Robbie White
EVANSTON, Illinois — Guys were undressing after practice when Robbie White walked into the Northwestern men’s soccer team’s locker room. Before taking off his goalie gear, he said he had an announcement.
The locker room became quiet.
A month earlier, White told his teammates in his recruiting class that he is gay.
Now this was the final day of practice in May before everyone left for the summer, so with a nudge from his roommate, White decided to clue in everyone else.
“All right, I’m gay,” White said. “Carry on with your day.”
His teammates didn’t carry on. They cheered and clapped then lined up to give him hugs.
“I felt a lot of love,” White said. “That was one of my top moments here at school. Everyone was smiling and cheering. It was great.”
Now, he is coming out publicly, apparently becoming the first LGBT athlete from a men’s team sport in the Big Ten Conference to come out publicly during his college career. He’s also believed to be the first men’s soccer player from any of the Power Five conference schools to come out publicly as LGBT during his college career.
“I just wanted to be a normal guy that can have his wife and kids,” White said. “Getting from there to here has been a process, but I’m happy I made it.”
White coming out publicly as gay is the culmination of an intense 13 months that started with his first career start in goal for the Wildcats.
On Sept. 18, 2016, White was named the starting goalie for the first time as Northwestern faced No. 3-ranked Indiana. A redshirt freshman at the time, he made six saves and held the Hoosiers scoreless for 110 minutes in a double overtime match that ended in a scoreless tie.
But after the match, he learned he broke his right foot during the final minute of regulation — an injury he continued to play with during the two overtimes. His season was done.
The months of rehab for his foot started to weigh on him, and in early 2017, a trainer noticed White was, what he describes now as, “a little more down for a week or so.” The trainer suggested White see a counselor, which he did.
He talked through the malaise of rehabbing his foot, but White also talked to the counselor about a secret he’d known, on some level, for five years — that he’s gay.
“As much as I didn’t want to be gay at the time, I had to accept that I was,” White said. “There’s no point in fighting it. You can’t really change it, so you might as well live your life the way you should live it.”
White gradually started telling his friends that he’s gay, and the first teammate he told was his roommate Braden Thuraisingham.
He told Thuraisingham the Saturday before Easter as a test run before coming out to his parents and two sisters on Easter. And the Monday after Easter, he came out to his teammates in his recruiting class.
“I was on a tear of telling people at that point,” White said.
But going from telling the seven teammates he’s closest with to telling a room of 30 guys stopped the tear. That was until Thuraisingham encouraged him to come out on the final day of spring practice.
That went well and so has this season.
On Sunday, White completed his first regular season since coming out to his team. The 6-foot-2, 185-pound redshirt sophomore started the most games in goal this season for Northwestern, and the Wildcats (6-11 overall, 1-7 Big Ten) went 4-4 in games he started.
White has started eight of the last 10 games and will likely be the starting goalie when Northwestern opens the Big Ten tournament this week as the No. 8 seed.
“I’m definitely happier now,” White said. “I don’t really think I have the most interesting of stories, but I’m just trying to make it easier for other people to come out in the future.”
