For student nurse Fokkema, her own ambitions have literally changed the rule book in Dutch football.
For the past 25 years, women in the Netherlands have only been able to play in mixed teams up to and including the under-19s.
From next season, they can compete in amateur men’s teams up to the Tweede Divisie, a mere two tiers below the top flight Eredivisie.
And that groundbreaking switch is largely because Fokkema and her club, VV Foarut, proved it could be done.
“It wasn’t my intention to change the rules,” says the 20-year-old. “I just wanted to play soccer like I used to.”
Fokkema had played alongside the same group of boys at Foarut since the age of five, but under the rules as they stood, that had to stop when they turned 19.
Foarut has a men’s reserve team, which she could have played in, and joining her sisters Jenny and Marianne in the women’s set-up at nearby VV Beetgum was possible too.
But Fokkema wanted to play in Foarut’s A team – eight tiers below the Eredivisie – so the club asked the Dutch FA (KNVB) for an unprecedented dispensation.
“They didn’t know for sure it would happen, but they would try,” she explains. “For me, it was very normal, there wasn’t any pressure. I thought ‘why not?'”
The KNVB initially turned down the request, but Foarut did not give up.
“With the board and especially her coach, Johan Polstra, we monitored her development and saw she could handle the level,” says the amateur club’s technical director Auke Grijpma.
“That’s why we continued our quest to let her join the men’s league.”
Their persistence paid off. At the second time of asking, the KNVB gave Fokkema approval, setting in motion a one-season pilot to assess whether women really could compete in top-flight amateur men’s football.