One Team, One Goal: How Ava Monaco Earned a Spot on the Men’s Soccer Team

Ava Monaco (BBA, ’28) loves numbers.  

In pre-kindergarten, she was already memorizing her times tables. In grade school, she used an abacus. In high school, she visited the New York Stock Exchange to watch her father’s company ring the opening bell, and that clinched her college plans: She was going to study math and finance at the Zicklin School of Business, from which both of her parents had graduated.  

Ava also loves soccer, which she played all four years at Hunter College High School, practicing for hours every day in the summer in preparation for college tryouts. When she was accepted at Baruch College, she assumed she would try out for the women’s team.  

But there was a catch: Baruch doesn’t have a women’s soccer team.  

Other CUNY schools offered Ava the chance to play on their women’s teams, but as a Macaulay Honors student, she’d already been accepted into the Zicklin School as a freshman and didn’t want to transfer out of the best business school in the system. So she set out to convince the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) that she should be allowed to try out for the men’s team.  

“I was sent the bylaws stating that I couldn’t play on the Baruch men’s team,” Ava says. “But soccer was my main passion in high school and I didn’t want to give up on it because of some rule that didn’t make sense to me.” After much research (she drew on her experience in a summer internship at a corporate litigation firm), she sent back “a list of bylaws detailing how a woman could join a men’s team.”

It worked. With an OK from the NCAA, Ava sent her highlight reel to the men’s soccer coach and showed up for tryouts on Randall’s Island in August, bright and early at 6:00 am. Joining her at tryouts were 50 other prospects, all of whom were men. The 50 were whittled down to 30; after training for two and a half hours every morning for the next week, the coach selected the final team—and Ava was on it.

Ava and her teammate, Silver (Jared) Bijlsma

Outside of soccer, Ava is a statistics and quantitative modeling major who’s enjoying her introductory Business 2000 class and the Baruch Investment Management Group (IMG), where she’s a junior analyst on the industrials and natural resources team. She says the Subotnick Center’s Bloomberg terminals and trading floor have been a “lifesaver” for her and her IMG teammates.  

“And it was so cool to discover the Robert A. Schwartz Center for Trading and Markets Research,” she adds. “When my dad”—Kris Monaco (MBA, ’01) —”did his MBA here, Prof. Schwartz was his advisor, and they became friends. I’m hoping to meet him.” 

Categories: Alumni, Alumni News, Faculty, News, Student News