"I never trained that": Tash Flint on where Denver Summit's hardest shot comes from

Photo courtesy @fiddle.fotos

When the ball fell to Tash Flint against Chicago, the easy read was that she'd hit it first time. She took a touch instead.

Then she hit it.

Flint came on at halftime of Denver Summit FC's 6-1 win over the Chicago Stars and scored, her first goal in a couple of months. People talk about how hard she hits a ball. She doesn't argue.

"I do think a lot of people have said my shot is ridiculously powerful," Flint said. "Maybe we should get one of them things where you shoot one of them speed things."

Where it comes from is another matter. She says she never worked on it.

"I reckon when I was playing on the streets and stuff like that, 'cause I never done anything to train that, to train being powerful at shooting," she said. "I never trained that. That's something I just probably always had."

Flint came up through Manchester United's academy and joined Denver on loan from the Tampa Bay Sun before the club made the move permanent. Her contract now runs through 2027. Head coach Nick Cushing has coached her before. She was part of his Manchester City squad that won the 2014 FA Women's League Cup.

"I'm only human"

The Chicago goal mattered to her more than the scoreline suggests. Before it, she'd gone a couple of months without scoring, and she'd said in a postgame press conference how frustrating that is for a goal scorer.

"It's tough as a forward and as an attacking player when you don't get that," she said. "You probably go through every single season going through little phases where the ball don't go in the back of the net and it just feels like it's not working for you."

Asked how she keeps her head through a dry spell, she answered, then admitted the question itself gets old.

"I always want to score goals, but at the end of the day, I'm only human. Not going to score goals every single game. I'm not going to score every single shot I take," Flint said. "So I think it's just willing to continue taking them shots, even if you got pressure on your back from the staff, from the players, that you need to get the ball in the back of the net. And deep down, sometimes I want to answer and say, well, I know. 'Cause I do know that, and everyone knows that. So it's not really a question that needs answering, to be honest."

Her explanation for the Chicago game was simple. "I just went there and done the basics," she said. "And I think not only I did that, but every single player that was on that pitch that game did that."

She also thinks Chicago felt the altitude, and says the Summit get it too. After three or four days in California, with a day or two off on top, "we do feel it as well" when they come back. "So I understand when teams come in they do struggle," she said. "It is tough."

"I used to get kicked around"

The streets she mentioned were where it started. Flint has an older brother and a younger brother, and both were mad about football. She went to their training sessions and games and ended up playing alongside them. "It's all I ever known really, was school and football," she said. "And I just used to play with the lads."

The lads didn't go easy on her. "I used to get kicked around, threw on the floor," she said. One shoulder barge sent her into something hard enough to burst a vein in her arm. "It was all different colors. But that's football. It's meant to be physical."

She joined Manchester United's academy at five. She left at 16 only because United had no women's pathway then, no under-18s or under-21s to move up into. So she went to Manchester City, a move her family would describe, in her words, as going "to the dark side."

At City, at 17, she played for Cushing for the first time. "It was as if the world was crazy. It was all massive. It was huge," she said. "I was so young playing pro football, and back then it was not as big as it is now. So I probably looked at it and took it a little bit for granted."

The biggest difference between that player and this one, she says, is that she left home. "I was such a home girl, and I still am now," Flint said. "But I'm out here on my own, working on my career, working on my football. It's all I'm here for." She doubts Cushing would have come for her if she'd still been in England. "He might have had in the back of his mind that I was still not ready to leave the UK."

The tidy passing she's known for, she credits to England. "You should be able to pass the ball five yards to your teammate, to the back foot and to the correct foot," she said. The NWSL asked something else of her. "I don't know if I can actually even say there's anyone really that quick in the UK," Flint said. "Where over here I'm like, damn, everyone's quick. So maybe that's something we need to work on in the UK, and be quicker, 'cause I'm trying to work on it. I mean, don't know if it's working."

Denver is also her fifth club in its first season, after Leicester City, Blackburn, Manchester City and Tampa Bay, where the Sun won the first USL Super League title. She won't take the credit for that pattern, mostly. "I don't think it's individually about me. I think it's the team in general and a collective," she said. "But I'd like to say I contribute a decent amount to the team like everyone else does."

"Practice on my arm. It's okay."

Off the field, Flint's Denver mostly runs through Carson Pickett and two dachshunds.

Pickett is her best friend on the team, and it shows on both of their Instagram accounts. "She's my kind of person," Flint said. "She's just laughy, bubbly, she doesn't take life too serious, but also wants to get better and better at football every day." Pickett's warning about the NWSL was simple: any team can beat any team. "Top of the league can lose to the bottom of the league," Flint said. "And she said that's one thing that's very different."

The 14ers have a chant for her. It isn't safe for work. She heard it before she knew she was hearing it. "I do remember someone saying to me one time, 'Have you heard the chant?' And I've said, 'I don't think I have,'" she said. "And then they said it, and I was like, yeah, I have heard."

She found a couple of coffee shops she likes, then bought a coffee machine so she could stay home with the dogs. "My dogs are everything. I do every single thing with them," she said. One of them won't go near water yet, and she's working on that. "My other one is crazy. He's off in whatever water. Swimming, puddles, lakes, ponds."

Asked whether Denver could be where she finishes her career, she didn't give the easy answer. She has said before that she'd like her last season to be at Celtic, where she scored 11 goals in 14 league matches on loan and won the Scottish title. "I just loved it there," she said. "The people, everything was just amazing about it." But she left the door open. "You never know. It might go amazing here, it might continue going great, and I'll be here till the end of my career."

Then there's the leg. Her tattoos started years ago with a face on the inside of her thigh. It was a random face she saw once and thought looked cool. Everything since is just something she likes: a quote, a compass and a map because she likes the world, an eye, lilies and roses, the number two. And a hot air balloon on the back of her leg, for a ride she has never taken.

"I've tried to book to go on one in the UK, and it cancelled and cancelled and cancelled," she said. "So I'm stuck with a hot air balloon on the back of my leg and I've never gone on one."

She used two different tattoo artists on the leg and wishes she'd stuck with one. She plans to have her original artist fix a couple of spots next time she's home. The patchwork on her right arm has a looser history. All of it was done by three friends who were learning to tattoo.

"They practice on me, and I'm like, 'Yeah, go on then. Practice on my arm. It's okay,'" Flint said. "And they've all turned out good actually, which is good."