The National Team

by Caitlin Murray

  “We don’t have to talk about what we need to do in the last five minutes of the game,” O’Reilly says now. “It’s just sort of ingrained in the training culture—and now we have this rich history of doing it over and over again. It’s a powerful thing to have in your back pocket that this team doesn’t give up. Teams know they might be winning in the final minute but, with the U.S., it’s not over. We’ll keep fighting.”

  O’Reilly ran onto a wide ball and launched a long, floating cross into the box. It would probably be the USA’s last chance to score before the whistle blew. Wambach couldn’t get to it. But there was Alex Morgan, standing smack-dab in the middle of the box.

  She wasn’t a player known for her heading ability, but Morgan jumped and whipped her head toward the goal. She didn’t hit the ball exactly how she wanted—it didn’t get much power—but it looped up over the outstretched hand of Erin McLeod and dropped into the goal, almost as if in slow motion. It ended up being the perfect header in the 123rd minute, just like the one Wambach scored the year prior against Brazil. Morgan threw her arms in the air, laughing as if in disbelief. The Americans closed in on her with hugs. The Canadian players looked as if they could collapse into the grass.

  USA 4, Canada 3: the end. The whistle blew, and the match was over. The Americans had just advanced to the gold-medal match of the 2012 Olympics in a thrilling classic.

  The Canadians blamed the referee and floated conspiracy theories. Christine Sinclair, who told reporters that the game “was taken from us” and “the ref decided the result before it started,” was issued for a fine and a four-game suspension for allegedly calling referee Christina Pedersen a profanity after the game.

  Melissa Tancredi told the referee after the match: “I hope you can sleep tonight and put on your American jersey, because that’s who you played for today.”

  But the Americans believed it was their tenacity that got them through that game. They fell behind three separate times, and three separate times, they came back. With that signature never-say-die mentality, the Americans prevailed. Again, it wasn’t something Sundhage taught the players. Rather, it was something she caught from them.

  “It’s contagious,” Sundhage says. “The American players are exhausted when we want them to be exhausted. Heather O’Reilly is that kind of player—running up and down, up and down. You say, Are you okay? And she says she is, but she can’t hardly breathe. That’s something you need. It’s contagious.”

  “Every country I’ve been to, we are all amazed by the way the Americans are,” Sundhage adds. “It had nothing to do with me and my coaching. I was lucky to be around them.”

  * * *

  With the gold-medal match around the corner, Shannon Boxx was finally ready to play again after recovering from the hamstring injury she suffered in the opener of the tournament.

  That left Pia Sundhage with a difficult roster decision. Should she go back to the starting lineup she wanted before the 2012 Olympics began? Would Carli Lloyd be relegated back to the bench?

  After all, it was less than four years before that Sundhage had told Lloyd she was being dropped from the national team. Although Lloyd had scored the game-winner in the 2008 Olympics final, she hadn’t held on to that form. So one day, Sundhage called her with bad news.

  “Carli, I want to give you a heads-up before the official email goes out,” Sundhage had told her. “You don’t have a renewed contract for 2009. If you do get a contract, it may not be Tier 1.”

  Lloyd was shocked. She knew she hadn’t played that well for the Chicago Red Stars, but she hadn’t seen this coming. She wanted to cry, but she just asked Sundhage why she wasn’t being renewed.

  “The consensus is that, for whatever reason, you are not the same impact player you were,” Sundhage explained. “Now what happens from here is up to you. You will have plenty of chances to show that you have improved your game and get your contract.”

  Lloyd quickly showed Sundhage she deserved to be part of the coach’s plans and got her contract. But by the time this 2012 Olympics came around, Sundhage still had her reservations.

  Being demoted before the tournament could have discouraged Lloyd, but defender Heather Mitts remembers it seemed to fuel her.

  “I was with her when she got benched—she was devastated but determined,” Mitts says. “I saw the amount of work and training she put in. I was actually concerned she was overtraining and wouldn’t be able to sustain the level during the Olympics if given the chance. When she got her opportunity due to an injury, I just watched her in awe as she was out to prove Pia wrong.”

  Lloyd did it even as she was asked to play as a defensive midfielder behind Lauren Cheney, a role that wouldn’t let her shine. Although Sundhage wanted the now-recovered Boxx on the field for the gold-medal game, she was convinced Lloyd needed to be there, too.

  The coach decided to put Boxx in the defensive midfield role and pushed Lloyd up in front of her as an attacking midfielder. That was the spot where Lloyd could truly play her best soccer, and now she had a chance to do it in another Olympics final.

  When the match arrived versus Japan, the Americans felt ready. The U.S. players felt they had been the better team in the World Cup final the previous year and they were eager for another chance against Japan.

  At historic Wembley Stadium, in front of more than 80,000 people, the players of the U.S. national team stepped onto the field to try to win their third consecutive Olympic gold medal.

  Within eight minutes, the U.S. and Carli Lloyd had already scored. Alex Morgan whipped a ball across the face of goal and Abby Wambach was there, ready to try to get her left foot on it. But before the ball could find Wambach’s foot, Lloyd had darted in front of her, head first, driving the ball into the net, as if appearing from nowhere.

  The Americans dominated the half, despite the close score, but the Japanese had their chances. Hope Solo was forced to make a lunging save at full stretch on Shinobu Ohno. Solo almost made a similar save later on Aya Miyama, but the shot went off the top of the crossbar.

  After halftime, Lloyd wasn’t finished. Running up the field with the ball in the 54th minute, she dribbled, dribbled, dribbled . . . and once she got to the top of the box, she unleashed a laser strike. It cut through specks of red shirts and into the corner of the net. It was about as sweet a hit as Lloyd could’ve hoped for when she struck the ball.

  Sundhage was never so happy to be proven wrong about a player.

  “We had a conversation before the Olympics, and she wasn’t happy about not playing in the starting lineup, of course,” Sundhage says of Lloyd. “And she had a good reaction. I told her, Just show me that I am wrong, and she did.”

  Unlike the previous two major tournament finals the U.S. competed in, this one would not have to go to extra time. Lloyd carried the team to a 2–1 win that felt more decisive than it looked on paper.

  The Americans were champions again.

  * * *

  The ends of tournament cycles have often marked coaching changes for the national team, and 2012 was no different.

  As the team was about to embark on its 10-game victory tour to celebrate their new gold medals, U.S. Soccer announced that Pia Sundhage was stepping down. Sundhage was going to return to her native Sweden to coach the national team there ahead of the 2013 women’s European championship, a tournament that Sweden was hosting.

  Before the U.S. team’s first victory-tour game on September 1, 2012, in Rochester, New York, the news was announced to the crowd in attendance, and Sundhage, bringing her journey full circle, belted out a few lines of Bob Dylan’s “If Not for You” as a thank-you and goodbye.

  “It’s a fantastic opportunity for me,” said Sundhage. “It’s just good timing.”

  But in the national team—an ultracompetitive environment where some players always seem to think they know best—it’s rarely that simple.

  Players who decline to speak on the record recall the leaders of the team quietly pushing behind the scen
es for a coaching change. Carli Lloyd shares a similar account in her 2016 book, When Nobody Was Watching.

  “Everybody wants to make it sound as if Pia was the one who engineered the change, but I’m not so sure, since that’s not usually how things work around the U.S. Women’s National Team,” Lloyd wrote. “April Heinrichs was forced out by a core of veterans who basically ran the team, and Greg Ryan was too, though he was going to be a goner anyway the moment the terrible 2007 World Cup ended.”

  Sundhage and U.S. Soccer president Sunil Gulati started to have discussions about Sundhage’s contract and, according to Lloyd, that’s when the push behind the scenes began.

  “When word leaks out on the team about what is going on, I am upset, and so are lots of other people who aren’t part of the ‘leadership group,’” Lloyd wrote.

  That any of the players wanted Sundhage out as coach took the federation by surprise, according to sources who were involved in the situation but decline to speak on the record. After all, the team had been extraordinarily successful under Sundhage: two Olympic gold medals and a close World Cup final decided on penalty kicks. Team sources say some players were still upset with how Sundhage handled the Hope Solo situation and Sundhage’s tendency to brush issues with her aside. Another player says Sundhage made the players write essays after every game, whether it was for club or country, and constantly checked up on players. She also wasn’t open to feedback from players.

  Just because some of the players had pushed for Sundhage’s contract not to be renewed doesn’t mean that U.S. Soccer’s higher-ups necessarily agreed. But as discussions dragged on while the federation decided how to proceed and Sundhage sensed hesitancy, she accepted the job to coach the Swedish team.

  Whether it was her choice or whether some players forced her out depends on how you look at it. Asked about it now, Sundhage declines to comment.

  After Sundhage’s last game on September 19, 2012, in Colorado, the video board at Dick’s Sporting Goods Park aired a video package of highlights from Sundhage’s time coaching the U.S. team. It featured interview snippets, highlights of her famously exuberant goal celebrations, and footage of the team’s biggest wins with Sundhage at the helm.

  Sundhage sobbed, and many of the players, including Alex Morgan and Lauren Cheney, openly cried as well.

  When asked for a goodbye speech, she belted out lines from a Bonnie Tyler song, “The Best.”

  The crowd broke out into a chant: “Pia! Pia! Pia!”

  PART III

  CHAPTER 16

  “Let’s Give This League a Shot, Let’s Go for It”

  It was October 23, 2012, in East Hartford, Connecticut. The national team had just played Germany to a friendly 2–2 draw on a rainy, cold night, and now they were meeting with Sunil Gulati, the president of U.S. Soccer, in their small, cramped locker room.

  There was only one item on the agenda for the meeting: a new women’s league. The players had heard the rumblings that a league was in the works. But details on exactly what the league would look like and how it would work were scarce.

  Gulati was there to formally present to the players, for the first time, a new model for a women’s league: The federation would pay all the club salaries for the national team players. This new model would ease the financial burden on the individual clubs, increase the likelihood clubs could afford to stick around, and ensure all the players earned similar-but-decent club compensation.

  It was an exciting idea—a new league for the players to compete in, day in and day out—but the players were immediately cautious.

  “A lot of people in that room had played in WPS or the WUSA,” Becky Sauerbrunn says. “We knew what a failed league looked like.”

  Gulati knew that too and had been thinking a lot about it. A few months earlier, he and Dan Flynn, the secretary general of U.S. Soccer, hosted a meeting at the Chicago Hilton with other people who had been involved in women’s club soccer. It included Arnim Whisler of the Chicago Red Stars, Michael Stoller of the Boston Breakers, and Alec Papadakis, who was the head of the USL, a lower-tier men’s league, and the W-League, a developmental women’s league. The meeting was about one thing: figuring out a way to bring women’s club soccer back.

  “I threw out this concept, and I hadn’t talked about it with Dan in advance, and he probably kicked me under the table,” Gulati jokes. “But that concept was that the federation would pay the national team players or hire them, however you want to put it.”

  The initial idea was for the USL to run the league and fund its operations, but after some pushback from the holdover WPS clubs, it was decided that U.S. Soccer would run it. Along with the Chicago Red Stars and the Boston Breakers, Sky Blue FC’s owners, including Thomas Hofstetter, signed on. Bill Lynch was the first new owner to agree to be part of the new league, and he would start a team in Washington, D.C. The Western New York Flash signed on, too. A couple of other brand-new clubs were in the works to join the league, as well.

  Once the details started to come together, it was time to bring the players on board.

  So now, here the national team players sat in East Hartford, Connecticut, being presented with a league and a group of owners, neither of whom they had ever heard of or who had been part of the previous failures of women’s club soccer in the United States. On top of that, Gulati had not yet hit the minimum of eight teams that he wanted to launch the league, so not all the owners were known yet.

  The players were interested—excited, even. It was only a year earlier that WPS had folded and members of the national team grappled with figuring out where to continue their careers. Some played stateside for semi-pro teams; some went to Europe, where the options for women’s club soccer had been steadily growing; and some just didn’t play club soccer at all.

  But they had a lot of questions.

  “Are you confident that the owners can afford to do this for the long haul?” Christie Pearce asked.

  “No, I’m not,” Gulati said.

  “Why not?” Pearce replied.

  “Because Warren Buffett wasn’t interested,” Gulati joked.

  There was no Philip Anschutz or Robert Kraft or Lamar Hunt among the bunch. There was no one that could afford to fund a women’s team forever if they really wanted. But there was a group of owners interested in giving it a go. That was the only reassurance Gulati could give the players.

  “Everyone was very concerned,” Carli Lloyd says. “Who are these owners? What are the facilities going to be like? Is it going be professional in the sense of locker rooms, travel, hotels, and all that?”

  Shannon Boxx asked Gulati how the league would avoid the churn that saw young players come into the league and quickly quit. Boxx, before she made the national team, almost became one of those players who quit the WUSA. She had gotten into graduate school at Pepperdine University and planned to retire from soccer entirely, but she decided to stick with it one more year, and April Heinrichs gave her a shot with the national team.

  “Players coming out of college might play for a year or two, but if they can’t pay their bills or if the clubs aren’t good enough, they are going to want to get a better job,” Boxx told Gulati.

  Gulati admitted he didn’t have an answer for that. The players appreciated his honesty, but they were concerned that the league wouldn’t be an economically viable option for non–national team players. If players constantly quit and there was constant turnover, the league would never be full of the sorts of experienced professional players who would make it a high-quality, competitive environment.

  Another player asked if national team players had to compete in the league.

  “No,” Gulati said. “If Christie can convince the national team coach that she can stay fit and be a top world-class player by running around a track in New Jersey, then she can play on the national team.”

  Although the players expressed concerns, the overall sentiment was that they did want a league to play in and they liked Gulati’s idea for the feder
ation to support the league. They just needed to know more.

  “That wasn’t the day where we said, Okay, we’re all in. As a team, we needed to have further discussions about our participation,” Sauerbrunn says. “But I remember leaving that meeting and I was excited. I was hoping it would somehow be different than the previous leagues, even though I was too young at the time to know how it could be different or why.”

  With the players generally on board, Gulati left that meeting and continued to look for owners to reach the number of teams needed for a first-division league. But they couldn’t be just any owners. They needed to be people who had experience running a professional soccer team. There were no more owners from the WUSA or WPS to ask.

  When Merritt Paulson, the owner of the Portland Timbers in MLS, got a call from Gulati about starting a women’s team for the new league, he was immediately skeptical.

  Two other women’s leagues had already failed. Maybe the market just wasn’t there for women’s soccer, he wondered. If the Timbers fielded a women’s team and it folded, it could tarnish the Timbers brand. Besides, he had enough going on with the Timbers, who were finishing up a horrible season in which Paulson had fired their head coach.

  “My initial reaction was fairly pessimistic,” Paulson says. “I didn’t give him a no, but I didn’t give him a yes, either.”

  Gulati pushed the idea of the new model for the league. The selling point was that U.S. Soccer’s financial backing and oversight would ensure that the league wouldn’t face the same troubles as the previous two leagues. The federations from Canada and Mexico agreed to subsidize some of their own players, too.

  Paulson was intrigued enough by the model that he told Gulati: “I’ll do it if you can get another MLS team.”

  Gulati had already been trying to do that. He’d spoken with Adrian Hanauer, the majority owner of the Seattle Sounders, who ultimately didn’t commit but recruited Bill Predmore, a local businessman who signed on to start the Seattle Reign. He’d also spoken with Sporting Kansas City’s co-owner, Robb Heineman, who was interested but asked if Gulati could hold off for another year. Gulati couldn’t wait, but instead the Likens family and Brian Budzinski, who already owned an indoor men’s soccer team together, agreed to start FC Kansas City.