Carmel woman earns place in Canadian Soccer Hall of Fame
By RICHIE HALL
Canadian soccer is celebrating a big anniversary this year: It was 35 years ago when it fielded its first-ever women’s international team.
That historic 1986 team featured a goalkeeper from Ontario named Carla Chin. She would be with the team for nine years, culminating in a trip to Canada’s first-ever Women’s World Cup in 1995.
Twenty-five years later, Carla Chin Baker and seven of her teammates have a permanent place in Canadian soccer history, as they have been inducted into the Canada Soccer Hall of Fame. The induction honors the eight players who were part of that original Women’s National Team. Chin Baker, who lives in Carmel, got a chance to reconnect with her teammates when they were presented to the country in a Zoom meeting in April.
“It was fantastic, because some of them I hadn’t seen since ’95,” said Chin Baker.
Chin Baker started playing soccer at age 12, playing in a coed league. When she got to high school, a friend asked her to try out for a club team.
“That’s when I got exposure to travel soccer,” said Chin Baker. She continued to play and by 1986, when she was at university, she represented Team Ontario in its provincial championship. When that was successful, Chin Baker was picked from a pool of players amongst the different provincial teams to represent Canada’s first national women’s team.
Chin Baker played her first international game on Dec. 11, 1987 at the Women’s World Invitational Tournament (the Chunghua Cup), at Kaohsiung, China. The Canadian team won its first game, beating Hong Kong 2-0, giving Chin Baker the first of her 10 clean sheets in international competition.
It was a personal experience for Chin Baker, as her grandparents are from mainland China. Kaohsiung wasn’t too far from where they were born.
“They were in a village probably about 10 miles away, but we couldn’t really venture too far from our congregation,” said Chin Baker.
The Canadian team played three more games at the tournament, one at Kaohsiung and two more in Taipei. It was a remarkable experience for Chin Baker, who was 21 at the time.
“It was absolutely incredible,” said Chin Baker. She said it was “eye-opening” because it helped her “appreciate you had living in North America, in Canada. It really made me very grateful for the opportunity to represent my country, but also to see other parts of the world.”
Chin Baker would go on to play 29 international games with the Canadian team. The team played in a qualifier for the first-ever Women’s World Cup in April 1991 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The Canadian team made it to the finals, with Chin Baker recording four clean sheets along the way, but fell to the United States team in the final.
The team qualified for the second Women’s World Cup in 1995, which was played in Sweden. The Canadian team finished its group play 0-1-2, including a loss to eventual champion Norway.
Still, it was a great experience, and Chin Baker said she was “unbelievably blessed and very honored to have that opportunity and to earn my way into a starting position during that event. It was an incredible experience, one that I’ll definitely never forget. Highlight of my national team career, of course.”
As one of the first national team players, Chin Baker saw several changes during her stay on the team.
“In the early days, when it first started, it was all from the provincial teams, and then they started to branch out to the universities,” said Chin Baker. The provincial championships would be the equivalent to each state from the United States playing each other.
And nowadays? “It’s so different,” said Chin Baker. “Now they run those residency programs and they have a U17 national team, U20 national team. They have the younger national teams and a full women’s team.”
Chin Baker and her teammates were at university when they were part of the national team; Chin Baker graduated from McMaster University in 1990.
“We would just play with our university teams, then at spring play with our club teams,” said Chin Baker. “At any point during the year, they would email us and say, are you available. We’d have a training camp, then travel to any event what we wanted.”
By January 1991, Chin Baker was living in the U.S. and working at universities across the country. After working at several colleges, she was an assistant coach at Notre Dame from 1993 to 1998, helping the women’s team to its first national championship in 1995 – “a pretty good year,” she said.
In 1998, Chin Baker officially retired from the program. That same year, she got married, and her family eventually settled in Carmel in 2007. She is now an assistant girls soccer coach at Park Tudor, and also was an assistant girls lacrosse coach for the Greyhounds this past year, helping them to a state championship.
Chin Baker’s daughter Erin Baker followed in her mother’s footsteps in the net. Erin Baker just graduated from Carmel High School and was a goalkeeper for the ‘Hounds, anchoring the defense as part of Carmel’s 2019 Class 3A state runner-up team.
“A lot of her training that she got was in game-like situations in practice, so she was able to simulate those situations,” said Chin Baker. “I let her develop into who she is today as a goalkeeper.”
Erin Baker recently got to play in the Girls’ High School All-American Game, which took place May 29 in St. Louis. She also is on the watchlist for Canada’s U20 World Cup team; both Carla and Erin hold dual citizenship.
Chin Baker and her fellow inductees received crystal statues for their Hall of Fame induction, which she said was “very, very nice.” In addition, the inductees were introduced with a question-and-answer session, which focused on their experiences as well as advice for young girls aspiring to play on the Canadian National Team.
Chin Baker said she was blessed and grateful to get to reconnect with her teammates. They may not have known it at the time, but Chin Baker and her teammates were pioneers for Canadian women’s soccer.
Congratulation Carla on your impressive accomplishments!!!