The chance to help grow a new team and league from the ground up attracted Katrine Pedersen and her family to Canada.
The former Danish captain is head coach of Ottawa Rapid FC, one of six teams set to kick off the new Northern Super League in April.
“This is a chance to be able to contribute to the growth of women’s [soccer],” Pedersen said of the move to Canada.
“This seemed to be a very good opportunity, with the staff here, to be able to build a team, an environment, a setup with a very high standard for professional football players. Being able to give players a place to play and a place to develop.”
Soccer has long been a men’s domain, Pedersen said. And while women have made strides in the game, there is more to be done.
“Women’s football has come to stay. It’s growing fast,” she said. “It still needs to change to meet the needs that today’s young players have to grow up with. So in that way, I think the Canadian league is a league that will be looked up to when it’s been going a few years.
“Right now, it’s a new, very very exciting project and journey that I’m very happy and excited to be a part of.”
The 47-year-old Pederson comes with an impressive resume.
A member of the Danish Football Hall of Fame, Pedersen was named Danish women’s player of the year three times (2007, 2011 and 2013).
She won a Danish-record 210 caps from 1994 to 2013, spending the last 10 years as captain. She played in three World Cups and five European Championships.
‘The perfect coach’
At club level, she played in Denmark, Norway and Sweden as well as Australia (Adelaide United) and England (Fulham).
Pedersen joins Ottawa from the Danish Football Association, where she served in a talent development role.
Kristina Kiss, a former Canadian international who is Ottawa’s technical director, calls Pedersen “the perfect coach, the perfect hire for us.”
Kiss played alongside Pedersen for a season some 20 years ago at IF Floya in Norway.
“She was a great teammate and a great player and a great person,” said Pedersen. “And she’s also one of the reasons I’m here now.”
Pedersen’s football travels did not take her to Canada in the past, although she was due to spend time here at a Denmark camp prior to the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. She was injured a week before start of the camp so never made it here.
Pedersen is one of four Danish women to have a UEFA Pro Coaching Licence, the highest coaching certification available in Europe. She was an assistant coach with the Danish national women’s team from 2015 to 2021 and has also served as a TV pundit.
More recently she coached AGF in the Danish top league, a team that was started in 2020 as a joint elite project driven by the parent clubs VSK Aarhus and IF Lyseng.
She plans to work in Denmark until making the move to Ottawa permanent at the beginning of January.
Pedersen and her partner, Maiken Pape, a former Danish international and pro tennis player, have two children: daughter Bjork and son Louie. The family, who live in Vejle, will join her in February.
“One of them is very excited and she wants to come here as well. The other one is a bit more in-between. He thinks he’s going to miss his friends,” Pedersen said of her kids.