The Big Interview: Allyson and Chantelle Swaby
The Swaby sisters represented Jamaica together at the World Cup last summer, playing as centre-back partners. Both reflect on their journeys together in an exclusive interview with WFC...
Jamaica’s World Cup campaign was special for many reasons. In just the Reggae Girlz’ second appearance at the pinnacle of the women’s game, Lorne Donaldson’s side defied the odds in a group which included both France and Brazil to make it to the second round.
On top of that, a team where much of the attention was on Manchester City forward Khadija Shaw, it was at the other end where Jamaica shone, not conceding a single goal through the group stage, keeping both Les Bleues and Seleção to 0-0 draws.
A 1-0 win against Panama was enough to make it to the second round for the first time, where even against a flair-filled Colombia Donaldson’s side kept them largely at bay, going out with a spirited 1-0 defeat.
Within every story there are mini stories, the kind of stories which you only get at a World Cup.
Within the Jamaica camp there were several, such as the level of players who had switched allegiance to represent the country, or the fact a GoFundMe had been set up by a player’s parent just to help get the team to Australia and New Zealand after a continued lack of support from the JFF [Jamaica Football Federation].
But there was a personal story too, the story of two sisters who not only ended up representing their country together, but shared a position.
Sisters playing together at the top level of the game is rare, but not unheard of. The Mewis sisters on occasion shared a field for the USA, but for Chantelle and Allyson Swaby, two sisters who had grown up together became centre-back partners, the very centre-back partners who helped keep those three consecutive clean sheets.
Their club careers haven’t converged, with both spending time playing across the USA – where they were born – and now in various European countries, but after seeking out the opportunity to represent the nation through their heritage ahead of the 2019 World Cup, they are very much connected at international level.
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“The only time we really played together was in high school and that was just recreational,” says Chantelle, who currently plays for Fleury 91 in France.
“I never thought this would be a possibility. Perhaps against each other, but not alongside each other,” she smiles. “I think when people ask about it, they think it’s something very interesting, but for me and her it’s just become playing alongside another person…not any other person, but the effect it has playing with someone you’re so comfortable with is positive.”
Chantelle is two years younger than Allyson, and admits she’s “someone I’ve looked up to for years”, having followed her pathway through William Hall High School in Connecticut where the pair grew up, before Allyson headed off to Boston for college and Chantelle went to New Jersey.
As the elder of the two, Allyson first went on camp with Jamaica in 2014 when she was still a teenager, attending a senior camp just a week after she’d completed an under 18s camp with the USA.
“It was just friendlies, there was no need to commit,” recalls Allyson, who is with Italian giants AC Milan. “I don’t actually remember if I had my citizenship at that point, but I went along and had a positive impression and my mum just got to work on getting us both citizenship.
“There was no pressure on us. Our mum just said if you want to do this and you have your passports it’s your choice.”
Allyson wouldn’t formally make her debut until 2018 ahead of the World Cup in France, but she remembers vividly the time her sister first came on camp.
“I just remember being like so nervous for her, which is really funny when I look back,” she laughs. “All the emotional memories I have are hoping she does well. I literally just wanted her to be at her best and now fast forward however many years, now it’s like she is the person I can look to for that stability, that calmness and a bit of reassurance, but that initial emotional reaction just came from being her sister.
“We were always involved in the same things, I don’t think there was much either of us didn’t try, perhaps she did a year of lacrosse and that was it. She was quite tall from a young age so there was a period she played up in my age group but my parents never put us on the same team.”
While playing together has become the norm for both, the rarity of a pair of sisters playing alongside each other at a World Cup and how special that is for them as a family is not lost on either of them, particularly given the success they enjoyed.
“Yeah, I mean…even when you say it like that, it doesn’t really sink in,” admits Chantelle. “And I don’t really know when it will or if it will. Looking from the outside, it’s something you don’t have words for because you don’t think things like that are possible.
“Four years ago I didn’t even play in defence, then when I realised I’d be playing alongside her it made me feel so much more comfortable and helped me with nerves because she’s someone I’m so familiar with.”
Allyson adds, “She’s always been right there with me and that’s been quite special, the first time we were apart was college. We were typical siblings, you love them but want to kill them sometimes!
“When we went off to school is when we became super close and appreciated one another a bit more and now both playing in Europe, sharing that with her has been really great and going through all the similar things, just in different places, has helped our growth a lot because they can relate to a lot of what you’re going through. It’s been a blessing to have her on that journey.”
On playing together, she continues “When we’re out there I don’t think about it too much but I know what she will do before she’s done it. If she makes an error, I know exactly how she’ll respond. When you finish a game and you’re like ‘wow’, it’s a sense to know what each other will do and it’s been really useful for each of us playing alongside each other and it’s that sense of familiarity, that person you know and who has your back. We were best friends, but we have our own separate friends of course and we have that balance of ‘if you need me I’m there’ and vice versa etc, but we have our own paths too.
“I think to be honest a lot of our games mirror one another. Where I lack, she’s quite strong and vice versa and we make a good partnership on that alone and knowing each other so well you can develop because you don’t play together all the time. It does give you a bit of a head-start.”
Whatever connection they do have, it certainly worked, as the pair played together across all four of Jamaica’s games, conceding just the two goals, and shutting out both France and Brazil.
“Going into those games, it wasn’t even like we were really training defence that much like that either, it was so weird,” laughs Chantelle. “We went into those games saying ‘we’re a completely different team now’, we just wanted to go out there and play. That’s our job, to protect the goals, and I’m happy we were able to do that. The whole eleven contributed to that, everyone stepped up in each game.”
Chantelle also had the bonus of having spent the previous 12 months playing in France, so she was particularly familiar with a front line which included the likes of Eugenie Le Sommer and Kadidiatou Diani.
“That was something I was so grateful to have, that last year here in France. If I hadn’t played against those players, I’d have been so nervous, but you have that understanding a bit more of Renard, Diani etc, you understand their strengths and weaknesses and also understand you play at the same level as them, and those things help to settle your nerves, because I’d played against a lot of those players twice in the league that season.”
For Allyson, the build-up was somewhat less settled. After four years at AS Roma, she joined Angel City in the NWSL for the start of 2022, but the move didn’t work out and in January 2023 she joined PSG on loan for the remainder of the European season to get minutes leading into the World Cup.
But the defender never played, so despite being on her sister’s doorstep, the pair had very different build-ups to the tournament.
“I had a pretty hectic…I don’t even know how long it was, a year? A year and a half between being in LA and then going to Paris for a brief moment?
“The World Cup was coming around and the main focus for me was getting some playing minutes which is why I decided to go on what should have been a loan to PSG. That didn’t come to fruition as I hoped and I needed to be somewhere I would play and be grounded for a minute because it does take its toll when you’re missing that consistency, and I’ve found that now in Milan.”
While her preparation may not have been ideal, the elder of the two sisters can at least claim the honour of scoring Jamaica’s only goal at the tournament, heading home a corner which gave them the vital win they needed against debutants Panama.
“I’ll tell you for free if you’d suggested anything like that before the tournament, that would have been a joke!”
Sadly, a continued dispute with the JFF over a lack of support since the World Cup means neither of them, along with the rest of the squad, have regularly represented Jamaica since.
They did take part in the Olympic qualifiers which saw them lose out to Canada shortly after the tournament at the end of last year, but since then haven’t been involved, with current head coach Xavier Gilbert now relying on back-up players with many of the star names yet to return.
It has though at least afforded both the time to reflect on their achievements as a pair as well as their own individual successes.
“Once we found some success at the World Cup we were all on a crazy high,” Allyson admits. “We went straight into Olympic qualifiers and the expectation was similar to the first [World Cup] we went to, to build on it for the next and one thing with this group is it’s always felt quite young and that’s been a motivating factor because in 2019 we’re all thinking ‘this is a stepping stone and most of us will be back here again and again’.
“This group has always been really optimistic of the potential to build with the players we have and the issues we’ve had can be disappointing when you feel like you’ve proven yourself the best you can, you want things to follow. All that being said it was none of ours first rodeo with our federation and it was disappointing to have to make ourselves unavailable for a moment, but we have to push for the changes off the field while acknowledging our successes in the same moment.”
Regarding the World Cup performances being a good bargaining chip, she adds “Absolutely. When you have success at a World Cup it helps with the visibility and opens new doors for players to play at a higher level and I think the 2023 World Cup was a reflection of 2019.
“That core group, the additions of Becky [Spencer], Drew [Spence] etc, players without international experience but loads of football experience and it ended up being a perfect medley of players there from the start and adding in some quality players where we hit a sweet spot. At the end of the day, we surprised even ourselves, but from the first game we knew everything was in our hands.”
Chantelle adds “I think we’ve definitely had some time for it to really settle in and I guess take in what we did and what we accomplished. It was a really quick turnaround, we had the Olympic qualifying matches, so we had some time, but also not really much time where we had to focus on the next task in hand.
“For me personally, I’ve definitely had time just to sit with it and focus on what we accomplished there and just kind of what we’re looking to do moving forwards. Setting that standard moving forward, that this isn’t just going to be something that happened by mistake.”
On current issues, she adds “I feel like moving forward we just need to have better communication with our federation. There’s always situations where either they reach out to us or we reach out to them and then time passes with no communication. That’s when the team statements come out, there’s a frustration we’re putting all this work in as athletes and it’s not being reciprocated by the federation and I think you’ll see more and more nations do it.
“It shows the push it gives for these federations to do the right thing and respect their players. We obviously missed the last window and we missed the Gold Cup which was a huge shame because it was the first one, and we’d loved to have participated, but there’s some things out of players controls that’s with the federation.”
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The fact Jamaica was never hugely on the map for either adds an extra layer of fascination to the story of two sisters representing the same team, before you even get to the fact they share a position.
When Hue Menzies took over as head coach ahead of the 2019 World Cup, he started to “pull up names” as Allyson puts it of players who had represented the USA at youth level and had Jamaican citizenship.
Working in the US college system alongside his role with Jamaica, Menzies was familiar with many of the talents who could do so, and started to assemble as squad to try and qualify for the tournament, despite practically starting from scratch after a period of inactivity for the team.
For Allyson, the call saved her career.
“I think I got a call a month before it saying ‘we know you have your paperwork’, it was done deal for me. I was one foot in, one foot out on continuing to play and that was the catalyst for me deciding to keep playing.
“Chantelle came too but she came late as she had exams. It was the last game vs Haiti and that’s a vivid memory because we were in Haiti, there was about 10,000 people in an 8,000-seater stadium, you can imagine the noise! Haiti had invested a lot, we had no business getting out of that group and to this day I don’t know how we did but we drew Haiti and qualified for the next round.
“I quickly found a team in Iceland for the summer, the final stage happened in October, we qualified and from there I ended up at Roma. It all happened so quick, it was like a boomerang effect. Playing for Jamaica has determined my career because I don’t know if I’d have chased a full-blown career if not for that, so I’m very grateful to them to be honest.”
Chantelle meanwhile admits for her it wasn’t even really on the radar.
“Honestly? No. I think for my sister a little bit more. In college she went with the youth teams and I just remember I was pretty young, I wasn’t really aware of what it was and the severity of it, that this was representing a national team.
“I guess too at the time Jamaica wasn’t really on the map, didn’t have the success they’ve had more recently. I think it was my junior year of college I had finally got all the money to make a citizenship and passport, all the documents I needed, and then it was a few months until the Caribbean qualifiers and that’s what really set the tone.
“I went to the camp not even knowing what I was doing. We were in Haiti, it was a crazy experience and it all happened so fast because a year later we qualified for the World Cup.”
She adds “I think going into that World Cup when I was in college, I had no thoughts or could even explain what was happening. How is there a player in college playing against the likes of Carli Lloyd?! It didn’t make any sense to me, it was a blur, but after that World Cup and being able to start my professional career, even though I had no idea what I was doing, it helped me build that international resume which a lot of clubs look for.”
The other element to take into account is family, because while the sisters were both almost as far from Jamaica within the USA boundaries as they could be, their heritage lies in the Caribbean.
Both their dad and brother made it down under last summer, which is no mean feat giving dad has a fear of flying!
“They’re like super proud, I probably can’t describe how proud they are,” says Allyson. “It was a big transition when we both left school because they came to every game. I was 90 minutes away and Chantelle was three hours away and they were in that car every weekend, they did not miss a game they could go to. We went abroad and that was kind of like a huge thing for them to not be able to watch us in person all the time.
“If we were in Jamaica they’d come if they could because it became the next closest thing. If it wasn’t soccer it would have been something else, we’ve always loved sports and shared that. They came to France and having dad and brother in Australia was really special. It makes you realise you’re playing for more people, the national team really shows you the affect of what you’re doing in your own community. It electrifies an entire community and I know they’re super proud.”
On her dad, she adds “I was like ‘are you hitch-hiking?!’ He’s a restless person, so that amount of time in the air, he’s not the person who can sleep the whole time! But it became one of his favourite places anywhere in the world and it’s amazing this little game and a little ball has brought this to him.”
Chantelle laughs “My dad does not like flying! He doesn’t want to be on a plane for more than four hours, and he ended up making the trip. I think he’s so grateful he did, it was unforgettable, seeing them there every game. A lot of players were able to have family there, my mum and aunt couldn’t make it, but it felt so good to see so many people after the game.”
Their main memory is though they have each other.
“I just remember her always being there,” smiles Allyson. “We weren’t on the same teams, but she’d have a game at three, I’d have a game at five, it’s just what we did. She’d watch me, I’d watch her, that’s just how it was…”