When Nobody Was Watching

by Carli Lloyd

  “Why do you think you were cut from the U-21s?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think I was the coach’s type of player,” I say. “He didn’t seem to like me.”

  “What sort of teammate are you? Do you connect with people and support others?” he asks.

  “That wasn’t easy on this team. The team was full of cliques. It was hard to get any chemistry going. I don’t think I really had a chance to show them the type of player I am.”

  “Do you like to go on the attack? What are your strengths?” James asks.

  “I do like to attack and to take people on and send through balls, and I have a strong shot.”

  “Do you get back on defense at all?”

  “No, I don’t do that much. I just sit behind the strikers.”

  “Why?”

  “That’s what I’m best at. That’s what my coaches want me to do,” I say.

  Almost every answer I give James is full of excuses, or buck-passing. The amount of ownership I take is negligible.

  The session lasts for an hour. I am gassed about twenty minutes into it. I don’t mind all the questions because they give me time to rest. When we’re done, James says he wants to meet again on Saturday to do a fitness evaluation.

  “This wasn’t fitness, what we did tonight?” I ask.

  “No, this was just an evaluation of your skill,” he says.

  I don’t say anything. But all I can think about is what a mess I will be at the end of a fitness evaluation if I feel this way after I work only on skills. Still, there is something I like straightaway about James. He is very clear and direct. I like the questions he asks and the way he asks them. I like that he doesn’t baby me. He hasn’t talked about setting any standards or goals yet, but I can tell his are very high.

  I report to our designated meeting place, on the track at Lenape High School in Medford, New Jersey, on Saturday afternoon. James says he wants me to do the Cooper Fitness Test, running at a steady pace for as far as I can go over twelve minutes.

  “Without stopping?” I ask.

  “Yes, without stopping,” he says.

  After a brief warm-up, I am ready, and off I go around the track, one lap and another and another. I want to stop, but I don’t. I think I might throw up at one point but don’t do that either. I finally finish up. Eight laps—two miles—is considered excellent. I don’t even get to five—a mile and a quarter. All-American midfielder? Ha. My Cooper test is more worthy of a chain-smoker.

  I look over at James, and he is not saying anything or betraying any emotion. His silence is making me nervous.

  Next I have to do interval work, running 400 meters, then 200 meters and 100 meters. I go hard and do my best, but honestly, it’s not very good and I know it. During the rest intervals, James asks more questions.

  What’s up with all these questions? I think.

  When all the track work is done, I knock out as many sit-ups and push-ups as possible in two minutes, and then James asks me to sit down on the red bleachers. It’s just the two of us at an otherwise deserted track. I feel as if I’m about to have the biggest exam of my life and hope I don’t screw it up.

  “So tell me, what do you want to do with your soccer career?” he says.

  “I want to play for the U.S. Women’s National Team,” I say.

  James is quiet for a few moments. The quiet stokes more anxiety. Part of me wonders if he is going to laugh, or at least tell me that I am in fantasyland.

  Finally, James speaks.

  “Okay, this is the story as I see it,” he says. “Can you do it—make the U.S. Women’s National Team? Yes, you can do it.

  “Is it going to take a lot of work? It is going to take a whole lot of work. A whole lot. But if you put in that work, then I don’t see any reason why you can’t go as far as you want to go.”

  I take in his words and look up and down the red grandstand and then at this young Aussie guy a few feet away, with long dark hair and the thick-legged, athletic physique of a soccer player. I know very little about him, truthfully, but as I sit and listen to him I have an almost complete trust in what he is saying. I’m not sure I can even tell you why. He seems smart and very knowledgeable about the game, but more than that, he seems real. Usually it takes some time before I am ready to let my guard down around people I don’t know well, but with James it happens almost instantly. I am encouraged for the first time in a long while. I want to hear more, and James obliges, providing the most detailed evaluation of me as a player that I’ve ever gotten.

  It begins with him telling me about the Five Pillars, which he sees as the essential components of any world-class player.

  “The Five Pillars are technical skill, tactical awareness, physical power, mental toughness, and character,” James says. “To be an elite player you need to have them all. From what I see after this evaluation, you are strong in the first two. You are good on the ball and have skills that are very advanced. That’s vitally important, because not many players have that. You also show a keen tactical awareness, and that’s important as well.

  “But the other three? Those are areas where you are sorely lacking. You are not fit, and that’s going to be a big challenge, because fitness does not come naturally to you. Mentally, you are weak. You don’t push yourself hard and you are lazy, and you aren’t the sort of player who is going to thrive under pressure. And your character? That is poor. You make excuses and find people to blame and don’t want to look at your own role in things. You always have a reason why things are not working out, instead of focusing on what you can do to make them work out.”

  James Galanis has pretty much just shredded me, and somehow I am fine with it; I am not defensive at all, because I know he is 100 percent right. I don’t argue or push back on anything he is saying. It is almost as if I’ve been waiting for someone like this my whole life.

  He continues.

  “If you keep working at 80 percent, you won’t get anywhere,” he says. “You need to stop with the excuses, and blaming this person, that person, and the man in the moon. You need to start treating every training session, every game, as if it were a World Cup final. You need to be the hardest-working person out there, every time, no exceptions. You can’t just sit behind the strikers and feed them through balls and be a one-way player. You need to play box-to-box. You need to defend and do the dirty work. You complain about the coach not giving you enough time? You need to give the coach no choice but to give you time. That is what it will take, Carli.

  “So here’s the deal: soccer needs to be number one in your life. Not your boyfriend or your social life or anything else. Soccer. That’s what it will take. If it’s not number one, let’s go home right now, because it won’t work and we will be wasting our time. If I call you at 10:00 PM on a Saturday night and say, ‘Meet me at the field in a half-hour,’ I don’t want to hear, ‘Sorry, Coach, I am at a party.’ You turn around to your friends and say, ‘Sorry, everybody, but I have to go train.’ You have to be ready and willing to train on Christmas and Easter and Thanksgiving, and all the other days that other people are resting. That’s what kind of commitment it’s going to take. If you are willing to make these sorts of sacrifices, I will be happy to work with you. I will do everything I can to help you reach your goals, because I know you have a lot of ability and I believe you have greatness in you. It is up to you. We have to build this foundation, day by day. We have to build on the strengths you have and get to work on the things you don’t have. If you’re ready, then let’s get to work.”

  My head is spinning, but it’s spinning in a good way.

  “When do we start?” I ask James Galanis.

  Climbing into my Saturn, I feel as though I’ve just gotten an IV infusion of hope. Everything is looking up suddenly. It’s not just the prospect of working with James. It’s being back with Brian too. We bumped into each other at a party and talked for a while. It was natural and easy, and soon we reconnected. Being with Brian is where I want to be, w
here I always want to be. I share with him the news about James and what a difference I think he can make.

  “You only get one shot at this. I’m glad you are going for it,” Brian says.

  4

  National Attention

  I DON’T KNOW IT AT THE TIME, but James Galanis and I have much in common. As a player, he was a tough-tackling midfielder who could score from distance. He could slice balls deftly and pin balls near and far and change fields with a fifty-yard crossfield ping, just like me. And like me, he grew up in a working family that knew nothing about privilege or abundance.

  James’s parents come from a region in Greece called Symou, and neither of them had it easy. His father was the oldest of seven children, after his parents lost their firstborn child to illness. He dropped out of school in fifth grade to help his father—James’s grandfather—with his work in a small general store on a mountaintop. James’s mother dropped out a year earlier, in fourth grade, to work in the tobacco fields. With the economy in postwar Greece in a shambles, James’s parents joined a massive wave of Greeks who emigrated to Australia to get a fresh start. His father was eighteen years old when he left his homeland, his mother sixteen. They lived only ten kilometers apart in Greece but never met until they both arrived in Melbourne. After falling in love and getting married, they raised a family in a little hardscrabble town called Preston.

  James’s father found work in a factory, dying fabrics. His mother worked as a seamstress and later started an office-cleaning business. James was the middle of three children, and the language spoken at home was Greek. James still spoke no English by the time he got to be school age, which of course made for a miserable experience in an Anglo-dominant school. Other kids teased him. The teachers were frustrated with him because he couldn’t understand English. James couldn’t stand school and hated the way it made him feel. The only thing that saved him was soccer. James started playing at an early age at a park a short walk from his house, next to a public library. He picked it up quickly, and when he got a little older, his soccer skills made him popular both at school and in the neighborhood. Suddenly he wasn’t the dumb Greek kid anymore; he was the kid you wanted to have on your soccer team.

  James had two idols as a youngster. One was Diego Maradona, and the other was Bruce Lee. James was fascinated by the martial arts. When he discovered there was a top karate school, named Goju Ryu, right near his house, he would go there and sit on the steps outside and watch. One day when he was about eleven someone invited him in and introduced him to an instructor.

  “If you like karate so much, why don’t you just join the club?” the instructor asked.

  “My parents can’t afford it,” James said.

  “Mate, tell your parents if they pay $16 for a uniform, you can train for free,” the instructor said.

  James got his uniform, and from then on, if he wasn’t on the soccer field, he was in karate class, working his way up through the ranks—white, yellow, green—until he finally made it to black belt. At age fifteen, his instructor entered him in a tournament. James had no idea what was at stake or who he would be competing against. He showed up and won his first fight, and then his second and his third, and wound up making it to the state championship.

  James’s karate training taught him about discipline, hard work, and the importance of technique—breaking skills down to specific components and then executing them flawlessly to get the desired result. It also taught him about the power of the mind, as he learned to meditate and visualize what he wanted to do in his bouts.

  The rigors of his karate training did nothing but help James’s soccer. He began playing with a local adult team at age fifteen, getting paid to play by a club called Clifton Hill. Over his parents’ vehement objections, he dropped out of high school at sixteen to play soccer.

  “My father didn’t talk to me for two weeks, but I knew this is what I had to do,” James says. “School didn’t stimulate me. I had to get out of there.”

  James studied to be an electrician’s apprentice, but mostly he played soccer, getting paid on a per-game basis and earning a reputation as one of the premier players in the area. During one off-season, in 1992, he decided to visit his parents’ homeland and stayed on the island of Poros, where he met a group of other young people, including a college student from South Jersey named Colleen. She was on vacation from studying for her master’s in business administration. Colleen and James were attracted to each other. Things proceeded slowly at first, but then James came to the States during the 1994 World Cup, and the romance took off. James spent the next few years splitting his time between Australia and South Jersey, heading to the States when his soccer season was over and staying for three months or so, then traveling the 10,000 miles back home for another season. All the crisscrossing of the world got old, and after James and Colleen got married, they decided to settle in South Jersey, where James started coaching and ultimately launched his own business, Universal Soccer Academy, in 2000.

  I am not James’s first soccer pupil, but I quickly become a regular. I start training with James almost immediately after the evaluation. When the subject of what the training would cost comes up, James is typically straight up. He never forgot what the karate instructor did for him, I guess. It is time to pay it forward.

  “I am not going to charge you anything,” James says. “I will spend as much time working with you as you want, because I believe in you. All I ask is that this be your number-one priority. As long as that is the case, I will be here whenever you need me, for as long as it takes.”

  Apart from being a great soccer trainer and a black belt, James Galanis might be as good a long-range planner as I have ever seen. He doesn’t tell me right away, but soon after we start working together he maps out a three-phase master plan for me. Phase 1 (2004–2008) is getting me well entrenched with the U-21s and into the mix with the full national team. Phase 2 (2008–2012) is continuing to improve my fitness and sharpen my overall game and solidify my standing on the U.S. Women’s National Team starting eleven. Phase 3 (2012–2016) is to become a dominant player for the U.S.—and the best player in the world.

  It is good he doesn’t share this with me, because it might make my head explode. You don’t start fixating on the finish line of a marathon when you’re steps into the first mile.

  Suddenly, the entire focus of my soccer life has shifted, and the biggest impact is on Brian. I am training with James four or five times a week, often two sessions of three hours apiece. Once I am back in school at Rutgers, I make the 100-mile round trip down to South Jersey more times than I can count. James says soccer has to come first, and he isn’t kidding. If I am not actually working out with James, I am texting with him or talking to him about our workouts, or I am off doing fitness work. That typically happens at Laurel Acres Park, which has a stocked fishing lake, picnic grills, and five ball fields. I am not there to recreate. I am there to punish my body into shape. I do repeat sprints up the big hill that is Mount Laurel’s top sledding location. I run the hill forwards, and backwards. And occasional suicides. It is a killer supplement to the distance running I do on the streets. James wants me to be able to run ninety minutes. That is what I am pushing for. I am going hard, all the time, and it’s no different when I hop in on the training sessions James has with his Medford Strikers team, the Scream. James and I talk about the Five Pillars constantly. The pursuit of the Pillars rules my life. Brian takes the brunt of this—and his selflessness is staggering.

  It’s not easy when you have a boyfriend you love and you are spending most of your time away from him. Nor is it easy when you text and talk much more with your trainer than you do with him.

  Brian is an athlete and a competitor and knows as much as anyone about the singular focus that is required. Not once does he give me a hard time when I go off to train or am away for a tournament, or when I tell him I can’t go to a party or out on a date. One year his sister’s wedding is right in the middle of a national team cam
p.

  “I hate that I won’t be there with you, but there’s nothing I can do,” I tell him.

  “I know. I understand,” Brian says.

  I am away on his birthday, July 14, just about every year. When he graduates from golf school, the Golf Academy of American–Orlando, I miss that too. Lots of people would say they understand and then get resentful. Brian is as understanding as anyone I’ve ever known.

  “I know this is your dream and whatever you have to do to make it happen, I’m fine with. I want you to be happy,” he says. His devotion is so total that it might seem almost corny, or not of this world. Trust me, it is not corny, or fake. It is who Brian Hollins is.

  It makes me love him that much more.

  I am invited to Chris Petrucelli’s U-21 camp in 2004, and right from the start I feel as though I am a different player. I am not a pretender anymore. I am not even just a contender. At each monthly camp we have, leading up to the Nordic Cup, I am emerging as a leader, even in the eyes of the coach who stomped on my dream about nine months earlier.

  “It was as if Carli had become a different person,” Chris Petrucelli says. “I didn’t know her that well at that point. I don’t know what she was doing a year before, but it was clear that soccer had become her ultimate focus. You saw it every day. It was like she became a pro. Lots of kids out there say, ‘I want to be on the U.S. national team.’ Then there are kids who say, ‘I’m willing to do whatever it takes to be on the U.S. national team,’ and that’s where Carli was.”

  In late March we embark on a trip to China to play three games in the greater Shanghai area. It is the first of my many trips to China, and it is a body-clock shock, a culture shock, a diet shock. Honestly, if I had gone to Mars, I don’t think it would be as much a jolt. I am so amped up I can’t even sleep on the flight over, so I binge-watch movie after movie after movie on my portable DVD player. I am seriously jet-lagged when we land in Shanghai, of course, and that only heightens the sensory bombardment. I’m a Jersey girl, so I am used to crowds, but I have never seen anything like this. The whole city seems to be in a near state of gridlock, and when it’s not, cars will go anywhere and do anything. Tailgating is practically a sport. Pedestrians are treated as if they are a civic nuisance, of barely more concern than construction cones.