The National Team: The Inside Story of the Women Who Changed Soccer
388
The National Team: The Inside Story of the Women Who Changed Soccer
388eBookUpdated (Updated)
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Overview
In the summer of 2019, the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team swept the field and decisively won their fourth World Cup, further cementing their place as the most decorated, ground-breaking, and outspoken team in women’s sports.
But in The National Team, a complete history of the team, leading soccer journalist Caitlin Murray shows how their story is not only one of triumph on the pitch. From the team’s foundation in the 1980s to today, these women have face numerous challenges off the field: sexism, striking inequality, low pay, poor playing conditions, and limited opportunities to play in professional leagues.
Through nearly one hundred exclusive interviews with players, coaches, and team officials, including Alex Morgan, Carli Lloyd, Hope Solo, Heather O’Reilly, Julie Foudy, Brandi Chastain, Pia Sundhage, Tom Sermanni, and Sunil Gulati, Murray takes readers inside the locker rooms and boardrooms in engrossing detail. A story of endurance and determination, The National Team is a complete portrait of this beloved and revolutionary team.
Updated to include the 2019 World Cup victory.
Praise for The National Team
“I gobbled up every page of this deep dive into the incredible history and culture surrounding this team.” —Alexi Lalas
“I’ve always had tremendous respect for the Women’s National Team but, after reading The National Team, that level of respect skyrocketed. This is a fantastic story about perseverance, overcoming obstacles and following your passion in life.” —Landon Donovan
“In The National Team, Caitlin Murray has told an inspiring tale of the long arc of the U.S. women's national team, shedding new light on all the major tournaments while revealing fascinating details on its decades-long fight for better treatment from the men who run soccer. I learned a lot of new things from this terrific book.” —Grant Wahl, author of Masters of Modern Soccer
“The U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team is one of the greatest collectives the United States has ever produced. For all its World Cups and Olympic Golds, it has never had a history worthy of its name. Caitlin Murray has put that right with this book. The National Team is the definitive telling of the team’s journey, giving the reader a behind the scenes understanding of the dreams, elite skills, and enormous sacrifices that have brought success on the field, and the huge battle for equality still to be won off it.” —Roger Bennett, Men in Blazers
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781683355274 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | ABRAMS, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2022 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 388 |
| Sales rank: | 571,750 |
| File size: | 18 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
"We're Not Very USA-ish"
It was almost as if the national came together by accident.
In 1985, there was seemingly little reason for a U.S. women's soccer team to exist. There was no Women's World Cup and no women's soccer in the Olympics, and there were no major trophies on the line.
But there was a group of women who had been pushing to change that. With connections to the U.S. Olympic Committee and the U.S. Soccer Federation, Marty Mankamyer, Betty D'Anjolell, and Mavis Derflinger, among others, pushed decision-makers to take women's soccer seriously. Their goal was for it to one day become an Olympic sport.
"We warned them on more than one occasion: You can't brush off recognizing women," Mankamyer remembers.
In the summer of 1985, the perfect opportunity arose for women's soccer to take a leap forward in America. That's when the U.S. Olympic Sports Festival, a sort of mini-Olympics for amateur athletes, would be held in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Even though women's soccer was still a long way off from becoming an Olympic sport, the Sports Festival organizers decided to give it a chance and include women's soccer for the first time.
A metallurgist from Seattle named Mike Ryan, who coached one of the regional teams there, was approached by officials from U.S. Soccer during the Sports Festival. They wanted him to pick 17 players from those competing at the Festival and coach the U.S. women's national team in its first tournament, which started in Italy in one week.
The U.S. women's national team had existed on paper before that — some players remember making a list after regional tournaments in 1982, 1983, and 1984 — but now there was a reason for the team to exist on the field. The national team had its first invitation to play in a real tournament, and U.S. Soccer decided before the Sports Festival they'd pick a team from the players there.
"After the last game, they sat everybody down and said, We're going to pick a national team and the team is going to train in New York and then you'll go to Italy. That was the first anybody had ever heard of it," says Ann Orrison, who made the list and eventually played five times for the U.S. team.
The name of Brandi Chastain, a 17-year-old striker from San Jose, California, wasn't on the list. She was there in Baton Rouge too but had far less experience than the college players who made the cut. She also didn't even realize she had missed out on playing for the first national team.
"There weren't any hard feelings," Chastain says now, 192 appearances for the U.S. later. "Honestly, I didn't know anything about it. I had a great time at that tournament — my parents came and I had lots of friends there."
The women who did make the list, plucked from the Sports Festival, didn't make up a team so much as a mishmash of players. But it was a start.
They went to New York City and played scrimmages against local club teams from Long Island. The training camp lasted just three days, and then they were set to fly to Italy for the Mundialito, which is Spanish for "little World Cup."
The players didn't have any official uniforms, of course, so the federation rounded up some kits, ironed "USA" on the front, and gave them to the players. The uniforms were huge and appeared to be men's kits. Mike Ryan later recalled: "Everything came around their ankles — they looked like little gorillas walking around."
So, the night before their f light to Italy, the team was up late, cutting and sewing their uniforms and training gear, trying to make everything fit properly.
"We were trying to figure out who fit into which uniforms best," remembers Ann Orrison. "Our trainer was hemming warm-up pants so they would semi-fit."
They managed to make the clothes wearable, but they didn't look like what a U.S. national team should wear. The sweat suits were blue and pink while the white game shirts had only a little red trim around the collar and shoulders. None of the players had numbers.
"They weren't U.S. colors," recalled Michelle Akers, one of the only two players to make that team and keep playing long term. "I remember feeling like, Well, I don't know what this national team is anyway, but we're not very USA-ish."
From New York, the group flew into Milan and then took a bus five hours to Jesolo, a small resort town outside of Venice. That was the site of the Mundialito, a four-team women's soccer tournament that was one of a kind at the time.
They may have been a ragtag bunch, but the national team was born.
* * *
When the national team's first games started, it was a rude awakening.
They finished their first official tournament by losing three of four games while drawing one. Having never played the likes of Italy, Denmark, or England before, the Americans didn't know what to expect — they weren't prepared for how hard the other teams tackled and tried to disrupt the game.
The U.S. team hadn't played good soccer, but it was the start of something, and they all knew it.
"We were just so happy to be there," forward Tucka Healy said later. "While watching the Denmark-Italy game, we grabbed an Italian f lag and rushed to the sidelines, where we led a cheer. They were totally shocked that we'd cheer another team."
There was reason to be excited for all the teams there, though. Women's soccer had barely existed on a global scale by this point in 1985 — these players were at the beginning of not just U.S. women's national team history but women's soccer history.
In 1971, only three international women's soccer teams existed and just two international matches had been played. Progress was relatively slow from there, and it took until 1990 for just 32 national teams to exist. For reference, today, FIFA's world ranking includes around 170 women's teams.
"Women's soccer worldwide at that point wasn't very prevalent or supported," says Marty Mankamyer, who pushed to add women's soccer to the Olympics. "There were less than a dozen bona fide teams that participated in international games."
The lack of global women's soccer was not because women didn't want to play, though. It was partially because, for decades, they weren't allowed.
In England, the country that invented the modern game of soccer, women were effectively banned by the English federation until 1971. In Brazil — another famous soccer country known for producing Pelé, one of the greatest players in the history of the sport — it was illegal for women to play soccer until 1979. In Germany, women were finally allowed to play soccer in 1970, and even then, they were required to play shorter games, just 60 minutes instead of 90, and with a lighter ball.
While other countries were in the midst of repealing bans on women's soccer, the United States was going through a very different policy change. In 1972, Title IX became law and, whether everyone knew it or not, women's sports in the U.S. were about to undergo a rapid revolution.
Title IX was one sentence — a mere 37 words — tucked in a lengthy law dealing with reforming higher education: "No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance."
The words sports or athletics are never mentioned. On the face of it, the clause meant that any universities and schools that receive federal funding, which is most of them, must offer equal academic programming to men and women. But the language also extended to other programming, like athletics.
One of the bill's primary architects, Rep. Edith Green of Oregon, wanted the language to be subtle and broad. She believed the only way it would be approved was if her colleagues in Congress didn't actually grasp what it meant. She reportedly told her allies who planned to lobby for the bill: "I don't want you to lobby, because if you lobby, people will ask questions about this bill, and they will find out what it would really do."
It would take years before Title IX would start to be enforced, but the new law eventually meant that young women everywhere had access to competitive sports programs. It also offered a compelling financial incentive for girls to take sports seriously: If colleges offered male athletes scholarships, they had to offer them to women too.
With Title IX in effect, women's soccer exploded. In 1974, only about 100,000 girls across the country were registered with the U.S. Youth Soccer Association. Today, that number is in the millions.
By 1985, when the U.S. women's national team played its first official matches in Jesolo, Italy, the women of the national team were some of the earliest beneficiaries of Title IX.
Many of the players had been plucked from college teams, like Cindy Gordon, who played at Western Washington University and was on the national team from 1985 to 1986. She took up soccer in 1972, the year Title IX passed. Her brothers had played soccer and she wanted to play too.
"I asked my mom if I could play, and she said that girls don't play sports," Gordon said. "When they passed Title IX, it was a big step forward."
* * *
After The Mundialito, U.S. Soccer never asked Mike Ryan to coach the team again. Instead, Anson Dorrance won the coaching job through a unique tryout that involved competing head-to-head with other coaches on a series of tests in front of a judging panel.
Dorrance came into the national team job as the head coach of the University of North Carolina women's soccer team and used his scouting work there to bolster the national team.
That included spotting a special player named Mia Hamm. While she was still in high school, on the recommendation of a colleague, Dorrance flew to Texas to see a 14-year-old Hamm play for the North Texas regional team. He didn't want to be told which girl she was beforehand — he went to watch the game without prejudice.
With Hamm's team kicking off, the whistle blew, and she instantly made her presence clear to Dorrance.
"She took off like she was shot out of a cannon, and that was all I really needed to see," Dorrance says.
He walked around the sideline and pointed to the girl he saw, asking his colleague if she was Mia Hamm. She was.
He continued his scouting and brought other players into the fold to build a team he thought could compete, including Brandi Chastain. Only two players from the original squad that played the national team's first game in Italy ended up staying on board with Dorrance: Michelle Akers and Lori Henry.
Dorrance wasn't sure when the first Women's World Cup would happen, but he wanted to be ready for it.
"We went into everything with guns blazing, with the ambition to be as good as we could be," Dorrance says. "Back then, we had no idea how far we were behind other teams or what we'd need to overcome to compete. But it wasn't a big adjustment to envision the possibility of a Women's World Cup. We weren't naive about what the potential was."
In 1988, the world governing body of soccer, FIFA, planned a new tournament as a case study for whether a Women's World Cup was a viable idea. The event was called the FIFA Women's Invitational Tournament and featured 12 teams from around the world.
When Dorrance asked a 17-year-old Julie Foudy if she could join the team for the tournament in Panyu, China, she initially lied and said she was busy. She claimed she had summer school classes at Mission Viejo High School, because she wanted to spend her summer at home in California.
"Julie, do you understand what I'm asking you?" Dorrance replied. "I want you to play for the United States of America."
"What do you mean?" Foudy asked him, confused.
That's how new and strange the concept of the U.S. women's national team was. The players who were on it didn't even know what it was. All Foudy knew was that she kept getting call-ups — first to the state team, then to the regional team, and finally to the national team.
But before Foudy knew it, she was on a plane to China for the first-ever FIFA-hosted women's tournament. There, the U.S. beat Japan in their opening match and then settled for draws against Sweden and Czechoslovakia, which allowed them to advance to the knockout round. But in the quarterfinal, Norway beat them, 1–0, and eventually went on to win the whole tournament.
Three weeks after the Women's Invitational ended, FIFA announced it had been successful enough that the first women's world championship tournament would be held in 1991.
They called the event the "1st FIFA World Championship for Women's Football for the M&M's Cup." FIFA worried the women's event might not be worthy of the "World Cup" label. (They've since retroactively bestowed it with the "Women's World Cup" name.) The matches were also planned to be 10 minutes shorter than normal soccer matches, running just 80 minutes each, an indication of FIFA's scaled-back expectations.
The name was confusing and the rule changes were insulting, but the national team was excited to have a world championship to compete in.
"We were acutely aware of the men's World Cup, so we were just waiting for our chance," Dorrance says.
The national team was getting better on the field — they won all six of the games they played in 1990 — but that's not to say everything had been figured out quite yet by the time the first Women's World Cup got close.
At the 1991 Women's World Cup qualification tournament in Haiti, the players of the national team were given white roses by U.S. Soccer officials to throw out to the spectators.
"We walked out to throw these roses to the crowd and we tossed them into the stands," remembers midfielder Tracey Bates, who played on the team from 1987 to 1991. "As we turned around, they threw them back at us. I just remember covering my head and running."
The effort to win over the Haitian crowd didn't go as planned — Dorrance urged his players to shake it off and focus on the first game — but by the end of qualification, the crowd was cheering for the U.S. national team anyway. The Americans outscored their opponents 49–0 over five games in Haiti. (Yes, they scored 49 goals, with 12–0 wins over both Mexico and Martinique and 10–0 wins versus both Haiti and Trinidad and Tobago.)
"I remember in the local newspaper the next day, it said something like: The Americans tried to seduce us with white roses, but instead they seduced us with their style of play," Bates recalls.
The women's game was still new and the U.S. Soccer Federation was still figuring out how to navigate it. Alan Rothenberg, who was elected president of the federation in August 1990, admits he didn't know what to do with the women's side of the game when he first came into office.
"The blunt truth is, I didn't even know the women's side of the game existed in the United States at that time," he says.
Luckily, Anson Dorrance and his assistant coaches, Tony DiCicco and Lauren Gregg, had been putting together a competitive team, even on a shoestring budget. As the U.S. women's national team was forming its own identity, it looked to the styles it had encountered elsewhere in the world: Germany's combination play, Norway's direct attack, and so on.
When the first Women's World Cup finally arrived in 1991, the Americans were not the all-around best team. While women's soccer was still in its infancy around the world, the teams from Europe had technical skills and tactical acumen the Americans did not. But what the Americans discovered in that tournament is something they've held on to ever since: a winning mentality.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The National Team"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Caitlin Murray.
Excerpted by permission of Abrams Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
PROLOGUE: "Where Are All These People Going?", vii,
PART I,
CHAPTER 1: "We're Not Very USA-ish", 3,
CHAPTER 2: "I Just Want to Play Soccer", 13,
CHAPTER 3: "Screw You, We'll Show You Differently", 24,
CHAPTER 4: "From Darkness into the Light", 32,
CHAPTER 5: "Babe City, Ladies and Gentlemen", 46,
CHAPTER 6: "Oh S***, These Women Are for Real", 55,
CHAPTER 7: "Is That the Starting Team? Am I Not on It?", 68,
CHAPTER 8: "We Kind of Bled to Death", 78,
CHAPTER 9: "It Was Their Team", 94,
PART II,
CHAPTER 10: "Why Do We Have to Deal with This Discrimination?", 113,
CHAPTER 11: "If There Isn't a Goalkeeper Controversy, Why Make One?", 121,
CHAPTER 12: "Whoa, Can We Do This Without Her?", 133,
CHAPTER 13: "You Wouldn't Be on the Field If It Was Up to Me", 145,
CHAPTER 14: "The Americans? They Just Go for It", 158,
CHAPTER 15: "Okay, This Is Our Payback", 170,
PART III,
CHAPTER 16: "Let's Give This League a Shot, Let's Go for It", 189,
CHAPTER 17: "I Cannot Comment Further at This Time", 209,
CHAPTER 18: "I've Dreamed of Scoring a Shot Like That", 221,
CHAPTER 19: "It Is Our Job to Keep on Fighting", 241,
CHAPTER 20: "We Played A Bunch of Cowards", 263,
CHAPTER 21: "The Power of Collective Bargaining", 280,
CHAPTER 22: "To Say I Am Devastated Is an Understatement", 297,
INDEX, 305,