For Iran, their Asian Cup debut is as much about results on the pitch as it is about changing perceptions off it

Kat Khosrowyar had, by all accounts, an ordinary American childhood.

She did the things that most other kids did growing up in Tulsa, Oklahoma in the 1990s. She went to a private school, she studied hard and she played community sport on the weekends.

Like a lot of girls in the USA, Khosrowyar quickly gravitated towards football — the top participation sport at grassroots level. She was five when she kicked her first round ball, and never stopped.

Her father was one of her earliest coaches, teaching her tricks and techniques and laying down the foundations of the game in her fledgling football mind.

She absorbed everything she could, taking his lessons with her into high school, where she went on to represent her region and, eventually, her state.

Khosrowyar dreamed of going through the country's famed college football program and, eventually, joining her idols representing the US women's national team.

«That was my ultimate goal,» she told the ABC from her home in Texas.

«That was my trajectory. That was my plan. That is exactly what I was setting my goals to be.

»I had [college] scholarships lined up. I just had to pick and choose which school I wanted to go to. The future, for me, was definitely going to be football-related somehow."

But when she was 17, everything changed.

«During my senior year, I decided to go to Iran to visit family and visit the country for the first time,» she said.

«Little did I know that my goal and my vision was going to [shift] towards a completely different country where I wasn't born, I wasn't raised in, I didn't speak the language. I just had family.

»Out of nowhere, my two-week vacation turned into 15 years."

Women's football didn't exist in any organised capacity when Khosrowyar arrived in Tehran in