U.S. born Mia Lindborg learned soccer while living in Abu Dhabi, now tries to earn regular role with Seton Hill women's team

Second grader Mia Lindborg got the news all children at that age dread: We’re moving.

Her father, Ryan, a project manager for Cleveland Clinic, had been tasked with spearheading the development of a new facility, and that would require his family to relocate.

Move? Away from the familiar surroundings of her Nashville home? Away from her school? From her friends? The thought of being uprooted was, to say the least, unpleasant despite her father’s assurances she would make new friends and have great experiences.

But this was a move unlike most children endure. The Lindborgs weren’t just leaving Nashville or Tennessee. They were leaving the United States, bound for Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates.

“It was crazy because I remember telling my dad, ‘No! I don’t want to move. I don’t want to leave my friends,’ ” Lindborg said. “I loved (Abu Dhabi) automatically. Obviously, I missed my friends … but I loved it. I think I didn’t even want to go back to Tennessee during summers because I liked it so much.”

During the transition, Lindborg at least had one security blanket: soccer. She started playing in little leagues at 5 years old, and once her family moved to the UAE, she joined Go Pro Football Academy in Dubai.

More than a decade later, Lindborg continues to advance her soccer skills. At age 16, she joined the UAE women’s national team, and now she is in her second season as a member of the Seton Hill women’s team. The sophomore appeared in seven of SHU’s first 10 matches (with one start) and logged about 26 minutes per match.

She has yet to score her first collegiate goal, though she did score twice in her first action with the Griffins: a scrimmage against Charleston before the 2023 season.

After competing against Middle Eastern and European competition for so many years, she said playing soccer in the U.S. has been a big adjustment.

“I remember when I came (to Seton Hill), and in my second week of freshman year, my coach (Riley Butler) was saying things, and I just didn’t learn this type of terminology back in Abu Dhabi,” she said. “So I would always have to clarify … because I learned it completely different based off terminology.

“(I was warned) before coming to the U.S. that these girls are big, they’re physical, they’re fast. We definitely played more technical and worked on individual skill (in Abu Dhabi) but here … the American girls, they’re big, they’re strong, they’ll knock you over easily. So I had to mentally and physically prepare for that.”

Bracing for the challenges of playing soccer in America might have been tougher for her than adjusting to life in a new country and culture. That, Lindborg said, was an almost-seamless undertaking.

Once her family got settled in Abu Dhabi, Lindborg was enrolled at Gems American Academy, a school that offers an American curriculum but attracts students from across the world. Though there were few Americans at Gems, Lindborg had the opportunity to be exposed to peers from many cultures, a prospect that excited her.

Among her studies was seven years of the Arabic language, which she said she can read and write but still has a few challenges speaking and comprehending.

“I’m not fluent or anything,” she said. “Even in school, there are some people who speak Arabic, and I always try to interact with them and have conversations. … It’s a super hard language to learn.”

Then she laughs.

“My Arabic is not as good as it should be.”

As for Abu Dhabi, Lindborg immediately was entranced, even though it was less modern and touristy than it is now. She has watched the city transform in the past dozen years and calls it a place everyone should visit at least once.

Further, she said the UAE is one of the safest countries in the world, even for women. Lindborg said she believes the way Arab cultures are portrayed in American media and how they are perceived by the average American often is unfair and inaccurate.

“I’ve never had one bad experience there as a woman,” she said. “I feel like it’s twisted in the media. Being a woman over there, it’s perfectly fine as it would be here. There was never one point in my life where I ever felt threatened or anything.”

On the soccer pitch, meanwhile, Lindborg was making a name for herself. She starred for the Gems girls soccer team — she was MVP of an international varsity tournament played in Greece in 2020 and was named the school’s athlete of the year and UAE high school championship MVP in 2022 — as well as her Go Pro club team. Her performance even caught the eye of the UAE women’s national team.

Go Pro often plays on the same pitch used by the national team, and the coaching staff took note of Lindborg’s talent. She eventually received an official offer to join the team. She balked at first, but, after a year of campaigning by the coaching staff and encouragement from a friend who had joined the team, Lindborg relented.

“My accomplishments are one of the big reasons I play sports now,” she said. “Especially going to other countries and being able to get recognized and win MVP and all these things, it gives you the hopes that you can make it.

“I think that’s the reason I am playing D-II soccer right now is I had such high expectations of myself, and I was actually able to achieve them.”

Having an athlete who hails from overseas isn’t unusual for Seton Hill. During the 2023-24 academic year, Seton Hill men’s teams had nearly two dozen international athletes, and women’s teams had nearly a dozen.

Besides Lindborg, Butler’s team has players from Australia, Spain and Canada. The 2023 team had players from Serbia, Germany, New Zealand and France. All of those players since have graduated.

“I was I was talking to (sophomore forward) Leah Kessler (from Mt. Lebanon) and was like, ‘Hey did you ever think a month before coming to school that your next best friend would be a girl from Australia?’ Butler said.

A Division II school such as Seton Hill doesn’t have the recruiting budget to jet all over the globe looking for talent. Often, the talent comes to them via agencies. The agencies will shop overseas athletes to American colleges and universities through mass emails.

From there, the individual coaches will zero in on players then try to pitch the merits of their institution. With Seton Hill, Butler said, he can sell it to international players by noting they would be less than an hour from a big city, Pittsburgh — and Butler said they often throw in that Seton Hill is only five hours from New York City — and be in smaller class settings, which allows an international student to get more individualized attention if he or she is not proficient in English.

“When you talk to internationals, a lot of them want to know if you’re close to bigger cities and what does the landscape look like. Is there a beach or something like that,” Butler said. “And, what’s the level of sport they’re coming to.”

Lindborg learned about Seton Hill through an agency she was connected to by her Go Pro club, Athletes USA. Seton Hill was one of many schools that reached out to her after seeing video highlights and reading her bio online.

She also had a more direct connection to Seton Hill: Fellow Go Pro player Isaac Foster, a year older than Lindborg, is a defender on the Griffins men’s team.

“I did a deep dive into this university, and I loved it so much,” she said.

Lindborg was recruited by previous women’s soccer coach Adrian Blewitt, but Butler, in his second season, is happy to have her on his roster and said he sees vast potential in her.

He said he likes her goal-scorer’s mentality, and she has developed some of the physical toughness she needs to bang bodies with the best in the PSAC. But, he said, the adjustment to playing the American-style game is ongoing, so she her ceiling remains high.

With half the PSAC schedule to go — Seton Hill was 2-2-3 in the PSAC (4-2-4 overall) through their Oct. 9 draw with Edinboro — there’s still plenty of time for Lindborg to contribute now and over the next two seasons.

“I think she has the tools where she could be a very good player and do a lot of really good things in this league,” Butler said. “She can run at players and turn players and get in front of the goal, and if our team can consistently create chances like that, she could be really dangerous.”

Added Lindborg: “I’m not satisfied yet because I want to be a 90-minute player, and I know I can. But I know there’s some things I need to work on to achieve that. But I definitely will keep on going to become that, for sure.”

She also plans to keep on going with the UAE national team. She went back to Abu Dhabi in the spring to play with the team and wants to see how far she — and the UAE women — can advance on the international stage.

As for life after soccer, Lindborg is studying psychology. She said she hopes to land a job somewhere in Europe or “back home in Abu Dhabi.”

“Home.” That’s how she refers to Abu Dhabi. She and her family still make periodic trips back to Tennessee, but the UAE is home now.

Those second-grade fears have been replaced by a grown-up fondness cultivated over more than a decade.

“I miss it so much,” she said. “I tell every single person I meet that they have to go visit Abu Dhabi. … It’s an amazing place.”