The National Team

by Caitlin Murray

  When she got a call asking her to interview for the USA job again in late 2007, she was surprised. Winning bronze in a major tournament would’ve been an honor anywhere else in the world. Greg Ryan’s firing was news to her.

  Meeting with the new U.S. Soccer president, Sunil Gulati, Sundhage told Gulati what she had told his predecessor: “Just so you know, I don’t want to be technical director. One of my strengths is that I know what I’m good at and I know what I’m not so good at.”

  This time, that was just fine. The federation needed someone who could come in and clean up the mess left in the wake of Ryan’s disastrous decision to bench Hope Solo. Sundhage, with her easygoing yet decisive approach, seemed like exactly what the team needed.

  The players were eager to turn the page with Sundhage, too. After she was selected for the job, the new coach held a conference call with the players.

  “She really wanted a camp in December, and that was usually our break, but we were all willing to do it because we all wanted to start fresh,” Shannon Boxx remembers.

  When the players arrived for their first meeting with their new coach in Carson, California, they were greeted by Sundhage with her guitar in hand. She opened the meeting by singing Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are a-Changin’.” Though Sundhage was fluent in English, it wasn’t her first language, and the song said it better than she could’ve otherwise: Things were going to be different now.

  Hope Solo was at that camp. The first thing Sundhage set out to do was bring her back into the fold and patch up whatever divides had emerged within the team. For Sundhage, there was never even a question that Solo would be the team’s starting goalkeeper.

  In her first meeting as national team head coach, after she finished playing guitar, she said to all the players: “I want to win. Do you want to win?” The response was a resounding “Yeah!” Sundhage knew it would be because, as she says now, “Americans, they are winners.”

  That settled the matter. “Well, to win, you need a goalkeeper,” she told the team. “I don’t expect you to forget, but I do expect you to forgive.”

  That four-day camp was less about the team playing together than it was about patching up rifts. Between training sessions, it was a marathon of meetings for Sundhage. She spoke to Solo privately and to the leaders on the team, and before the camp started, she’d spoken with Greg Ryan on the phone.

  “He had his story. I talked to the players. I got about five different stories about the state of the team. But I got an idea of what happened,” Sundhage says. “For me it was good, and my mission was: We need to take the next step.”

  Sundhage went out of her way to make sure everyone felt heard. But she already knew what she was going to do, regardless of what anyone said, and she wasn’t open to any suggestions to the contrary. If Ryan’s downfall was being too easily swayed by his own players and their whims, Sundhage wasn’t going to have that problem.

  Luckily for the national team, there wasn’t much time to let any bad feelings fester. The Olympics were right around the corner. The Beijing games would become the team’s sole focus.

  * * *

  The 2008 Olympic Games were 21 days away. The national team was in San Diego for one final send-off game before departing for China. On the field for this friendly versus Brazil was the lineup Pia Sundhage hoped would win a gold medal.

  The atmosphere was festive. The national team’s popularity and attention had waned significantly since 2004, when stars like Mia Hamm retired, but a sellout crowd of 7,502 fans came to see the team they would support during the Olympics.

  In the 32nd minute, Abby Wambach slipped the ball to Amy Rodriguez, who knocked it back in Wambach’s path for a give-and-go. Defender Andréia Rosa, reading the play, stepped up to the ball to clear it away. At the exact same moment, Wambach took a full swing at the ball to shoot. Wambach got to the ball first, but on the follow-through, her shin smacked against the Brazilian’s shin.

  The moment Wambach went down, she knew it was bad. She quickly looked over to the bench and signaled that she needed to come out of the game.

  “I still remember the sound of it and seeing Abby on the ground,” Shannon Boxx says. “I remember being concerned for my teammate, thinking: Is she going to be able to play soccer again?”

  Christie Pearce, who played under the last name Rampone for much of her career, ran over to Wambach and squatted down to check on her.

  “I broke my leg. My tib and fib are both broken,” Wambach said, referring to the tibia and fibula, the shin bone and its counterpart.

  “Are you sure?” Pearce asked.

  “Yeah. Tell Pia to get a sub ready,” Wambach replied.

  It was a jarring sight to see Wambach on the ground, helpless. She was often the player throwing her height and weight advantages around—going into hard challenges as defenders bounced off her. She had grown up in Rochester, New York, as the youngest of seven children, and it showed—she wasn’t afraid to speak up for herself, and she was tough as nails. She could seemingly play through anything and was known to shout at her teammates to pump them up, too. Her communication style straddled the line between leadership and bossiness, but she was an incredibly effective messenger.

  More important, however, she was the national team’s most productive player. At that point, Wambach led the team in scoring for 2008 with an impressive 13 goals and 10 assists in 21 games.

  The players on the field huddled and put their arms around one another in a circle as Wambach’s leg was put in a splint by trainers on the field. They told each other there was nothing they could do about Wambach now and there was still a game to finish.

  “I remember looking around at everybody’s faces,” says Heather O’Reilly. “You’re of course devastated for Abby. But it was also kind of like: Whoa, can we do this without her? Abby at that juncture was our everything—she was our goal-scoring leader.”

  Wambach was wheeled off the field and into the back of an ambulance, where she called out, asking if anyone would lend their phone to her. A medic handed Wambach his phone, probably expecting the player to call a loved one. Instead, she dialed Lauren Cheney.

  “Cheney!” Wambach blurted out after Cheney, who would later play under the married name Holiday, picked up. “I hope you’ve been working out. I’m injured, and if they replace me with another forward, it’s going to be you.”

  “Shut up,” Cheney said, laughing. “You’re being dramatic. You’re fine. You’re always fine.”

  “I’m serious,” Wambach insisted. “I can’t run. So you need to get fit because you’re going to the Olympics.”

  Scans at the hospital would confirm Wambach had suffered a mid-oblique fracture of her tibia and fibula, and Cheney would eventually take Wambach’s place on the roster—but Cheney wasn’t a replacement for what Wambach did on the field. Pia Sundhage needed to decide who could take over Wambach’s vital attacking role, not just in this game but as a starter at the Olympics.

  As Wambach lay on the field waiting to be stretchered off, Sundhage and assistant coach Jill Ellis had plenty of time to discuss their options. Natasha Kai, who had been a frequent starter with Wambach, seemed to be the obvious choice. Ellis tossed out Angela Hucles’s name. By that point, Hucles wasn’t starting games—she was a late substitute.

  “I had other players in mind, but Jill Ellis was smart enough to say we need someone to keep the ball,” Sundhage says. “Angela Hucles took her place, and that was a crucial moment—a winning move because I listened to Jill Ellis.”

  Hucles was an unlikely choice to replace Wambach. It wasn’t just that she was a very different player than Wambach, lacking the same physical bite or pushy communication style on the field. It was that Hucles and Sundhage had a history—when Sundhage was Hucles’s coach at the Boston Breakers, she thought so little of the player that she traded her away. Sundhage later said that Hucles wasn’t dynamic enough. When Sundhage took over as national team coach, Hucles thought maybe her career in red, white
, and blue was over.

  “We butted heads at the Breakers,” Hucles says. “I had never butted heads with another coach like that. So when she came onto the national team, I was like, Huh, I know I have to prove myself every time, but we’ll see if I make the team again under Pia.”

  But Sundhage needed to change tactics without Wambach. No, Hucles didn’t have the aerial presence that Wambach did, but no one else on the team did. She also didn’t have the speed that Rodriguez or Kai did, but she could hold on to possession. The skills she did have would allow her to be a fulcrum for the attack and provide service to speedier players around her.

  After the send-off game, which the U.S. won, Sundhage met with Hucles and told her that she was going to be starting during the Olympics—with Wambach out, Hucles would take her place. Though she had been a backup midfielder for the team, Hucles was now going to be starting as a forward.

  Meanwhile, Wambach was in a hospital undergoing a four-hour surgery that involved a titanium rod and a bunch of screws to put her leg bones back together. Afterward, as she was recovering, a small group of players went to visit her before they left for China: Christie Pearce, Kate Markgraf, Angela Hucles, Heather O’Reilly, and Leslie Osborne.

  Wambach, ever the leader and motivator, told her teammates to go get ’em and win the Olympics without her. No one expected anything less from her. But the visit in the hospital was still quiet and uncomfortable—a feeling of sadness hung over everyone like a fog.

  “It was definitely a bit somber,” Hucles says. “I wonder now if I could have done more? It’s one of those situations where that had to have been one of the hardest experiences for her to go through.”

  If the players had somehow forgotten that Wambach, their best player, wasn’t joining them in Beijing, the constant peppering of questions from the media would remind them.

  No one was talking about Hope Solo or Greg Ryan anymore. How could this team possibly win without Wambach?

  * * *

  When the national team got to China, it was time to try out the plan Pia Sundhage and Jill Ellis had devised.

  The team stuck to the 4–4–2 formation that Sundhage preferred, but the way it worked had to change. No longer could the team pump the ball into the box and hope Abby Wambach got a head to it. No longer could Sundhage put players like Amy Rodriguez and Natasha Kai on the field to link up and feed the ball to Wambach. The team had to readjust its focus.

  “When we got there, we played China in a scrimmage, and you could tell we were just flustered,” says Shannon Boxx. “We had no real idea how we wanted to play now without Abby up there. It was like, Oh my gosh, the games start in a week, so what are we going to do?”

  After that scrimmage, it was time for the real games of the 2008 Olympics to start and the team wasn’t feeling confident at all. It showed in the opening match. The U.S. lost to Norway, 2–0.

  They looked sluggish and out of ideas in the attack. Norway looked comfortable. It was the team’s first loss under Sundhage.

  “I just remember being at the hotel the next morning to do recovery work and Norway was there in the workout room,” Boxx says. “I was like Ugh, why do I have to be in the same room with you guys right now? It was the worst feeling.”

  Sundhage had to figure out how to move forward from the loss, and she sought input from April Heinrichs, who was then a consultant for the U.S. Olympic Committee.

  “You know what?” Heinrichs told her. “You can do something the U.S. team has never done before.”

  “Oh, what’s that?” Sundhage asked.

  “You can lose a game and still win the Olympics,” Heinrichs said.

  “Well, shoot,” Sundhage chirped. “That’s a great way to look at it.”

  Sundhage credits that little pep talk with getting her through that moment.

  “She helped me out with that kind of thinking,” Sundhage says. “Winners, they come back and make it work.”

  That’s exactly what Sundhage and the national team did. Sundhage adjusted her personnel slightly so the new pairing up top would be Angela Hucles with Amy Rodriguez, who would start over Natasha Kai. Something clicked. Hucles was able to hold the ball up and feed it to the other speedier attackers racing in behind. It was at this Olympics that Heather O’Reilly made the permanent switch from striker to outside midfield, where she would spend the rest of her national team career, racing up and down the right flank.

  After that Norway loss, the U.S. went on a five-game winning tear to land in the gold-medal match. Waiting for them was Brazil, the team that had humiliated them only one year before and the same team Wambach had broken her leg going up against. The Norway rivalry seemed to be slowly fading away as the Marta-led Brazilian team turned into the most constant thorn in the USA’s side.

  If the American attack—the masterstroke of putting Hucles in Wambach’s spot—was the catalyst for the five straight wins, the defense was going to get the Americans through the gold-medal match. The back line was full of experience—Christie Pearce, Kate Markgraf, Heather Mitts, and Lori Chalupny—while goalkeeper Hope Solo was growing in confidence with every game.

  By then, 22-year-old Marta was well on her way to winning a third straight FIFA World Player of the Year award, but neither she nor goal-scoring partner Cristiane could find a way to score on the USA.

  The Americans had trouble, too—it was a tight, chippy affair—and the match moved into extra time after a scoreless 90 minutes.

  Six minutes into the extra-time period, Lloyd pounced on a loose ball, darted into the box, and fired a left-footed shot that skipped under the hand of goalkeeper Bárbara. The Americans finally had a lead.

  The Americans had to hold on for another excruciating 24 minutes. But the defensive unit drilled in and the U.S. won, 1–0. Lloyd’s goal was the game-winner.

  “It brings chills to my body,” Lloyd said afterward. “It was the most memorable moment in my career. I hope that I have more memories like that.”

  The Americans were gold medalists again. They finished the tournament with six different goal-scorers in six games.

  “That was probably the greatest team victory of a team I was ever part of,” says O’Reilly. “We didn’t have Abby—we didn’t have our superstar—but everybody stepped up.”

  At one point amid the celebration in the locker room, the players decided to call Wambach to share the joyous occasion with her.

  The equipment manager for the national team dialed Wambach, and after she answered, he said, “Hold on,” and pointed his cell phone toward the players. Then Wambach, on the other end, sitting in the diner where she watched the game, was hit with a rush of screaming and cheers.

  She would later admit that the thought of the team winning without her terrified her. Did the team really need her? A resounding answer would come soon enough.

  * * *

  There had been no guarantee Pia Sundhage would continue with the national team after the 2008 Olympics.

  Sunil Gulati, the president of U.S. Soccer, had probably seen how tumultuous Robert Contiguglia’s choices of April Heinrichs and Greg Ryan turned out to be. He had only given Sundhage a contract through the end of the Olympics with a promise to reassess after the tournament.

  Once the team won gold, Gulati quickly awarded Sundhage a contract extension through the next World Cup–Olympics cycle. At the team’s party in Beijing to celebrate winning gold, Gulati got down on one knee and jokingly proposed that Sundhage stay on as head coach.

  An economist who was born in India but came to the United States as a child, Gulati seemed to put in more effort with the women’s national team than his predecessors at U.S. Soccer. He had been involved with the federation since the late 1980s and came into the job with a clear understanding of the women’s program. That included a grasp of how important the women’s team was for the landscape of soccer in America.

  He had not only seen the 1999 World Cup and the explosion of growth in women’s soccer since but he had been rooting
for the women’s team since its earliest days. Chat with Gulati long enough about his involvement with U.S. Soccer and he’ll eventually talk about a phone call he made to the women’s team in 1991.

  He just wanted to wish them good luck at the first-ever Women’s World Cup in China, but it wasn’t so simple in an era before everyone had a cell phone. Gulati was in Russia for his job at World Bank, the team was in the meal room at their hotel in China, and he was patched through via the U.S. Soccer Federation headquarters in Colorado Springs. It was a collect call.

  “It was Russia to Colorado Springs to China, and it was Thanksgiving Day,” Gulati says. “I remember saying words to the effect of, Be thankful you’re playing for the United States and be thankful you’re at least one goal better than Norway.”

  The sorts of very public fights that Contiguglia and his second-in-command, Hank Steinbrecher, got into with the women’s team would stop under Gulati—at least for the time being—and the Gulati era would usher in a friendlier relationship with the team. John Langel, the team’s lawyer, would eventually become something closer to friends than adversaries with Gulati. Disputes still arose—travel accommodations and using the players’ likenesses for sponsorships were frequent issues over the years—but compromises came more easily.

  “With John, we would have our screaming matches and then we’d walk out and shake hands,” Gulati says. “We got to a point where if it was really important, either one of us could call the other, even if it wasn’t in the contract, and say, Hey, we need to get this done. With a commercial appearance, he’d say, Can we take care of this? Or, You need to get these players different flights. When you get to point of trust, regardless of what was in the contract, he could rely on me to be fair.”

  But that didn’t mean serious problems never came up.

  In 2009, Kate Markgraf got a phone call from Pia Sundhage. As head coach of the national team, Sundhage had to call players twice a year to let them know if their contract with U.S. Soccer would be renewed and whether the player would stay on the same salary tier.