Lizzy and Mady Hairston dress in silence, squinting from early-morning grogginess. It’s still dark outside, and will be for a while, but they are diligent. Their father hustles them out the door and into the car.
Although it’s 6 a.m., the girls are up and ready for training. There is just enough light from the street for them to see while they warm up on the field at Grant, passing, dribbling and shooting the soccer ball. It’s quiet at first, but soon the sisters are calling to each other.
“We get up early…and we’re out at Grant Park or Buckman right when it’s, you know, sunrise so we can get some field time out there,” John Hairston says.
“There’s always someone who isn’t doing it or there always is someone else who is working, maybe even harder than you,” says Mady Hairston, a senior at Grant High School.
For the Hairston family, this routine is normal. Alex, Juli, Mady and Lizzy, ages 22, 20, 18 and 14, respectively, have been raised to put family first.
“They don’t have an option but to be each other’s best friend. I told them from the time that they could talk…they have to treat each other with respect and, you know, really have each other’s back,” their dad says.
From this tight-knit family, they find success. Each daughter is an accomplished soccer player, and all of them have set their sights on playing soccer at some of the highest levels for college.
In short, the Hairston family can easily be considered a soccer dynasty.
“I think that family support is probably the key ingredient of allowing them to grow and develop those special skills…to be able to stand out, be part of that 1 to 2 percent that move on from high school and club athletics and go to the realm of the college athletics,” says Rob Klatte, the former women’s soccer coach at Purdue University. He coached Alex and Juli at the Division I college.
People who’ve known the family see beyond the soccer.
“They’re raised, they’re guided, they’re not on their own,” says Bernadette Suh, a long time family friend who is the mother of NFL defensive standout, Ndamukong Suh. “For that reason, the girls feel supported and so they feel that there’s only one way to be successful in life.”
Working hard is a family value. “Be hard-working and…do what you can to give your all every day,” Paige Hairston, their mother, says. “We came from parents who have really great work ethics and we were taught that. It’s just natural in us to do that, to be like that with the girls.”
John Hairston and Paige Williams met at a church function in 1991 in Portland. Paige was dating someone else and John remembers shaking her hand and not letting go. “I just was telling her it was really nice to meet her,” he says. “I just wanted to let her know a little bit that I was interested.”
Paige Hairston remembers their first date like it was yesterday. “We met over at Rose’s Café,” she recalls. “We just talked for hours. I mean, I think we almost closed down the place. We just had one good conversation after another and I couldn’t believe how the time flew by.”
She grew up the middle of three kids in Southern California. Her parents divorced when she was young, but she remembers how they worked together to teach her the value of education and curiosity. In high school, she and her sister started attending church on their own. “Church was just another part of learning and growing up and being a better person,” she recalls.
For John Hairston, who grew up in Portland, Sunday church services were a constant. His mom was a teacher at Grant High School and he was a proud member of the Generals baseball team. His parents taught him perseverance and honesty. “I really bonded with my dad and I always wanted to be a dad like he was,” he recalls.
In 1992, they got married, settled down in a small, two-bedroom home on Northeast 13th Avenue and Shaver Street, and started a family. Alex was born in 1993, followed shortly by Juli.
From the start, Alex was the typical oldest child – focused, serious and motivated, but with a silly side brought out by her family. Juli, her parents say, has always been a “pleaser” and laid back, but no less hard working.
In 1996, the small family packed up and moved to Spokane, Wash. where Mady was born in 1998. A year later, they returned home to Portland where Lizzy’s birth in 2001 completed the family. Mady is best described as “fiercely competitive,” says John Hairston. And Lizzy, the classic youngest child, has always been a “firecracker,” Paige Hairston says.
For the girls, their differences have brought them closer together. “We’re all perfect contrasts,” says Mady Hairston.
John and Paige Hairston, who grew up with three and two siblings, respectively, always knew they wanted a big family. The constant movement, the easy laughter, even the bickering and chaotic schedules, were home for them.
They taught the girls to put family first. “We always played together, got in trouble together,” Mady Hairston says. “We’ve all been through it. We’re all honest, truly honest to each other and we just have a trust with each other that you can’t find anywhere else.”
Laughing, the girls recall the mischief they made growing up. In one instance, their dad had just finished putting a new coat of paint in one of the rooms shared by two sisters when he walked in to find toothpaste smeared all over the walls.
“I said, ‘Who put all this on the wall?’ And no one wanted to fess up,” their dad recalls. “So I went and got some clear tape and I went in there and I said, ‘OK, I’m gonna see whose fingerprints are on this thing.’”
Once he had gathered the “evidence,” he gave the girls one more chance to come clean. “Do you want to let me know now?” he remembers saying.
Juli Hairston confessed, but it wasn’t the toothpaste their dad was upset about. He needed the girls to understand the importance of telling the truth.
This sense of integrity runs in the Hairston family, he says. One day, his grandfather asked him to go pick up a newspaper from the stand two miles down the road. When John Hairston got to the stand, a man was just closing the box. The man offered to leave it unlocked so that John could save the 25 cents it cost to open it. He grabbed a paper, went back home and gave his grandfather the quarter.
“He said, ‘Well how did you pay for it?’ And I told him what had happened…and he got pretty upset. He said, ‘That’s stealing and you don’t want to ever steal and you always represent the family wherever you’re at.’ And so he made me go back and put the quarter in the machine.”
The girls have been taught this same lesson. “For us, it’s kind of like, we just want to, we don’t really want to do anything that would disappoint our family,” says Mady.
Faith also plays a large role in their family. They attend Mt. Olivet Baptist Church – the same church John Hairston attended growing up; where John and Paige were married; and where all four girls were baptized.
“I’ve always looked at it like you can bring someone to church and to the table but you can’t force-feed them on that, you know,” says John Hairston. “It has to be in your heart. And I guess all we’ve done is just try and build a stage and let them kind of perform on that.”
Alex Hairston says that although they can’t make church every Sunday, “it’s something that we’ve grown up with and stuff so it’s something that’s always been constant in our lives.
“It’s nice to have something to believe in…it’s nice to go to church and hear like what the pastor or even other people have to say and take that into account like, kind of make your own connection with God.”
In high school, John Hairston was an all-star athlete and Paige Williams played volleyball and ran track. But soccer, for the most part, was foreign to them. So when Paige signed 5-year-old Alex up for “kick and chase,” it came as a surprise to her dad. Paige remembers him saying, “I want her to play baseball, or softball, or basketball. Why’d you sign her up for something like that? Soccer?”
But Alex was hooked. And John Hairston caught on quickly. “After the first game, I brought her back to the house and I said, ‘OK, this is what you need to do. It’s all about scoring goals,’” he recalls. “So I set up a little net and all I did was teach her how to get the ball and kick it in the net.
“And the next game, I mean, she went out there and they literally were asking for her to come off the field because she was scoring so much on the other team.”
That was the beginning of a legacy that would be carried out by all four girls at Grant High School and beyond.
They spent the weekends watching each other’s soccer games and playing in their own, and over the summer they set up tournaments in their backyard. Mady Hairston remembers the elaborate brackets they made that lasted for weeks.
Each girl eventually joined a competitive club soccer team and later the Olympic Development Program.
Paige Hairston remembers weekends in the summer when they would have as many as 16 games to attend. And as Alex and Juli Hairston entered high school, the stressful search for college began. They reached out to recruiters and always had to play their best in case a college scout was on the sidelines.
But amidst this chaos, they kept family at the forefront. The girls trained with their dad on the weekends and Paige Hairston made a point to go to every game that she could. They also carved out time to step away from soccer. Their mom says that they try “to create that balance of just, ‘OK, it’s not all about soccer. It’s not all about sports. Let’s have some fun, let’s do movie night, just spend some good time together.’”
When Alex left home to play soccer at Purdue University on an athletic scholarship, John Hairston recalls that even visiting the school before she committed there was hard. He remembers, “We got back to the airport and I asked her how she liked the school and, you know, she actually started crying and I was like, ‘Well what’s wrong?’ She said, ‘No, I really like it. I’m just thinking about missing you guys.’”
“No one told me how hard it was going to be to send a kid off to college,” their mom says. “I just had to make the adjustment, her not being here, our family was going through a change.”
It was just as hard when Juli Hairston joined her sister at Purdue a few years later.
“It always felt like there was something missing because we’ve been together like for a really long time before that,” says Lizzy Hairston. “But it always felt good, them coming home for Christmas and stuff because it just felt like a family again.”
Today, Alex Hairston is a Purdue graduate and studying to get into medical school. Juli Hairston is a junior at Purdue and hoping to go to law school. Mady Hairston is a senior at Grant and has committed to playing soccer at the University of Maryland next year. Lizzy Hairston is a freshman, but is already emailing Division I college coaches and compiling a list of options.
“I can’t imagine not having any sisters because I’ve lived with sisters for so long, I feel like I’d be a completely different person,” says Mady Hairston.
Juli Hairston, who lives halfway across the country, adds: “I talk to my family at least once a day…they keep me level-headed.”
For many families, the teenage years can be a rough time. But the Hairstons have maintained their close relationships.
“A lot of times when girls become teenagers they see their parents as not being a knowledge base…the girls still respect their dad at older ages and still continue to work with him,” says Tom Atencio, who has coached all four girls in soccer.
On a recent day, Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder blast from the speakers of the Hairston’s Lexus sedan, a step down from the SUV they used to have, but more practical for their current family size. John pulls up to Roosevelt High School’s soccer field and Lizzy jumps out.
Her early morning training sessions with Mady have paid off. Her agility and speed stand out on the field. After the game, she swaps congratulations, but then focuses on what she can do to improve. She knows there’s always something she can work on.
The Hairston family puts just as much effort into strengthening their relationships with each other as they do into being successful at school or on the field. Even when all the girls are in different places, family will come first.
“We just trust each other a lot,” Lizzy Hairston says. “We can’t really spend that much time away from each other.”
Alex Hairston agrees. “They’re definitely like my best friends,” she says. “It’s comforting to know that something like that won’t change.” ◊
