t have a goalie kit. “It’s so annoying that we constantly have to prove things to the SU. A lot more women have been coming into football, particularly, I think, due to the success of the Lionesses, but we still have to fight for the opportunities that men get handed to them. We spend the same amount of hours in training and in matches as they do.”
Catarina and Katherine’s efforts still need to be recognised - the 3s’ Instagram captions are more akin to novels than anything else. Katherine notes that she and a friend created the Instagram account in their first year, after feeling somewhat neglected from the main Instagram page. “Everyone’s so obsessed with Varsity too, I mean, we play baby Varsity, just like the 2s do. We also have matches!”
In many ways, UCL Women’s 3s exemplify what university sport can and should be: competitive without being exclusionary, ambitious, and thoroughly sustaining for the women who commit to it.
Their success this season, and over the past couple of years, is not simply a matter of results, but of persistence in a sporting structure that has only recently begun to make space for them. As UCL expands its women’s football provision, teams like the 3s remind us that participation itself is an achievement, and that recognition should not be reserved solely for the top teams. To value women’s sport properly is to acknowledge the labour, community, and confidence it produces — long before it becomes easy to celebrate.