Fallon Tullis Joyce is squirting deer blood into the dirt.
Manchester United and U.S. women’s national team goalkeeper clarify ‘blood and water’ Competitor. There are chunks in the mix, too, congealed in fallen leaves and dark, scarlet rivulets, a la Jackson Pollock.
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“You know, yesterday I had a bottle of water with a potential PK (penalty kick) for Chelsea (if the League Cup final went to penalties). Today, I had a bottle of water with muntjac blood in it.
“It’s a morbid transformation within 24 hours.”
The 29-year-old had a cool way of saying sick, saying “Look, Manchester United Women’s No. 1 is helping deliver lunch to the world’s largest live lizard in the Komodo dragon’s den at Chester Zoo”.
This is cool. This is certainly the mood of those who wander around the zoo just to catch a glimpse of Tullis Joyce on the other side of the glass – wearing blue plastic hospital gloves, a cream United hoodie, dark gray overalls and gold earrings like she’s in a special edition of Vogue’s National Geographic.
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What’s cool is that she’s standing where they expected to find a four-foot tube of poisonous scales, flicking her tongue ominously. What’s cool is that she squirts the red liquid in every direction instructed by the accompanying zookeeper. It was even cool that zookeepers had removed a semi-eviscerated muntjac deer carcass from a black garbage bag minutes earlier, and its entrails were carefully scattered throughout various parts of the enclosure—a rock, a palm frond, another rock—until finally it was placed under a bushel of straw and long grass, where it could be found when the lizard was returned to its home a few minutes later.
But what’s even cooler is that those unfamiliar with United manager Mark Skinner’s squad have discovered the identity of the mystery guest.
“That’s the Manchester United goalkeeper,” one teenage boy whispered to another.
“never.”
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“swear.”
“Hmm.” Pause. “This is a crazy side mission.”
There were jokes, of course: it was United’s symbolic burial of their Carabao Cup final hopes from the previous afternoon. Or they offer a blood sacrifice to the gods of the Women’s Champions League ahead of next Wednesday’s quarter-final first leg against Bayern Munich at Old Trafford.
But such quips are fleeting, especially when Tullis Joyce emerges from the enclosure to view her masterpiece: the ultimate furry feast of the Komodo.
“This is disgusting,” the second boy said. He also means cool.
Making wildlife, biology and conservation cool is Tallis-Joyce’s specialty.
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Scrolling through the goalkeeper’s social media pages is like taking a field trip to the planet: There, she scuba dives from Spain’s Costa Brava in search of revitalizing red corals, hikes in the Amazon rainforest to study stingless bees, and gawks at a striped cat named Grandpa in Florida’s Okefenokee swamps Head eagle (Tullis-Joyce is a big fan of the marsh), or wearing a hunting hat, telling her followers about the leaf scorpionfish being a mystery (“I love the ambush reef predators, whose ‘mohawk’ or algae-covered dorsal fin resembles a swaying rotting leaf that devours unsuspecting prey!”).
As well as these videos, there are others depicting her “other thing” – being a professional goalkeeper at the highest echelons of women’s football.
It would be easy to think that Tullis-Joyce was leading a double life. “When I’m not diving on the football field, I’m jumping into the nearest body of water,” is her succinct slogan when she serves as an ambassador for the environmental organization 11th Hour Racing.
It’s just that it means a split – by day, they’re eco-warriors wearing snorkels; by night, they’re the reigning Women’s Super League Golden Glove winners (an award given to the goalkeeper who keeps the most clean sheets in a single season).
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“I’m always asked: ‘If you weren’t a football player, what would you be doing?'” she said. “I really believe you can do a lot of things at the same time. I use them all at the same time. Marine biology has kept me sane during some dark moments in the football world.”
Monday put that theory into practice.
Tullis-Joyce made the four-hour journey home from Bristol on Sunday night after Manchester United lost 2-0 to Chelsea in the Ashton Gate Cup final.
Less than 10 hours later, she stood energized in front of a roomful of elementary school students in the first of three classes on Monday and enthusiastically answered questions about her ideal next destination (to the Galapagos Islands to “follow in the footsteps of Charles Darwin”), whether she’d seen a polar bear (yes, in fact, when she visited Svalbard, Norway’s northernmost archipelago) or which animal scares her the most (“I probably wouldn’t get close”). Polar bears, or crocodiles, but once you learn more, you won’t be afraid of them anymore. “)
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The balance can seem exhausting, not just physically – United reached the quarter-finals in their first Champions League campaign, turning a high-intensity season of domestic and international football into one that often requires three days of rotation between games – but mentally too. (At one point on Monday, Tullis-Joyce told a student the names of four recovering coral families, then without hesitation rattled off a series of wilderness parks and the various creatures within them.)
“Sleep is hard. My brain is racing all the time,” she says, a less hyperbolic comment when she delivers it at the tempo of Tullis-Joyce’s default, breathless frontman. But the earth is big. If you’re slow, you’ll miss something.
Yet in a culture that often encourages young athletes or precocious intelligence, Tullis-Joyce has long been an active dissident, encouraged by her mother but nurtured by her own drive. When Tullis-Joyce was rejected from the local Olympic development program at age 12, she dedicated herself to “work, time and (sometimes) tears”, attending training sessions covering the regular range (dumpster diving and blindfolded tennis catch) four times a week, in addition to a two-hour commute to practice at a local club.
No matter how many minutes there were in between, Tullis-Joyce would attend the National Marine Science Bowl at Longwood High School in the eastern suburbs of New York City, visit local beaches, analyze horseshoe crabs, take buzz quizzes across Long Island, and watch documentaries by British primatologist Jane Goodall and marine biologist and oceanographer Sylvia Earle, Tullis-Joyce’s early idol.
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“In USA Track and Field, they want you to have that image, especially being a goalkeeper on the field,” she said. “They want you to be the barking goalkeeper (yelling at teammates during games), but I do like to have a little bit of compassion on the field. That’s what I try to do: be as compassionate on the field as I am off it, especially with the wildlife around me.
“I think my brain is like a small, sticky sponge. Any type of really cool fact, I try to stick to my brain because I know how important it is to tell students, when it does feel a little bad and dim, to be like, no, actually, this is all happening while doing this. And students, you don’t know what background they come from, so I just give it the best I can. I’ve been given so much, so I have to keep giving it.”
A desire to give back to the community led Tullis-Joyce to take her passion for wildlife and conservation beyond her own boundaries.
Tullis-Joyce, who is pursuing a degree in marine biology at the University of Florida in Miami where she played goalie for the school’s team (she still ranks among Miami’s top five all-time in saves and saves in 62 games), was one of 118 students to receive the prestigious National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Hollins Scholarship and the school’s full-tuition Ronald Hammond Scholarship. Under the latter condition, Tullis-Joyce was required to perform community service while studying (and playing top-level women’s college soccer).
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For Tallis-Joyce, this clause is its own mission.
“Outreach has always been a part of who I am,” she said. “Like, when you’re given something, you’ve got to give something — that’s a big part of how I feel about being a professional athlete. I’ve had a lot of great professors and teachers and coaches, and I want to give back what I’ve been given.”
Tullis-Joyce arrived in Manchester’s red half from Seattle in September 2023, where she spent her free time diving off the nearest coast, and she immediately looked for outreach opportunities. Manchester United’s foundation seized on this desire, and its Eco-Red initiative (launched that year and based on the club’s environmental sustainability strategy) quickly became her passion project.
According to relevant sources, it was Tallis-Joyce who pushed the foundation to become more involved in local schools and enter classrooms to educate elementary, middle school and university students on marine biology, ecology and conservation. “It was a humble beginning,” Tullis-Joyce laughs, recalling the days of making cuttlefish with clay and pipe cleaners.
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Three years later her commitment and enthusiasm has helped to raise funds from donors to support a number of schools to deliver face-to-face conservation workshops or attend educational courses at Chester Zoo, for example Competitor Monday witnessed it.
Spending just one afternoon in Tullis-Joyce’s orbit, it’s easy to see how the money was accumulated.
We live in a world increasingly beset by headlines with images of ocean currents turning, the planet warming, and dark clouds billowing into the night sky. According to a new study by Global Responsibility Scientists and the New Weather Institute, football’s carbon footprint is approximately 65 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO2e). Stuart Pimm, the world’s leading extinction expert at Duke University in the United States, said that humans are causing species extinction at about 1,000 times the natural rate.
At this point, a tempting option is to question the efficacy of spending the next three minutes removing the plastic wrap from the Meal Deal egg and cress sandwich before placing the cardboard box in the correct recycling bin.
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Tullis-Joyce was familiar with this existential spiral.
“But we can also see from research conducted in marine reserves that protecting even the smallest animals can have an immediate impact on restoring these populations,” she said. Her voice stood out not for its petition but for its passion and unabashed conviction.
“That’s why I come to these events,” she added. “To show how resilient nature is, and how resilient we humans are. It’s a reflection of what we can do. That’s what I balance. These marine reserves have shown they can restore species, and projects like Chester Zoo and the Black Rhino Project – they said they were extinct in the past and now they’ve been able to release five in Rwanda! That’s absolutely exciting.”
She paused, then smiled.
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“If you focus on one corner of the world, I do think any of us can make a huge difference. I really believe that.”
To her left, a student attending the last class of the day (held at the Chester Zoo’s jaguar exhibit) shouted a belated “Yanited!” as the class walked out. Tullis-Joyce smiled.
Soon, she was asked to take another selfie. She agrees.
But first she pointed to the jaguars behind the glass and rattled off a wealth of facts about them.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
U.S. Women’s National Team, Manchester United, Women’s Soccer
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