But what may perhaps be most important is that the soccer team’s lessons—the story of its hardest struggles in the fight for equality—will continue on no matter what happens with the soccer team. What the team started decades ago has slowly spread and touched other teams around the world. For the youngest players on the soccer team, it may be what ensures they never forget the history of the team, even if they weren’t around to see it happen.
For the new soccer players who have never had to strike for anything and stepped onto a national team that already offered a living wage, they are still able to see the effects of what the generations before started.
Samantha Mewis—one of the soccer team’s up-and-coming players who could make her World Cup debut in 2019—happened to train with a group of the hockey players during the offseason before the hockey team went on strike. The conversations sometimes turned to equality, and she later got to see the hockey team turn that conversation into action.
“We often discussed our roles in the landscape of professional sports—how could we continue to fight for our own rights and further create opportunities for the next generation?” Mewis says. “Their resolve to go on strike before their world championship until they received fair compensation was extremely admirable and taught me so much about the power of collective bargaining.”
For John Langel, fighting for the hockey team allowed him to reprise a familiar role. The soccer team may have eventually outgrown his guidance, but with the hockey team, he again got to build something from scratch.
“Being fired by soccer hurt,” Langel says. “I didn’t like it. I look back on it and say I’m glad I was fired because several players needed new representation, but I didn’t like it when it happened. Going on to being as successful as we were in hockey—going on strike and getting what the players wanted in the face of criticism that we hadn’t been tough enough with U.S. Soccer—that made me feel good.”
CHAPTER 22
“We Had to Turn the Lens on Ourselves”
With the failure of the 2016 Olympics still fresh, coach Jill Ellis sat down and wrote an email to the players of the national team.
This email wasn’t a usual update or a motivational pep talk. It was distinctly the turning of a page for the national team. The team would play two friendlies after the Olympics, but once those were done, it was time to hit the reset button.
“Some of you will not factor in our plans for 2019 and I will share that with you in a timely manner,” she wrote, in part. “For some of you, it will mean you will not be on a specific roster so I can rotate and evaluate other players. But what everyone must understand is that performance becomes the precedent of selection. Whether you have 1 cap or 300 caps, gold medals or no medals, you will be measured by what you do on the training field and what you do on the playing field in this, and your professional environments.”
It signaled for some players that their guaranteed starting spots of the past were now up for grabs. For others, it signaled their career with the national team was over.
Whitney Engen, who had served as a depth piece on both the 2015 World Cup and 2016 Olympic rosters, was among the players cut from the team. After the two post-Olympics friendlies in September 2016, the 28-year-old centerback got a phone call from Ellis informing her of the decision.
“I was extremely surprised at the timing and to say I am devastated is an understatement,” Engen said in a letter to fans.
Heather O’Reilly, who had been on the national team since she was 17 years old, was no longer getting minutes for the national team and clearly didn’t fit into Ellis’s long-term plans. She played her last game for the national team on September 15, 2016, in an emotional farewell from the international game. Mia Hamm, her former teammate, came out before the game and presented her with a framed jersey.
The new normal on the national team would now be seeing less experienced, unfamiliar names on every roster while Ellis called up players from college, the NWSL, and youth national teams. A core of veterans would no longer be starting every single game. And, notably, now that Ellis had won a World Cup, she would have a longer leash than someone like Tom Sermanni did, even after failure at the Olympics.
This new approach that Ellis insisted upon was a break from tradition and it certainly wasn’t what American fans or players were used to, and once the new collective bargaining agreement was ratified, she would end up with even more flexibility.
“The rest of the world deals with how you play for your club, and that’s how you get a call-up,” Ellis said. “It’s about shifting the mind-set.”
Mia Hamm retired in 2004 with 276 caps to her name, and Carli Lloyd, who debuted for the national team in 2005, has around 270 caps. But the new era of the national team means no player should ever come close to matching those numbers, at least as far as Ellis is concerned.
Mallory Pugh may have gotten a head start because she broke into the national team and became a starter at just 17 years old, but Ellis thinks someone should replace her before she starts hitting jaw-dropping career stats.
“If she reaches 200 caps, I don’t think we’re doing our job,” Ellis told reporters. “When I used to recruit in college, my sole job was to out-recruit what I had. And if I did that, I knew we would grow and be successful.”
So, with the players on notice, Ellis set out on a mission to leave no stone unturned. After the dust had settled from the 2016 Olympics, she began calling in a carousel of new players and tinkering with her tactics endlessly.
But what if she tinkered and tested but never found a team as good as the one at the 2015 World Cup?
* * *
When the 2019 World Cup arrives, the Americans will have a new goalkeeper in goal for the first time since 2007, when Greg Ryan benched Hope Solo and accidentally blew the team up.
Solo has not returned to the team, even though her six-month suspension came and went. In late 2017, the federation eventually settled a grievance with the national team players union over her suspension. The terms aren’t public, but sources with knowledge say it included a monetary settlement.
Instead, the national team will turn to a goalkeeper who has never featured in a major tournament.
“Hope played every minute of every game, and now we have a starting goalkeeper with 12 caps,” Ellis admitted in 2017.
At the 2019 World Cup, that new goalkeeper will most likely be Alyssa Naeher, who had just seven caps at the time Solo was kicked off the team and has quickly earned start after start to gain reps. Ashlyn Harris, a longtime backup for the national team, is another option. Any other goalkeepers in the pool won’t have more than a small handful of international caps.
“As a goalkeeper, there are a lot of scenarios and situations that you can’t fully train for,” said Naeher after she became the new No. 1 goalkeeper. “The only way to gain those experiences is in games.”
For her part, 37-year-old Solo thinks she still has plenty to give to the game. She got long-needed shoulder surgery after the 2016 Olympics, and even though she hasn’t played club soccer, she says she’s been ready to return. But, although the assault case against her was finally dismissed for good in May 2018, she’s hardly endeared herself to the federation since her termination, becoming a vocal critic of the organization.
In the unlikely event the federation and Ellis would invite her back, Solo says she’d turn it down.
“I know they need some defensive leadership and some good goal-keeping,” Solo says. “I would never work for a federation, at this point, that doesn’t pay their women equally. I won’t work for someone like Jill who is part of the problem—I think she’s a weak leader and essentially another puppet for U.S. Soccer.”
“Have stranger things happened? Yeah,” she adds of a possible return. “There’s a possibility if Jill wasn’t there and U.S. Soccer came to terms with paying the women equally. There’s a possibility, but it’s pretty slim. I’m not holding my breath.”
* * *
Th
e national team’s performance in Seattle on July 27, 2017, had not been a good one—not by any stretch.
Two years removed from a World Cup victory in Canada, the national team was now losing to opponents it had never lost to before. On this day, it was Australia who beat the Americans, 1–0, for the first time in 28 games.
The starting lineup, like most that year, looked experimental, with some players in new roles and usual starters watching from the bench. Taylor Smith, a fullback who had shown well in the NWSL, made her debut for the national team, becoming the 17th player under coach Jill Ellis to get a first cap. New defenders Abby Dahlkemper and Casey Short joined her on the back line. A defensive breakdown allowed Australia’s Tameka Butt to score.
Alex Morgan and Crystal Dunn, both second-half substitutes, each had golden opportunities to score that they couldn’t finish. Lloyd came on as a second-half substitute, as well, but couldn’t find a way to change the game.
Morgan, walking through the stadium from the field after the match, in a rare outward display of frustration, whipped a Sharpie at the wall before disappearing into the locker room. Presumably, she had the marker in her hand because she had to sign memorabilia for VIP ticket holders, who line up in the tunnel for autographs after games. It was the only thing she had in her hand that she could throw.
Her display of emotion was in plain view of the mixed zone, where journalists stood, waiting for the players to walk through. It was a glimpse of consternation from a team that was often polished and upbeat—a team that was not only media savvy but used to winning.
Jonathan Tannenwald of the Philadelphia Inquirer, who was there among the press corps to see it, tweeted about it. It was well after midnight on the East Coast, but it took only minutes for his tweet to spread amongst the national team fans, who shared Morgan’s frustration.
Morgan wasn’t being criticized by fans for being angry—far from it. Fans, who were equally frustrated with the national team’s recent struggles, felt comforted the players shared their same feelings.
“I love this, to hear about the frustration and emotion from these players who are upset with themselves and the situation,” said one fan. “Glad to see an emotional response—maybe it’ll lead to a more fiery USA squad,” wrote another. “She has every right to be angry. This team is SO MUCH BETTER than their coach is allowing them to be,” another said.
When Morgan walked through the mixed zone later to speak with reporters, she lamented the “lull” the Americans got into as the first half wore on. It was plainly obvious to the journalists in Seattle that day that the Americans didn’t really start to threaten Australia until the second half, but the goals never came.
“We’re not going to forget what happened tonight,” Morgan said. “We need to learn from this, for sure.”
At this point, some of the players had become worried enough about the team’s performances to say something to the federation. A small group of veteran players in Seattle went to Sunil Gulati, the president of U.S. Soccer, to express their concern about the direction of the team under Jill Ellis, according to sources close to the team.
That loss in Seattle was only the USA’s third in 2017, but the losses that year were especially demoralizing.
In March, the national team had lost 3–0 to France. It was the USA’s worst, most lopsided loss in a decade—the last time the team lost by such a wide margin was that infamous 2007 World Cup semifinal versus Brazil. The loss to France also came after a 1–0 loss to England a few days earlier, marking the team’s first time losing back-to-back games since 2014, when Tom Sermanni was fired as coach shortly thereafter.
Adding to the embarrassment of the losses to France and England, they came during the SheBelieves Cup, a tournament that U.S. Soccer had created as an upgraded replacement for the Algarve Cup. The Americans came in last place in their own tournament.
When the group of veteran players went to Gulati in Seattle, they were mainly concerned about the team’s recent string of dropped results. Some of these veterans who were complaining to Gulati had seen their playing time scaled back significantly and could only helplessly watch the team struggle.
There was a new and obvious economic reason to be upset by the losses: the players’ compensation was more directly tied to winning than it had ever been before because of their new CBA. But this was also a team that viewed nothing less than winning as acceptable. Winning was a defining part of the national team’s identity.
As Alex Morgan told the media right before the loss in Seattle: “We do have the best team in the world, and not even on our best day, we should still beat the best teams.”
Results aside, however, players expressed to Gulati concerns about a lack of communication from Ellis off the field. Some players felt that they learned more about Ellis’s plans from reading her comments in the media than from speaking directly with their coach. Instead of the team feeling confident and cohesive, it felt unstable and in flux.
The team’s losses in 2017 were easily attributable to Ellis’s coaching decisions, including experimental tactics and constant lineup changes. Throughout the March 2017 SheBelieves Cup, Ellis had put the team into a new, unfamiliar formation that used three defenders instead of four. On top of that, she rotated in new players and asked others to play in new positions.
So when the French team easily penetrated the American back line to score, it wasn’t surprising. The Americans looked disorganized and out of sync. No one seemed quite sure of their positioning. It was unclear who was supposed to track certain runners into the box. And the Americans, who wanted to play the ball out of the back, struggled to connect lines.
Eventually, Gulati told the players he wouldn’t consider a coaching change until after the 2019 World Cup. A source with knowledge of the situation says the federation asked other players on the team about the veterans’ complaints, and the players who hadn’t met with Gulati were fine with Ellis staying in charge.
For the players in the primes of their careers who had been playing well for the national team all along, off-cycle tinkering was just something they’d have to weather.
“It is difficult because you want to continue maintaining a really high level both individually and collectively as a team,” Tobin Heath said after the SheBelieves Cup when asked about coping with such experiments. “That’s where you can grow and stretch the most—under that intense pressure. At times during this process, it doesn’t necessarily feel as much like that because there are so many changes. But as much as it can be frustrating, it’s important to remain focused and positive about the fact that we’re trying to go somewhere.”
There can be value in losing, after all. The national team had started losing more often before the 2015 World Cup. They went to Brazil in December 2014 and lost to Brazil, 3–2. Their next trip on the schedule was to France in February 2015, where the Americans again lost to the host, 2–0. Ellis credits those losses with hardening the team before the World Cup.
“I wanted them to struggle,” Ellis later said. “It was going to be a challenge. It was hot, adverse, hard, and we lost the game. From there, I took them to France and we struggled, we lost.”
“In those hardships, we learned more about ourselves,” Ellis added. “I’m going to say that without those struggles and losses, I don’t think we win the World Cup. We really had to turn the lens on ourselves, and we needed to be exposed and find answers.”
The question may be whether the national team will learn enough from their latest string of struggles before the 2019 World Cup.
The thing about the national team is that there have always been setbacks. There have been losses and embarrassments and steps backward. There have been coaches who have come and gone again. There have been lulls when the media and fans stopped caring about the team.
But the national team always eventually comes back stronger, better, fiercer. The culture of the team—its DNA, its fighting mentality—has outlasted every player, every coach, every World Cup, e
very Olympics, every collective bargaining agreement, every fight.
Whether they can win another Women’s World Cup in 2019 or an Olympic gold medal in 2020 almost doesn’t matter. They’ll be back eventually, because they always are.
That’s just the national team.
Acknowledgments
As a journalist who has followed and covered the U.S. women’s national team for many years, I always aspired to one day write a book about them—a story of defying the odds, of changing the sports landscape, of inspiring women. I’m grateful that my editor at Abrams Press, Jamison Stoltz, presented me that opportunity. He believed in me, and this book would not be possible without him, or without his assistant, Alicia Tan, and the entire team at Abrams.
I’d like to thank all the national team players who spoke to me on the record for this book and generously shared not just their time, but their memories and insights: Julie Foudy, Brandi Chastain, Briana Scurry, Kate Markgraf, Ann Orrison (Germain), Shannon Higgins (Cirovski), Tracey Bates (Leone), Shannon MacMillan, Tiffeny Milbrett, Danielle Slaton, Angela Hucles, Heather O’Reilly, Cat Whitehill, Heather Mitts, Hope Solo, Shannon Boxx, Becky Sauerbrunn, Carli Lloyd, Ali Krieger, Ashlyn Harris, Meghan Klingenberg, Alex Morgan, Megan Rapinoe, and Samantha Mewis.
My gratitude also extends to the players I’ve interviewed previously over the years. The players of the national team have always been gracious with the media and eager to promote the game they love. Years of interviews I’ve conducted—that I thankfully archived along the way—helped fill in this book.
I would also like to thank the coaches, administrators, team attorneys, and others I interviewed as well: Anson Dorrance, Lauren Gregg, Pia Sundhage, Tom Sermanni, Sunil Gulati, Robert Contiguglia, Alan Rothenberg, John Langel, Becca Roux, Rich Nichols, Jeffrey Kessler, Eva Cole, Marty Mankamyer, Joe Elsmore, Mick Hoban, JP Dellacamera, Donna de Varona, Marla Messing, John Hendricks, Jim Kennedy, Amos Hostetter Jr., Ben Gomez, Joe Cummings, Arnim Whisler, Jeff Plush, Jim Gabarra, Mike Lyons, Merritt Paulson, Brian Budzinski, and Chris Canetti. Special thanks, as well, go to Anthony DiCicco, son of the late Tony DiCicco, and Dan Levy, Mia Hamm’s agent.
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