However, after playing backup to Helen Alderson, Earps was given a run in the team over the second half of the season, which prompted her to sign on for the following season, as she prioritised playing time. But when her goalkeeping coach left Doncaster Belles, Earps knew she needed another move to keep progressing her game. “I wasn’t getting technical training and I was starting to feel like game time’s great, but I’m not developing like my skills and my trade, because I’ve not got that goalkeeping support,” she added.
Next stop Birmingham City, who Earps joined in 2013, where she benefited from specific coaching, but a fight for a starting place prompted her to look for another opportunities, which led to her joining Bristol Academy (as Bristol City were known at the time) in 2014. Two solid seasons with Bristol followed before their relegation, leading Earps to look again for a new club so she could stay in the top tier.
She joined Reading, and just like at Bristol, she had to juggle her career with her education, making frequent commutes to her campus in Loughborough where she was studying for a degree in Information Management and Business Studies. She said: “It’s a big old journey [from Reading], getting up in the really early hours of the morning to do like, you know, a three-hour drive so I could get to my 9 a.m. lecture.”
Earps admits she could have gone to a “big club” and sat on the bench, waiting for her chance as a backup keeper, but that wouldn’t have been right for her. “It was always to try and push myself to be the best that I could be, and to pick out the best opportunity that’s fitted me the best,” she added. “And when I graduated in 2016, that was the time that I went pro. So that was when I was like, well, I’ll see where football goes. I’ll do it full-time.”
A headstrong, determined character from the beginning, making her debut at the age of 10, Earps recalls being bored at the time, cartwheeling around the box. When her opponents won a penalty, she saved it and the encouragement from her dad — “if one of the other girls was in goal, they wouldn’t have saved that” — was all it took for Earps to be hooked.
