When Nobody Was Watching

by Carli Lloyd

  Right from the start, I can see how devoted Brian is, how he would do anything for me. He is further along on the romantic-feelings front than I am in the beginning, but I catch up fast. If I am not studying or playing soccer, I am pretty much with Brian. His dad has a boat and a few WaveRunners, and we like to go out and zip around on them in Rancocas Creek, and I join his family on camping trips to Raystown Lake in Pennsylvania. In one part of the lake there are three different outcroppings where you can jump off into the water. The lower one is maybe a ten-foot drop. Next is probably a twenty-foot drop, and the top level must be forty or fifty feet up. It’s insanely high. I do not scare easily, and neither does Brian. I have never met a roller coaster I wouldn’t go on. The hairier the ride, the more time upside down, the steeper the vertical drop, the better. Brian is the same way. We jump off the top outcropping far over Raystown Lake, feet first. By the time I hit the water, I feel as if I am close to the speed of light.

  I love it.

  Brian’s family has another favorite—and much saner—activity at Raystown Lake. They all like to golf, and they are big hitters. They have this contest in which they tee up the ball on one side of the water and see if they can hit it to the other side, well over 300 yards away. Nobody makes it, but they get close. One time I tell them I want a shot at it. I have just climbed out of the water, in a soaking-wet bikini. I get a club and stand over the ball and am determined to mash it, far over the water, and show them I can compete. I draw the club back and come through the ball with all the power I can muster . . . so much so that the driver flies out of my hands, winging high and far into the lake. The club goes farther than the ball. They all think it’s hilarious. I feel terrible about losing the club. It was Brian’s cousin’s brand-new driver. We all go out into the water and dive down and try to find it, with no luck.

  Next time I will towel off before I try to hit a ball over the lake, I tell myself.

  The outings with Brian and his family are so nourishing, so much fun. The more I am with him, the more I appreciate the goodness of his heart and the steadiness of his demeanor. I struggle so much with my pursuit of perfection in other parts of my life, with doubts about how I am going to measure up. I don’t have to reach any standard when I am with him, don’t have to be anything but myself. You hear people talk often about unconditional love, but Brian demonstrates it every minute we are together. Every birthday or special occasion, he fills up almost every inch of the card with his thoughts and feelings. If we share an appetizer or a dessert, he always insists that I take the last bite. It’s a small thing, but it means a lot to me.

  Early on in our relationship, I realize how lucky I am to have a guy like Brian to care about me. I think, He would be a wonderful man to spend my life with. I’ve never been more right about anything in my life.

  2

  Strikers Forever

  WHEN I AM TWELVE YEARS OLD, I have what feels like a colossal, crush-my-world setback. It’s an own-goal loss in a World Cup final, a walk-off home run for the other guys in a World Series. I have done all I can with the Delran Dynamite, and I decide to try out for the South Jersey Select team, which is the destination for all of the elite players in the area. If you are any kind of player, this is where you want to be.

  If your goal is to play at the highest level, this is where you need to be.

  I am a star player for the Dynamite, but even at this age I know that doesn’t mean too much. I need to trade up my local pond for a bigger body of water. I need to get in with the big fish and see if I can swim.

  I go to the Select tryout, and from the time I get out of my dad’s car the experience is daunting. I see platoons of kids milling around everywhere, more than I’ve ever seen at a tryout before. Almost all of them are much bigger than me. I am used to being one of the smallest kids out there. It’s never mattered before, so I try to talk myself into not being intimidated.

  You can play with any of them, I tell myself.

  I want to believe that, but do I really know it’s true? Isn’t that why I am here—to see how I measure up? Tryouts are a strange phenomenon, a nonstop parade of insecurities and doubts. You look this way and that and make snap judgments about people’s size, strength, character, and playing ability, all of it pretty much based on nothing. You compare yourself constantly to all of those around you:

  Whoa, that girl looks tough.

  Geez, that girl looks mean.

  And that kid over there, wow, she looks really athletic. You think I can take her 1 v. 1?

  When you do something well at a tryout, you instantly look up to see if any of the evaluators have noticed, hoping to catch them writing down your number and nodding to each other. If you do something poorly, you hope they were checking a text message or watching somebody else screw up. It’s wickedly competitive, all of us wannabe Select players going for the same blue ribbon, as if we were prize pigs at the county fair, all of us desperately hoping that the evaluators—these strangers with clipboards who suddenly are the most important people in your life—are favorably impressed.

  Part of you wishes you could help them along:

  Hey, did you see that first touch? That through ball? Can you tell how much it means to me to be on this team?

  You want to holler all these things. You want to tell them how you don’t just love soccer—you need it the way most other people need oxygen. You wish that you could give them a reading of your desire, but you do not get a private audience. So you just play. You try to be at your absolute best and to make an impression.

  You do everything you can to win the blue ribbon and make the team.

  The tryout ends. The list is posted. Your name is not on it. The evaluators have had a good look at everyone and have decided you are not Select quality. There is no gray in tryouts. You either make the cut or you don’t.

  I do not make it.

  I am devastated.

  It is the first time this has happened in my years of playing soccer. I never want to show the world my emotions, and this time is no exception, but in my room it’s a waterworks show beneath the Ronaldinho poster, a maelstrom of hurt and anger and disappointment that won’t let up. I keep replaying the tryout in my head, wondering what I could have done differently. It’s a pointless exercise, of course. It just flings open the doors to self-torture.

  My parents say all the right things.

  “You can learn from this and use it to make yourself better,” my dad says. “You can turn this negative into a positive.”

  “This happens to everybody at some point. It isn’t the end of the world, even though it might feel like it,” my mom says.

  I am not able to take in much of the comfort, though. I am not sure how long I beat myself up for not making Select, but it goes on for a while, until I get a letter in the mail. It is from a man named Joe Dadura. He is starting a U-13 team at a club in a nearby town. It’s called the Medford Strikers. He says he saw me at the Select tryout and thinks I am a good player. He is reaching out to other players who he believes have potential. New Jersey is a congested little state mostly associated with its Turnpike and its Shore, its straight-talking people and traffic tie-ups, but it’s also a place that produces as many good soccer players per capita as any region in the country. Joe Dadura’s goal is to find enough of these players and coach them the right way and build a team that can compete with anyone.

  Soon I am wearing number 10 in the red, white, and black of the Medford Strikers and traveling three times a week to Lumberton, New Jersey, a township that was once a stop on the Underground Railroad; runaway slaves hid in the bottom of a well at a house on Creek Road.

  In no time at all I am completely sold on life as a Striker. I am part of a core of players that includes Joe’s daughter, Kacy, Maureen Tohidi, Venice Williams, and Quinn Sellers. They are really good players and even better teammates. We do well right off, and it all starts with Mr. D, as we call him, a kind and warmhearted guy who pushes us hard and is supercompetitive but still
creates a nurturing and fun team atmosphere.

  Mr. D is not a typical soccer coach in any way. He didn’t grow up playing or come up through the coaching ranks; he taught himself the game by reading books, going to clinics, and watching videos. Eager to coach his three daughters, he wanted to learn enough to be able to do it. Mr. D owns a tire business, but as far as I can tell he spends every spare second coaching soccer, with his Medford Strikers hat and jacket his regular uniform.

  It doesn’t take me long to figure out that the Medford Strikers are the best team I’ve ever been a part of. From the back line to the front line, there are strong players all over the field. Mr. D’s emphasis is on quick ball movement, clean touches, building a possession-centered attack and sound, stout defense in the back. I am in center midfield, still a half-pint, relying on technical skill and quick, darting runs as I probe for defensive weaknesses, knocking the ball wherever it needs to be knocked.

  I want to be in the middle of everything, all the time, on the field and off. Maureen says I remind her of a gnat, flitting here and there, finding fresh ways to annoy people, whether it’s at practice or on our trips to tournaments, which seem to come up almost every weekend. I jump on people’s backs when they don’t expect it. I sneak up from behind and try to trip them up. I steal their candy and squeeze my way onto a sofa when there is no room for a regulation-sized person. My teammates start calling me PITA, as in Pain In The Ass. PITA doesn’t just become my nickname: it becomes my identity, and even part of my email address.

  I am in constant motion, an undersized prankster on the prowl, but on the field I am all business. I am out there to compete and to win, as if little PITA undergoes a personality transplant the moment she crosses the line onto the field. We are in Florida one time for a big holiday tournament, and it’s raining hard and the field is a mess. We are wearing all-white uniforms. I get pushed from behind by an opponent—no whistle—and go face first into the mud. When I get to my feet, I am covered in the stuff.

  “I would’ve been furious, but Carli just brushed off as much of the mud as she could and kept playing,” Venice says later. “She wasn’t a fighter or someone to get in your face, but she was going to get her payback by doing a crazy move and scoring on you, and that’s what she did this time. On the next play she beat somebody and scored on a long shot.”

  Venice is right. I get my revenge where it counts the most. Seeing the opponent have to take the ball out of their net is one of the best feelings on earth.

  Mr. D encourages unselfishness and team-oriented play, and it’s what I love most about this team. Kacy is a really good player, a midfielder who plays alongside me, but Mr. D doesn’t build the team around his daughter or around any one player. We all feel important and valued on the Medford Strikers. There isn’t any griping or sniping, and nobody acts as if she is the person who makes the whole thing go. The ball moves, and the glory is spread around. It’s a beautiful thing when that happens. And because no petty stuff is going on, we have the best time at practices and tournaments and fun follows us around. In one out-of-state tournament, there’s a boys’ hockey event going on at the same time and we are sharing a hotel with a bunch of young hockey players. Mr. D has a strict curfew of 10:00 PM before early games, but this time a teammate of mine and I decide to venture out to see where the hockey players are hanging out. It’s more mischievous than anything, but when we are not back by the time Mr. D does his bed check, we are toast.

  “You’re sitting out the first half tomorrow,” Mr. D tells me.

  I know better than to try to talk him out of it. I never blow curfew again.

  Lots of times at the end of practice, I have fun without running afoul of any rules. I go to the center of the field and line up a couple of balls on the midfield line. I look toward the empty goal, about fifty yards away. I take a few steps back, sprint up to the first ball, plant my left foot beside it, and swing my right leg into it as if it were a sledgehammer, pounding it as far as I can. I do the same thing with the remaining balls, then go round them up and do it again. When I hit the ball just right, I can just about reach the goal. It’s a great feeling when I do. I wonder what it would be like to try to score from there in a game.

  Just as Mr. D had planned, the Medford Strikers emerge as a major player in Jersey soccer. Our core five players—Kacy, Maureen, Quinn, Venice, and me—stay together for six years. We win two consecutive New Jersey State Cup titles and soar into the national rankings. But even as we do I struggle at times with my own expectations. I want every touch to be immaculate, every pass to be on target, every shot to find the back of the net. Of course that doesn’t happen, but I am not very good at cutting myself any slack. Mistakes stay with me, gnaw at me. Maureen, our captain, has radar for it and helps snap me out of it. In one game I take a shot from distance, a good ten yards outside the 18, and miss badly. Two more shots follow, both way off target, and then both of my hands go to my head and my head drops.

  Those are the telltale signs. Maureen doesn’t want to see it, or hear it.

  “Forget about it, PITA. Keep plugging away. You’ll get the next one,” she says.

  It’s a pointed, on-field intervention, and I need it. Maureen has a great knack for helping me get through the thicket of self-criticism. She knows when I start to lose it almost before I do. I am still learning to deal with adversity and not to let my emotions careen out of control, particularly when I am thrust into a new situation.

  I make the New Jersey Olympic Development Program team in 1996, at age fourteen, all five feet, one inch, and 105 pounds of me. The way ODP works is that, at the end of the year, all the players in the program from the thirteen states in Region I attend a regional camp at the University of Massachusetts. The camp lasts almost a week, and at the end of it a Region I pool team consisting of the top eighteen players is selected. Every morning during the week a list of the players who have made the pool team for that day is posted. Then a final list is posted on the day the camp closes.

  I am a mess of nerves and anxiety the whole week. For one thing I am terribly homesick and call home to talk to my parents all the time, but the bigger issue is that I’m constantly making comparisons. I look around and see this staggering assemblage of soccer talent and convince myself that I am out of my league. That this is not true is irrelevant; it’s the tape that is playing in my head, and it isn’t doing me any favors. In fact, it holds me back big-time. It’s hard to play freely when the gears of your brain never stop churning.

  I do not make the final posted list. It’s a major blow, but it teaches me an invaluable lesson about confidence. I learn that if you don’t approach the game with the right mentality, you have no shot to deliver your best. I learn that, as the saying goes, “to compare is to despair.” Gradually—very gradually—I also learn that I am the most free, having the most fun and playing my best, when I am focused completely on my own game, not worrying about what everybody else is doing. I learn this the same way I learn how to execute a side volley or a chest trap: by doing the training, doing the reps, because it is only through rigorous training that you are going to get where you want to go. I keep working at focusing on my own game. It is my solution to every challenge.

  3

  Smackdown

  FOR A GUY WHOSE DAY JOB IS TIRES, Mr. D sure gets a lot of traction out of his Medford Strikers. We become one of the top teams in the country, which gets us into high-profile tournaments, which in turn brings packs of college coaches to our tournament games, with scholarship offers in tow.

  Maureen Tohidi is offered a full ride to Syracuse. Quinn Sellers accepts a scholarship from Villanova, and Venice Williams (University of South Carolina–Spartanburg) and Kacy Dadura (Niagara) do the same.

  We’re not the Phillies or Eagles, but the Medford Strikers become quite a sensation in South Jersey. There are photos and glowing write-ups about us in the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Burlington County Times, and South Jersey’s Courier-Post. Soccer fans know about us and ou
r championship pedigree. My father, the unofficial chronicler of our acclaim, carefully cuts out all the clippings he can gather. He always brings them up to my room to make sure I know about them.

  “Look what they wrote in the paper,” he says. Then he takes the clips down to his desk in the garage, where he spends hours—and I mean dozens of hours over many years—arranging and pasting and painstakingly putting together the most comprehensive scrapbooks you have ever seen. My dad never wants to miss anything, and I don’t think he ever has.

  I have interest from dozens of colleges, an exciting if overwhelming thing to look forward to after my four years at Delran High School, where our team goes to two state finals and I’m named Burlington County Player of the Year in my junior and senior years. I boil the competition down to two finalists: West Virginia and Rutgers. I really like the West Virginia coach, Nikki Izzo-Brown. She has built a strong program, and talking to her convinces me that she can help make me a better player and catapult me to a higher place on the national radar. That is the whole goal—to get seen by the talent evaluators at U.S. Soccer and make my way onto a national team. (I am named to the U-18 national team in 1999, but since we never have an actual camp or compete against other countries, it feels like a credential on paper only.)