PORTLAND, Ore. – Growing up in Hella, Iceland – a village of fewer than 800 residents – Portland Thorns FC midfielder Dagny Brynjarsdottir spent most of her childhood evenings kicking around a soccer ball or playing basketball with the local boys until well past sundown. She would stay out playing until her mother called her inside for dinner.
So when Brynjarsdottir played soccer with the girls for the first time at 13 years-old, the experience shocked her.
“When I was with boys – even though we were arguing on the field – I just tackled someone pretty hard and he just tackled me back,” she recalls. “But the girls were just more dramatic, so if you tackled someone in practice, some of them would talk behind your back like, 'Oh my God, what is she doing?'”
But all that time with the boys meant that their soccer idols growing up – players like the Brazilian striker Ronaldo – became the young Brynjarsdottir's idols as well.
“I was just one of the boys I guess,” she says.
The time she spent playing and training with the boys imbued the athletically gifted Brynjarsdottir's game with a tough edge and helped prepare Brynjarsd0ttir for the first big move of her soccer career: a contract with Reykjavík club Knattspyrnufélagið Valur.
But as prepared as Brynjarsdottir might have felt from a soccer perspective, the move to the big city was still jarring at first for the small town teenager. The experience, she says, proved far more difficult than she ever imagined it would be.
“I think that was one of the hardest steps I've ever taken in my soccer career, just because I had to move away from home and move to Reykjavík, which is a city, and move outside of my comfort zone for the first time. I had always been with my best friends that I have known since I was young, some of them since I was born, and I think that was tough for me.
“It took time for me to start being myself and playing my style. But it definitely made me stronger.”
In her time at Valur, Brynjarsdottir displayed a mental toughness well beyond her years, scoring 30 goals for a team that at one time boasted nine members of the Icelandic Women's National Team.
Her experience at Valur also gave Brynjarsdottir the confidence to pursue a dream of coming to the United States to play collegiate soccer for Florida State University.
“I said, 'OK, all the Woman's National Team players on the U.S. team go to college first so why don't I do that?'” Brynjarsdottir remembers. “I was ready for it because I had won all the titles in Iceland and that year I was on the full team and was chosen best young player in Iceland. So I needed a new challenge.”
Coming from Reykjavík to Tallahassee, Brynjarsdottir brought with her a few misconceptions about her new home.
“I was pretty surprised in January and February because I thought when I went there that I could wear shorts all year around,” she says. “I was like, 'I need to bring a jacket with me.' I didn't really have any warm clothes with me at the time because I just thought it would be sunny all the time, but it wasn't.”
Like she has in her soccer career, though, Brynjarsdottir adapted quickly to American culture. So much so, in fact, that she says now friends back in Iceland tell her she's too American.
“Icelandic people are kind of like just work and do your own thing,” she says. “But my teammates on the national team and in Iceland say I'm more like an American after I've lived here, I guess because now I'm open, more willing to talk to people around me even though I don't really know them.”
And there's no question that the tall and rangy Brynjarsdottir was a natural fit for the more physical and direct American game. In 2014, during her senior season with the Seminoles, Brynjarsdottir scored 16 goals and tallied six assists in 23 games. Along the way, she became a MAC Hermann Trophy finalist, earned NSCAA first-team All-American honors and was named ACC Offensive Player of the Year.
At the end of that 2014 season, Brynjarsdottir helped Florida State navigate its way to the College Cup Final where it defeated the University of Virginia 1-0 to take home the national championship.
Now 24 years-old, Brynjarsdottir is a leader with her national team, captaining Iceland in its recent Algarve Cup matches, and has played professionally with European women's soccer powerhouse Bayern Munich.
In Portland, Brynjarsdottir hopes that her role with the Thorns will lead to the type of offensive output that earned her so much national recognition when she was at Florida State.
“I don't know why, but somehow I'm good at scoring game-winning goals,” Brynjarsdottir says. “Hopefully I can get some of them in to get important points [for the team].”
If her game-tying goal on opening day against the Orlando Pride is anything to go by, Brynjarsdottir is more than ready to tackle the latest stage in a remarkable career that's taken her from one of the tiniest villages in Iceland to one of the biggest clubs in women's professional soccer.
