Little Ale Used to Dream Exactly Like Jade
The week of the biggest game of her life, Alejandra Rivera found time to transform a children’s book.
Not just read it. Feel it. Shape it.
Ale is a professional women’s tackle football player from Saltillo, Mexico, and an automotive engineer. She has never once waited for a lane to open. She has spent more than a decade fighting for a place in a sport that rarely saved one for her, playing her way from the early leagues of northern Mexico to the San Diego Rebellion in the United States, earning a spot on a professional roster the long, hard way. And in the middle of preparing for the national championship in Frisco, Texas, broadcast live on ESPN2, she agreed to do something quieter and smaller in scale but not in meaning: she read Cada Campo es de Ella and told us honestly if it felt true.
What she sent back really hit home:
“As a professional football player, your story made me cry more than once. I relate to Jade’s journey so deeply. The way her hard work slowly builds her confidence, and then at the end she dares to dream. When she says that one day she’ll play under bright lights, in front of roaring crowds, on a field so big it feels like the whole world is watching. And she was right. I just played the biggest game of my life, on ESPN2, and little Ale used to dream exactly like Jade.”
Ale played that game, and she and her team left everything on the field.
Books like Cada Campo es de Ella are not simple stories. Ale understands that better than most.
She grew up without a single woman in football to look at and say, “that could be me.” There was no map. No proof. Just a girl with a love for a sport that had not yet made room for her, doing the quiet, invisible work of believing in something she could not yet see. At eighteen she set her sights on professional women’s tackle football and has not looked back since. But before any of that, she did something that resonated: she joined the boys’ football team in high school, because that was the only team there was. I did the same thing in seventh grade. Different decades, different countries, same answer. When there is no team for you, you find the one that exists and you show up anyway.
That is what a visible woman does. She does not just play. She gives the next girl permission.
Ale and I both agreed in wishing we had had something like this book when we were young girls. A story that told us clearly, that we already belonged on the field. That we did not have to earn our way in. That we were not a footnote to someone else’s game.
We did not have that. We had to find our belonging the hard way.
Girls across the world can have that now.
Ale’s role in Cada Campo es de Ella went far beyond a simple review. She read it as a girl from Mexico who grew up loving a sport that had not yet made room for her. She read it as a professional athlete who made it to a field that once felt impossible. And she read it as a woman who understands that the details matter, because little girls notice everything.
She even helped rename the characters. Ale brought herself so fully to this project that it happened naturally. The names in the Spanish edition carry her personal touch, her sense of what sounds right, what feels real to a girl growing up in Mexico. That is not a small thing. Names are the first way a child decides whether a story belongs to her.
Because of her, this book does not just translate. It fits.
She told me that she hoped young readers would feel, when they held it, that they were seen. Not as a version of someone else’s dream. As themselves. As girls who already carry something worth building on.
She put it better than I ever could:
“Don’t wait for permission to dream or to play. The field is yours. Go claim it.”
Alejandra Rivera is a Huddle Breaker. She is the living version of the ending she read in those pages.
Cada Campo es de Ella is available now, and it carries her fingerprints on every page.
Follow Ale: [@Alejandra.ar24 /@grandesports2]
Cada Campo es de Ella is the Spanish edition of Every Field Is Hers, published by Breaking the Huddle Education LLC. Available now on Amazon through breakingthehuddleeducation.com.
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