The National Team

by Caitlin Murray

  So, once the plan was finalized, Hendricks then set out to secure those sponsorships. Hyundai signed on immediately. The automotive category was already checked off, and it seemed like the other nine categories would be filled in no time.

  “It came lightning fast. Hyundai loved it, and they were going to be the official car of the league,” Hendricks says. “So we were like, Okay, we’re going to do this. We’ll find the 10 sponsors that each put in $2 million per year. And that $20 million was vital to the business plan.”

  By the first kickoff on that historic day, April 14, 2001, the league had attracted about $64 million from investors. On paper, that was an impressive number, but the fact is, they hadn’t secured the other core sponsorships they wanted—the sponsorships the business plan depended on.

  They ended up with only Hyundai at the commitment level they wanted, plus some smaller sponsors, which put the league about $15 million behind where they wanted to be annually. The longer the league went on with that deficit, the deeper the hole would become.

  There was cautious optimism, though. Surely the other sponsorships would come soon enough. The product on the field was too good, and the players were too likable.

  “We always had great meetings,” Hendricks says. “The participants from the sponsors were all fans, so it stood out on their schedule when they had a meeting that featured Mia Hamm and Brandi Chastain and Julie Foudy. So, we tended to have really great meetings.”

  Hendricks, who founded the Washington Freedom, recruited an impressive batch of investors—friends of his in the cable television industry—to put in $5 million each to run teams in seven other cities. The investors, who came from Cox, Time Warner, Comcast, and Continental Cablevision, could tolerate losses and weren’t expecting immediate profits, which is how investing in start-up sports leagues usually goes.

  Many of them agreed in part to invest in the league because John Hendricks was well-liked and respected. But many also, as Hendricks did, saw it as an investment that could be beneficial in the long term.

  “We said, Let’s give this thing a try and see how it goes,” says Jim Kennedy of Cox Enterprises, who ran the Atlanta Beat franchise. “I didn’t ever envision it to be a moneymaker for us. We were hoping it’ll break even and maybe create some value down the road for all the owners.”

  The thread that ran through all the backers of the league was that, on some level, they all believed the women of the national team deserved a league to play in. They had all seen the 1996 Olympics or the 1999 World Cup, and it affected them in some way. Some of the investors had daughters. Some were fans of the players. But they saw it as a worthwhile investment, even if it fit more into the nice-to-do category than the moneymaking category.

  By the time the WUSA held a huge launch event for the players, the investors, and their families in Washington, D.C., everyone felt good about the investment. At the dinner, held at a hotel event space, the players stood up one by one and shared what the launch of the WUSA meant to them.

  “They knew little boys had sports heroes growing up—little boys could see a path pursuing a career in sports, but girls couldn’t see that kind of path,” Hendricks remembers. “There was hardly a dry eye in that room. All the owners were welling up with tears. We were all just so excited. We thought maybe 10,000 people would show up to the first game, but 34,000 people—it was at a level above MLS, so we were just on a high.”

  For all the national team had accomplished—selling out the Rose Bowl, forcing TV networks to air their games live, and securing better contracts from their federation, championship trophies, and sponsorship deals—the league was coveted in a way nothing else was. It was supposed to be the crucial step toward sustainable careers.

  “The league was the most important piece,” says Tiffeny Milbrett, who debuted for the national team in 1991. “You can’t be a professional athlete for six months out of the year or work two weeks out of every month or every other month. That’s not professional. You need a week-in and week-out daily environment. That’s called work.”

  The opportunities created by the WUSA weren’t just for the U.S. national team players, though—they were for all women playing soccer. Americans who excelled in the college game and top players from around the world now had a highly professional league to play in.

  Some players owed their own national team breakthroughs to the WUSA. The league started as a place for the national team players to go and became a place where national team players were made.

  Take Angela Hucles, for instance. When she graduated from the University of Virginia in 2000, for all she knew, her soccer career was over, despite scoring 59 goals, a Cavaliers record, 19 of them game-winners.

  “I went out and did your normal get-a-job type of procedure: Going to the career center, looking at opportunities, and talking to counselors,” she says.

  As she heard rumors of a possible league forming, she started training for a management role at Ferguson Enterprises, where she was learning to operate a forklift, coordinating refrigerator deliveries, and performing other tasks to learn every aspect of the business. She was there just three months before she abruptly quit to enter the draft.

  She was selected 93rd overall, but her solid play in the league earned her call-ups under April Heinrichs. She eventually went on to earn more than 100 caps for the national team.

  The league also created new opportunities for the national team’s opponents. Bringing in superstar internationals was seen as crucial, not just to bolster the league’s quality but to ensure a deep pool of club talent outside of just the U.S. national team players. With most players at the time quitting soccer after college, the dilution of talent was a concern that international players could address.

  “We had a lot of best players in the world—players like Birgit Prinz [Germany] and Sun Wen [China],” says Julie Foudy. “That was an interesting change because we had never interacted with them like that. All the sudden we were teammates with them.”

  Lauren Gregg, Tony DiCicco’s assistant coach at the 1999 World Cup, was tapped to head player personnel for the league front office, where she signed nearly 70 international players during her time with WUSA.

  To have top world talent alongside one another was a new experience for all the players. It made all of them better competitors, and it led to some memorable lost-in-translation moments. At one point with the San Diego Spirit, Foudy was getting to know Chinese defender Fan Yunjie when the conversation went something like this, at least as far as Foudy heard:

  “What’s your husband’s name?”

  “Who?”

  “Your husband.”

  “Yeah.”

  “No, what’s his name?”

  “Who?”

  “YOUR HUS-BAND. WHAT. IS. HIS. NAME?”

  Yunjie finally looked at Foudy and said: “Julie, my husband’s name is Hu.”

  Everyone burst out laughing.

  “Foudy was crying because she was laughing so hard,” teammate Shannon MacMillan remembers. “All of us were like, Oh my gosh, Jules. We caught on after, like, the first round, but she kept going and starts talking louder because she thinks she can’t hear her.”

  But the cultural exchange that was happening in the WUSA was bigger than that. Some of the international players were coming from countries where they too felt their federations were failing to support them. By becoming teammates with the U.S. national team players, players around the globe were being exposed to the American mentality of banding together and standing up to demand more.

  “They got to see how feisty we were with our federation and how involved we were in advocating for change,” Foudy says.

  Those planted seeds would take some time to grow—and indeed, the U.S. national team would inspire other national teams around the world for years to come—but the WUSA may have been where the U.S. team’s influence started.

  Through it all, however, those rooting for the WUSA’s success felt MLS was actively trying to hurt it
.

  “MLS was a hostile force to what we were doing,” says Amos Hostetter Jr., who founded the Boston Breakers. “There was no element of cooperation from them and, in fact, they were against us. A lot of scheduling was set up to conflict with our games. They were of the view that if anyone was going to have a successful soccer league, they should do it.”

  * * *

  The signs were there by the time the first season ended. Financially, the league was on an untenable path it could continue on for only so long.

  With Hyundai as the only major corporate sponsor, the advertising revenue the league projected and needed to break even never came over the course of that first season. And as attendance trended downward, it was even tougher to sell sponsors on the idea that an investment in the league was worth making.

  While the Washington Freedom, the Atlanta Beat, and the Boston Breakers looked to be hitting their numbers with crowds of 8,000 or more per game, not everyone attending games had paid full price for tickets, which cut into the revenue teams counted on. It was only going to get harder in year two after the newness had worn off.

  “I was concerned that we were doing too many promotions to get people there,” says Jim Kennedy of Cox Enterprises and the Atlanta Beat. “I thought we ought to just find out if there would be true paying fans who will pay to come to games.”

  The situation was dire in other markets, though. The New York Power, San Diego Spirit, and Carolina Courage averaged below 6,000 fans per game in the first season. That was well under the league’s initial projections and, again, not everyone was paying to get in the door.

  At one point, Joe Cummings, the general manager of the Boston Breakers, was asked to take over as GM for the New York Power. He was stunned when he arrived and took a closer look at their budget. The team was spending $800,000 annually on marketing in metro New York City even though it was averaging only about 2,500 paying fans per game at $15 per ticket. At that rate, with 10 home games per season, breaking even was impossible.

  The Boston Breakers were arguably the closest franchise to being on a break-even path. After all, running a sports team wasn’t new for Cummings. Before taking over as general manager of the Breakers, he had been the assistant general manager of the New England Revolution in MLS.

  Every Tuesday, a spreadsheet would go out to all the teams showing the financial performance of each franchise. The Breakers were consistently in the top three in attendance and spent far less money than many of the other franchises to get people to the games.

  “Nobody ever called and said, Joe, what are you doing?” he says. “No one at the executive level ever called and asked for best practices.”

  That worried Cummings because a lot of people running franchises in other markets didn’t have experience in professional sports. It also became evident to some of most active investors that not everyone had the same level of interest in running a sports team, either.

  “It became clear to me fairly soon that having corporate ownership wasn’t the best thing,” says Kennedy. “You really need a passion when you own something like this—you need to really care about it. Here in Atlanta, we really did. We wanted it to be successful. But I don’t know it was that way in other markets.”

  Because of the league’s single-entity structure, when some franchises lost money, all franchises shared the cost. The franchises that were doing relatively well—franchises like the Washington Freedom, the Boston Breakers, and the Atlanta Beat—still ended up losing money as other teams floundered.

  After the first season ended, the league took drastic steps to cut costs. The WUSA headquarters were moved from an expensive New York City office to a space at Cox Enterprises in Atlanta. The league’s CEO, Barbara Allen, who took few steps to rein in spending or help teams stay on track, was replaced by a more business-savvy Lynn Morgan.

  Those changes, plus a championship attendance of more than 21,000 people, led to some optimism that the league would be able to course-correct. But just two weeks after those reforms were implemented during the offseason, the unthinkable happened: The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, changed the world overnight.

  For the WUSA, that meant corporate sponsor dollars dried up almost instantly.

  “After 9/11, it was such a shock to the economic system,” says John Hendricks. “Most companies continued advertising, but they cut back dramatically on nice-to-do corporate sponsorships. All our sponsorship leads came to an end. It was extremely hard to even get a meeting after 9/11, let alone close them.”

  At one point, Hendricks went to the McDonald’s corporate headquarters in Chicago with Mia Hamm and Brandi Chastain. He pitched the company hard about how soccer was a popular and growing sport with American families. The players talked about how empowering it was for young girls to have soccer. But the McDonald’s executives didn’t budge.

  “They were apologetic,” Hendricks says. “They told us they were cutting back—they were not doing golf tournaments they used to do and they were not doing as much in sports.”

  The hope of the revenues and expenses ever coming in line was rapidly disappearing. Without new revenues, the league continued to cut expenses.

  By the third season, the only major expense left to cut was personnel, and there was talk of pay cuts across the entire league. For non–national team stars like Shannon Boxx—players who already weren’t earning very much money—the thought of retirement loomed.

  Boxx, a Notre Dame alum, wanted to work in child psychology, and that was her plan for when she stopped playing soccer. Before she knew she’d play in the WUSA, she had started gathering recommendation letters and applying to graduate schools.

  One day, at a team meeting with the New York Power, Boxx told her teammates: “I don’t know I can do this anymore. I would love to, but I can’t.”

  She was ready to quit before her third season in the WUSA. But the national team players told her they would cut their salaries so players like her wouldn’t be affected as much. The founding players of the WUSA—the national team players—realized if they lost the league’s best talent, the league would never thrive.

  For the third season, they took pay cuts of as much as $25,000 each, and salary caps league-wide were cut by 25 percent, reducing the average salaries to about $37,235. Minimum salaries for first-year ($25,000), second-year ($26,250), and third-year ($31,500) players remained untouched. Rosters were trimmed from 18 players to 16.

  Boxx ended up staying to play in that third WUSA season, and it’s a good thing she did. That was the season she broke through to the national team under April Heinrichs. Boxx eventually went on to represent the national team in 195 games.

  In the end, though, cutting expenses was never going to be enough for the WUSA. Running a professional soccer league cost what it cost.

  “The fundamental issue, frankly, wasn’t expenses,” says Ben Gomez, who ran the investment firm of Breakers founder Amos Hostetter Jr. and helped run the WUSA team. “Obviously, building a team and doing it in a high-quality way was expensive, but the fundamental issue was the revenues just didn’t show up. Ticket revenues were lower than expected, advertisers didn’t show up, and there were no TV rights. When you see no top-line growth, it doesn’t matter how well you do managing expenses. We kind of bled to death.”

  Hostetter says he lost about $20 million on the Boston Breakers alone over the three seasons, and $30 million overall because he half-owned the Bay Area CyberRays.

  After the third season of the WUSA commenced, everyone knew the league was out of money and they might not see one another again, so when the league held its end-of-the-season banquet in 2003, there was a somber feeling.

  “We went through 36 months of this torture of trying to get the economics together to make this a viable long-term proposition, and everybody knew this was probably going to be the last event of the WUSA because we couldn’t continue,” John Hendricks says. “The players were thanking everybody for the effort. Tears were aplenty in the room
.”

  On September 16, 2003, during the offseason, the situation reached its conclusion. The national team players were at camp for the 2003 World Cup when everything they feared became official. Hendricks made the call to pull the plug on the WUSA. The 2003 Women’s World Cup was just five days away.

  In all, 375 people—players and staff—lost their jobs. After investors poured more than $100 million into the league all told, the league folded in the face of a $17 million shortfall that figured to grow if the league continued.

  “If only we had six or seven CEOs in America that had stepped forward in the past year,” Hendricks told reporters when the league’s suspension was announced. “An independent women’s professional league can survive—if it has corporate support.”

  The reasons for the WUSA’s demise are varied, but some of its supporters can’t help but think its challenges weren’t all that different than what MLS has overcome.

  Perhaps what the WUSA never found was their Philip Anschutz or Robert Kraft or Lamar Hunt. When MLS was on the brink of failure in 2001 after losing $250 million, the three billionaires agreed to take control of a handful of teams each to keep the league afloat. While two teams folded, the 10 remaining teams were all owned by those three men. It was a massive investment that eventually paid off—today, MLS commands $200 million expansion fees and is financially stronger than it’s ever been.

  “MLS survived because a billionaire man decided it was worth it to give his money and continued to give his millions and millions to fund the league,” Tiffeny Milbrett says. “That’s a really big reason that league never folded. I just feel like the women never had that—that person who was willing to do it because the women deserved it.”

  CHAPTER 9

  “It Was Their Team”

  Heather O’Reilly, just 17 years old, was up in her room when the phone rang at her family’s house in New Jersey. Her mom answered and then called up the stairs in a way that made O’Reilly curious as to who was on the phone.