Self-awareness is key to Kerri’s identity, and she is able to pinpoint the conscious decisions she has made throughout her life. It’s rare to find someone able to track her route to here and now with such precision, even though that route has been circuitous. After her Economics degree at Yale she lived in Japan and taught English for a year. “It was perfect. It was a present to myself for working really hard in college.” Most Yale grads fast track into Wall Street, but Kerri felt “disgusted by the whole recruitment process, investment banks, consulting and all of that.” She’s honest about why. “Realistically, there was probably some fear in me: ‘I don’t think they’re even going to want me, I don’t think my GPA is high enough, I don’t think this, I don’t think that’. I don’t think I really wanted it either. I did apply for a couple but I missed the major deadlines. It was very subconscious and I was protecting myself.”
Self-awareness also means being honest about negative experiences, and Kerri is very forthright about the down side of Yale. Despite her background as a top-level competitive soccer player, despite being recruited, Kerri spent most of her college sports career on the bench. She couldn’t understand why the coach refused to let her play. “I had coaches from other schools saying ‘we don’t understand why you’re not playing.’ I had people on my team not really understanding but no one could really do or say anything. So I sat on the bench. My freshman year, I lived with it, I was a freshman. Sophomore year comes around, same old thing, even pre-seasons I did well, I was kicking ass. Still, she sat me on the bench.”
The experience was frustrating and demoralizing. “I left many games crying”. Away fixtures were the worst. “Going to these away games, and just sitting on the bench, taking time away from my studies, I found myself crying on the bus on the way home. It’s an emotional thing. You’re leaving campus to go play, your peers are watching you and you know what you’ve done before. You know that your club team won Regional, you were East Coast champs; that played at the professional level, but were not playing in college. That was the hardest thing I ever had to go through, sitting on the bench watching people play that I know I am better than. Because it was a level of oppression and an indirect form of discrimination.”
Kerri feels the coach used her PhD in Sports Psychology to manipulate the girls in the team. “It wasn’t just with me but with other players, she had us compete against each other on who could lift the most weights, who could squat the most and how she would rank everybody. That has no bearing on your ability to play soccer – that’s about stamina and agility. So she would rank us based on that.” The coach set cruel verbal quizzes, challenging the team members to choose between breaking an opposing player’s leg and not scoring a winning goal, or between taking a final exam or playing a crucial match. Kerri has never had a real explanation for this treatment. That same year, thirteen girls quit the team, there was an investigation, and the coach was forced to resign.
Kerri is still bewildered by what happened. “It was a very difficult experience for me because I loved the sport. That was a passion of mine that I allowed someone to take away from me. I didn’t know how to stop it. I was 20 years old. I apply that direct experience to me being able to sustain myself as an actress, to be out here in Hollywood because I now know what it feels like when someone strips you of your confidence, takes your passion away from you and says ’You cannot‘ or ’You’re not good enough‘ even though you know in your heart of hearts that’s not true. I am able to detect anyone from the outside who’s toxic.”