The National Team

by Caitlin Murray

  They spoke to younger players one-on-one and invited them to join a large conference call. Many of these youth players were teenagers, so their parents were invited to join, too.

  “We’re doing this for you,” Foudy told them. “We’re trying to build the future, and we need you to say no if they ask you to come in because we’re going to say no. We ask that you support us because ultimately, you’ll gain the benefit of this. It’s not us being greedy like Hank Steinbrecher is saying—we’re just trying to make conditions better.”

  None of the younger players resisted. Instead, all the players agreed to present a unified front to U.S. Soccer.

  “There was total cooperation,” John Langel says. “It was pretty amazing how it happened.”

  With practically the entire women’s national team program on board, team leaders Julie Foudy and Mia Hamm continued to push for a new team contract. Merely extending their expired contract wasn’t an option, so if they couldn’t get a new one, they weren’t going to play.

  Hank Steinbrecher’s standby answer to that threat had already been made clear at the Australia Cup, and the players were ready for it. He told them the federation would bring in the U-20 team again. Foudy and Hamm were unfazed.

  “You can’t. They’re with us now,” they responded. He countered that they could call in the U-18 team. Again, Foudy and Hamm said they had already spoken to those players. Before he could even mention it, they told him they had the U-16 players on their side, too.

  “I think that’s when they were like, Oh shit, these women are for real,” Foudy says now.

  With the 2000 Summer Olympics approaching and the federation out of leverage, a landmark deal finally got done.

  For the first time, players were guaranteed compensation for at least eight months out of the year, so they didn’t have to worry about when their next national team paycheck would come. That basic structure, which offered better financial stability for on-contract players and some protection against the whims of the federation, still exists within national team contracts today.

  The tension between U.S. Soccer and the players would continue, however, and it had the knock-on effect of bringing others into it.

  Tony DiCicco, a coach beloved and respected universally by his team, always stayed out of contract negotiations. A coach has no role in contract negotiations between a team and their federation—a coach is only there to coach. Besides, DiCicco viewed the players more like an extension of his family than workers he was there to manage.

  It wasn’t unusual for Tony DiCicco to host the players at his house for big pasta dinners with his wife, Diane, and the couple’s three sons. He was passionate about coaching and seemed to care for his players deeply as human beings. At the start of training sessions, he’d walk out onto the grass and shout up to the sky with his arms out: “I LOVE MY JOB!” The players would echo the call and giggle, starting practice with smiles on their faces. And when the players prepared to go out onto the field for a game, his last words were always: “Play hard, play to win, have fun.”

  But one day, amid contentious talks between the players and U.S. Soccer, DiCicco tried to talk to Julie Foudy about the ongoing negotiations, which she believes was prompted by the federation.

  “I understand where you’re coming from, but don’t get in the middle of this, because you will lose every player on the team,” Foudy warned him. “We don’t fuck with your negotiations, so don’t fuck with ours. I know they’re pressuring you, but I’m telling you, this will ruin your relationship with every player, because we care that deeply about this. The respect will be gone if you’re seen as being on the side of the federation.”

  DiCicco told her he understood, and he backed off. He went back to staying out of contract negotiations. It was a decision that may have saved his relationship with the players of the national team, even as it hurt his own relationship with the federation.

  CHAPTER 7

  “Is That the Starting Team? Am I Not on It?”

  After the national team won the 1999 Women’s World Cup, it seemed like U.S. Soccer would be eager to keep a good thing going: The federation would obviously work to sign a new contract with its players and make sure Tony DiCicco would stay on as coach.

  Except, neither happened.

  The contract dispute seemed inevitable after the victory-tour debacle, but why the World Cup–winning coach didn’t return to the team is the matter of some debate, even all these years later.

  Four months after winning the World Cup, DiCicco announced he would resign to spend more time with his family, and indeed, the job took him away from his wife and three boys for weeks at a time for tournaments around the world. His family was relieved that he wouldn’t disappear for such long spells anymore. DiCicco admitted he missed watching his own kids’ soccer games and spending more time with Diane, his wife.

  But factoring into DiCicco’s decision seemed to be the lukewarm, at best, attitude the federation had toward the national team coach who brought success at the highest stage.

  Sources recall DiCicco confiding the details of meetings he had with the heads of the federation shortly after the 1999 Women’s World Cup. The federation’s leaders expressed dissatisfaction with the style of soccer the team played. They wanted the players to engage in more one-touch passing. The team didn’t look dominant enough in the final, they said. DiCicco told those close to him about the discussions, but sources spoke on the condition of anonymity because DiCicco, who died in 2017, never publicly spoke about it.

  What was public, however, was how unenthusiastic the federation seemed about keeping the World Cup–winning coach around.

  With DiCicco’s contract set to expire at the end of 1999, when reporters asked him what was going on, he admitted he didn’t know if U.S. Soccer would keep him: “They have been up-front and honest with me and very much noncommittal in either direction.”

  U.S. Soccer dragged its feet on offering a new contract—waiting three months until after the ’99 World Cup—and when they finally did, it was a short, one-year deal that looked more like a stopgap measure than a vote of confidence. DiCicco was reportedly insulted by the offer.

  That attitude from U.S. Soccer could also be explained by the federation’s apparent impression that DiCicco wasn’t iron-fisted enough with the players. Whether that perception was right or wrong, it may have stemmed from his unwillingness to take the federation’s side during contract negotiations and insert himself into the process.

  “I remember the word on the street was they thought he was too soft with us,” says Julie Foudy, who later went on to be president of the Women’s Sports Foundation from 2001 to 2002. “That’s what we heard—that he gave us too much power. And I remember thinking, How stupid is that? This is a coach who is a good player manager.”

  “He would have a leadership council of the captains, the veterans, and younger players, and he’d ask what you think and get the pulse of the team,” she says. “He’d often disagree with us, but he’d let us have a voice, and I think any good leader does that.”

  Now, Contiguglia says there was a combination of reasons that kept the federation from pushing to keep DiCicco as coach.

  “One of the decision-makers felt very strongly that you don’t keep a national team coach for two cycles,” he says. “Some players, who I spoke to, wanted a change. There were issues with the style of play. There were a number of factors.”

  Whatever the reasons, DiCicco would not be the coach again after leading the national team to an astonishingly successful 103–8–8 record. Suddenly, the federation was without a coach less than eight months from the start of the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, Australia.

  On his way out, DiCicco recommended the job go to Lauren Gregg, his assistant, who helped lead the national team to winning the 1999 Women’s World Cup. Gregg, along with assistant coach Jay Hoffman, managed the national team on its trip to the Australia Cup, where the young Americans won even as the veterans boycotted the tourname
nt.

  “Lauren would give the team the best chance of winning at the Olympics,” DiCicco told reporters. “And the one-two punch of winning the World Cup and the Olympics could launch the sport to the next level: a pro league.”

  Gregg was seen as a frontrunner, along with University of Portland coach Clive Charles, but April Heinrichs, who had become the first woman inducted into the National Soccer Hall of Fame two years earlier, was asked to apply later in the candidate search.

  After retiring from the national team in 1991, Heinrichs built up a coaching résumé both within U.S. Soccer and at the collegiate level, including four seasons at the University of Virginia, where her teams always made the postseason, though they never reached a semifinal. At the time she was invited to interview, she was coaching the under-16 women’s national team for U.S. Soccer.

  There was no question that Heinrichs, the captain of the 1991 World Cup team, had the leadership qualities for the job. Taking charge seemed natural for her.

  Take, for instance, her reaction when she saw a hit-and-run in 1991. Heinrichs was driving back to a national team residency camp in North Carolina with teammate Tracey Bates when the highway traffic suddenly started to merge into one lane. An accident had just occurred, and, as the players neared the accident scene, a truck that was involved—and missing a back tire—sped away.

  Heinrichs immediately followed the truck in pursuit, calling out to her teammate: “Get the license plate number! Get the license plate!” In the passenger’s seat, Bates was having trouble seeing it because sparks and debris were flying from the spot where the truck was missing its tire.

  They followed the truck to a gas-station exit, and a Ford Pinto pulled in front of the truck and stopped. Out of the car stepped three uniformed marines. With the national team players behind and the marines in front, the hit-and-run driver was cornered. As Heinrichs got out of her car and approached, the truck driver went into reverse.

  “He’s backing up!” Bates shouted. Heinrichs ran back to her car and tried to get it out of the way, but the truck smashed into it. The marines swarmed the truck and tackled the driver while Bates ran to call the police on a pay phone. She also called coach Anson Dorrance to explain why she and Heinrichs would be late returning to camp.

  After the police arrived, the players asked the marines if they realized she and Bates were in pursuit of the truck. The marines said they did notice what Heinrichs and Bates were up to, but they were worried about what would happen when the mom and her little daughter stopped the truck.

  “They thought April was the mom and I was like 12 years old,” Bates says, laughing.

  Bates adds: “The next day at practice, everyone on the team was calling us the North Carolina Highway Patrol.”

  What April Heinrichs’s teammates knew about her was that she was a doer. But how she got that way—how she was molded into the person she became—wasn’t something she talked about very much.

  She was born April Minnis, but she never met her father. She grew up in a self-described “dysfunctional family,” and her sister ran away from home when she was a teenager. The name Heinrichs came from her stepfather, Mel, a Denver firefighter. Her mother divorced him, and when April was a high school freshman, she chose to live with him. She went on to have little contact with her mother and later said they just never connected.

  “You hear stories all the time about people tracking down missing fathers or mothers,” Heinrichs once explained. “The thing about me is, I don’t spend too much time on the past or the absence of it. I spend a lot of time on goal setting, which is all about the future. I know now as an adult that it’s a real good coping mechanism.”

  She has said she doesn’t think her background affected who she always was. But whatever the reason for the way she approached everything, Heinrichs was someone her former teammates could tell was destined to move into coaching after her playing days ended.

  Still, Heinrichs’s opportunity for the national team coaching job came sooner than anyone expected. U.S. Soccer was gambling on someone who had limited experience managing at the international level. Another wrinkle was that Heinrichs had been teammates with many of the veterans still on the team.

  But federation president Robert Contiguglia, who had followed her career since the 1980s, was impressed by her. When he was the president of Colorado Youth Soccer, she was a teenage standout for an academy team in Denver—on multiple occasions, he had presented her medals. He asked Heinrichs to submit a written proposal for the job.

  Tracey Bates remembers reading Heinrichs’s paper before she submitted it to the federation. Even though Heinrichs was her longtime friend, Bates didn’t need to feign enthusiasm. When she finished reading and put down the paper, she told her: “You are going to get this job, April.”

  Not only was Heinrichs hired in January 2000, but she got the multiyear contract that Tony DiCicco did not get. She signed a four-year contract that would take her into the next World Cup–Olympics cycle.

  “We are talking about building a program and not an event,” Contiguglia told reporters on her introductory conference call. “It involves success on the field, but it’s more than that. We’re building a program and a sport.”

  * * *

  Players quickly learned that April Heinrichs was a very different kind of coach than they’d had over the past few years. Tony DiCicco held frequent team meetings and was eager to include veteran players in decisions, which created an atmosphere that many players say felt like a family. But Heinrichs was more businesslike in her approach.

  She wanted players to feel like they were competing against one another for spots on the team. That approach would force players to always give their very best—no one could take their spot for granted. But some players took it as Heinrichs pitting them against one another, especially since the veterans and younger players stayed in separate housing at the residency camps.

  “We want to make sure there’s no complacency,” Heinrichs told reporters early on. “We want to make sure we’re not stagnant, make sure we’re still growing.”

  The roster of Heinrichs’s first camp made it clear that she was turning the page on a new chapter. Tiffany Roberts, Danielle Fotopoulos, and Tracy Ducar—members of the ’99 World Cup–winning team—were left out of Heinrichs’s first camp, where she invited a large crop of 35 players.

  For the younger players who were brought in, it represented a huge opportunity to impress a new coach who was examining the player pool with fresh eyes.

  “Quite frankly, what I remember from that camp was trying to survive,” says Danielle Slaton. “It was like, Holy cow, these were the girls I saw at the Rose Bowl when I was watching as a fan, and now, oh my god, I have to try to mark Kristine Lilly!”

  But for the most established players in the group, their standing quickly felt threatened. In Heinrichs’s first games as the head coach, a pair of friendly losses to Norway, the stars who carried the team to the 1999 World Cup—Mia Hamm, Julie Foudy, Brandi Chastain, and others—found themselves starting on the bench.

  “It was just uncertain,” Mia Hamm told reporters. “You start to overanalyze everything. She puts a team out there, and you’re like: Is that the starting team? Am I not on the starting team?”

  “That camp was very competitive, and there was not a lot of feedback in camp,” Hamm added. “Everyone was going: Am I doing all right? Is this what she wants?”

  Heinrichs did have a plan all along: She wanted to evaluate the newer players and get a sense of where the program was overall. The problem, however, was that she didn’t explain that to anyone.

  In her first match as head coach, Heinrichs didn’t put Carla Over-beck, the team’s longtime and beloved cocaptain, in the starting lineup. The move came with no warning, and it sent ripples of anxiety throughout the veteran contingent of the team.

  Overbeck worried she was losing her spot on the team and knocked on the coach’s office door to ask directly what was going on.


  “I just had questions,” Overbeck later said. “I was wondering a bit about my future, just because there weren’t meetings and it wasn’t communicated to me.”

  There wasn’t a lot of time for the players and Heinrichs to adjust to each other, though. The 2000 Olympics were around the corner, and the expectations for the national team were enormously high after the 1999 World Cup victory.

  On top of a quick turnaround for a new coach, the team was dealing with a bit of a hangover from the intense previous few months. Some of the players had more demands on their time than ever before with media requests and sponsorship opportunities. The protracted and bitter dispute with U.S. Soccer over a new contract was also emotionally draining for the team.

  “We had been marketing ourselves on our own, because U.S. Soccer didn’t, for a good six months, and we had just finished contract negotiations,” says Kate Markgraf, who played her early years under her maiden name, Sobrero, and grew up north of Detroit, Michigan. “We were tired. Any new coach wants to hit the ground running, but psychologically we were fatigued.”

  On top of it all, Heinrichs was overseeing many players who had been her peers on the 1991 World Cup team, which she captained. It offered an unusual dynamic that was jarring for some of them.

  “The big thing with April was that she played with a lot of us,” says Shannon MacMillan, who wasn’t among that 1991 World Cup group. “That’s a tall order, to switch off of being teammates and friends to now saying, I’m your coach. I think that was a lot to ask of her.”

  By the time the 2000 Olympics arrived, everyone had to block out whatever else was going on with the team. The team had to keep its momentum going to maintain its place in the sports landscape. Only a win would suffice. NBC wasn’t going to repeat its mistakes from the 1996 Olympics—each of the national team’s games would be aired live on MSNBC and CNBC, despite the time difference.