TEENAGER Jasmin Johansen is back in the US proudly wearing a bronze medal after making her international football debut with the Bermuda national women’s team at last month’s Island Games.She does not turn 18 until later this month, but the US goal-scoring record breaker has already tasted overseas success after Bermuda international team football coaches showed faith in the Boston-based college football sensation.

And her equally proud Bermudian father William “Jerry” Johansen has paid special thanks to the Bermuda Football Association (BFA) which took a chance by including his daughter in the national set-up.

He said: “I’m whole-heartedly thankful they gave her the opportunity. Bermuda is in her blood. My brother Bill Smith’s connection with national team coach Jeremy Salaam led to her being asked to trial with the team.” That was in early June as the squad was being assembled by Salaam and fellow coach Vance Brown. It was as Jasmin and her father flew back to Boston that Johansen opened a newspaper on the airplane and saw the national team selection listed, with his 17-year daughter included.

“I appreciate that the BFA gave her the opportunity to come to Bermuda and play with the team so they could see her skills and point things out that she needed to work on,” said Johansen.

Jasmin and her father worked on the areas the coaches identified as needing attention in the teenager’s game, and she was then ready to join the Bermuda national team a few weeks later at JFK airport in New York when they flew in for a connecting flight to the Island Games in Rhodes, Greece.

The team played two group games, beating Guernsey 3-1 and Western Isles 4-2 to top group B, before losing 5-0 in the semi-final against Prince Edward Island. However, the Bermuda team bounced back to win on penalties in the bronze medal play-off against Isle of Man, which had finished 0-0 at full-time.

Jasmin played in two of the four games.

“She was ecstatic. She was very excited about representing Bermuda, a place she has been coming to ever since she was a child,” said Johansen, who has been Jasmin’s trainer since she first started playing football and continues to play a role as a volunteer assistant football coach at Jasmin’s former school Boston’s Woodward School for Girls.

Johansen also captained North Village in his younger days.

Although born in the US, Jasmin qualified for consideration to the Bermuda national team as both her father and mother Jerilyn are Bermudian. Jasmin comes back to Bermuda often to visit her grandmother Audrey Alice Smith in Pembroke.

Winning a bronze medal was a crowning moment for her in a whirlwind 12 months that has also seen her set an all-time goal scoring record at the Woodward School for Girls.

Her 104 goals there — some 15 more than anyone else in the school’s 112-year history — is not expected to be broken anytime soon, if ever.

That prowess caught the imagination of newspapers in Massachusetts, which ran headline stories on her exploits. Her hometown newspaper, The Quincy Sun, ran a further page feature on the teenager following her return as a medal winner from the Island Games.

She told the paper: “They (national team) have me mostly at midfield-forward. In high school I scored most of my goals on breakaways, but now it is more strategy, passing and working more as a team. It is about working as a unit.”

She is about to start further studies at Atlanta’s Spelman College, where she will again play on the school football team.

Her continuing studies mean Jasmin will only have limited opportunity to play for the national team during the next few years, however she is keen to be a part of the Bermuda national set-up whenever she can.

Her father said: “Hopefully one day she will come back and play with the national team here so that Bermuda will get to see her.”