The National Team Read online

  As it turned out, the players didn’t have much leverage at all. There were no games to boycott. No World Cup draws in California to threaten to skip. The tactics the team had used successfully in years prior weren’t going to work here. They needed another way to force U.S. Soccer to come to the table.

  * * *

  While the U.S. Soccer Federation may have had the ultimate authority over soccer in the United States, there was an organization that had authority over U.S. Soccer: the U.S. Olympic Committee.

  The USOC was comprised of national governing body members from all Olympic sports, including soccer, which was represented by the U.S. Soccer Federation. The Olympic and Amateur Sports Act—the law that created the U.S. Olympic Committee—explicitly stated that all national governing bodies must offer the opportunity for athletes to compete “without discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, age, or national origin.”

  On November 15, 2004, John Langel wrote a letter to Jim Scherr, the CEO of the USOC, and he CC’d Dan Flynn, U.S. Soccer’s secretary general. It was a scathing rebuke of not just U.S. Soccer’s decision to cut the national team’s schedule in 2005, but the federation’s treatment of the team over the years up to that point.

  “These recent events are shocking,” Langel wrote, after summarizing the back-and-forth over the 2005 schedule. “It is unethical and violates the USSF’s obligations of transparency to misrepresent to United States Olympic athletes about the reason they will be denied the right to compete in protected competitions.”

  “Unfortunately, over the years, there have been a number of other telling illustrations of discrimination,” the letter continued.

  Then, Langel launched into a laundry list of allegations of how U.S. Soccer discriminated against the women:

  • USSF’s statements in the 1990s to the effect that they would not have a women’s national team if they were not required to do so;

  • USSF has attempted to persuade the Men’s National Team Players’ Association to structure its contracts in a way that would not result in any payments to the women under the same matrix;

  • USSF’s unwillingness to pay the women anywhere near equal compensation for successes comparable to the men’s (indeed, USSF is committed to paying the women less than the men even though the women have been far more successful on the playing field);

  • Unequal support with respect to items such as equipment managers, trainers, massage therapists, meals, hotel accommodations, and transportation;

  • The commitment of funds to pay for 14-year-old boys and not girls to live and train in Bradenton, Florida, while attending a private soccer academy;

  • The commitment of $10 million to build soccer stadiums for a for-profit professional league for men, Major League Soccer (“MLS”);

  • The commitment to loan or give millions to assist in the start-up of MLS. Correspondingly, when repeatedly asked by the Women’s United Soccer Association (“WUSA”) for start-up funding to help relaunch a league, US Soccer has repeatedly claimed “it is not in the business of building leagues”;

  • The commitment of funds to pay Major League Soccer reserve players, again using not-for-profit funds to support a for-profit league that is at no current risk of failure;

  • The recent decision to avoid scheduling events at or near certain MLS cities so as not to adversely affect the MLS while conducting the Women’s Post Olympic Victory Tour;

  • The decision to assign the USSF’s marketing rights to the marketing arm of Major League Soccer, thereby benefiting the MLS and ending any attempt to appeal to sponsors of women’s sports;

  • The recent and repeated refusal to even provide dates to meet with the women to negotiate a new Uniform Player Agreement even though the current agreement requires the parties to meet to negotiate in good faith at least sixty days before the expiration date of December 31, 2004; and

  • The refusal to even discuss a plan for the Team for the next four years, knowing the women stop getting paid on December 8, 2004.

  The letter went on for another five pages after that. It mentioned that U.S. Soccer’s board of directors appeared to be below the mandatory 20 percent threshold of women. It mentioned that U.S. Soccer had no official policy on ethics. It cited a report that claimed U.S. Soccer engaged in “back room politics” and was “an old boys club.” It was an all-out assault on the federation.

  “In the short run, the women are asking that USSF be directed to take the steps necessary to ensure that the women play in the upcoming protected competition in Portugal,” the letter concluded, referring to the Algarve Cup. “In the long run, the women are asking that USSF be directed to remediate the effects of its discrimination.”

  The goal of the letter, as brutal as it was, wasn’t really to convince the USOC to reprimand U.S. Soccer or revoke its national governing body status. Its aim was to get U.S. Soccer to cooperate with the national team and back off the plan to gut the 2005 schedule.

  The USOC told U.S. Soccer officials they had to cooperate with the team, and after some back-and-forth, the federation agreed to send the team to the 2005 Algarve Cup.

  “They were incredibly reluctant to cooperate until the USOC told them they had to cooperate,” Langel says.

  Tiffeny Milbrett, who returned to the team after April Heinrichs left, says the ordeal reinforced a second-class status for the women’s national team with the federation.

  “U.S. Soccer had to be threatened by the Olympic Committee that they weren’t managing their governing status toward the women appropriately,” she says. “It was like, Why do we have to deal with this discrimination and these attitudes? It was the Olympic Committee that changed things, not these men at the federation saying, Yes, the women deserve it.”

  Amid the fight over whether the team would play a real schedule in 2005, the team’s contract expired, bringing both issues to a head. Contract negotiations were ongoing throughout the back-and-forth over the schedule, and they were highly contentious.

  In the end, the national team ended up playing only nine games in 2005, which included the Algarve Cup and a few friendlies in the United States. That was better than what had been initially proposed by the federation, but it still fell well short of what had, by now, become the team’s usual schedule. As part of the contract negotiations, the federation gave the players a retroactive payment of around $50,000 each to make up for the quiet schedule they played. It was tantamount to an admission that the federation was wrong to “go dark” in 2005.

  But there were bigger financial concerns. For all the gains the national team had made in their previous contract, the deal didn’t look as good once the WUSA folded. The players were guaranteed a monthly stipend ranging between $3,500 and $6,500 per month, but only for eight months out of the year. On the low end, that was a salary of less than $30,000 per year, and there were no protections if a player got injured.

  The players still didn’t have enough financial stability—they weren’t earning actual salaries. Playing soccer for the federation was their job, and they needed to know they could be paid year-round. The negotiations to make that a reality would end up being the lengthiest and most difficult ones by that point. Negotiations started in mid-2003 and would go all the way to the end of 2005.

  In the end, U.S. Soccer and the national team agreed to a contract structure that was a pivotal step forward: finally, soccer became a full-time, year-round job for the players. The deal established three different tiers for players, all of whom would receive contracts that paid salaries. It wasn’t a stipend, it didn’t depend on whether U.S. Soccer held any games, and it wasn’t for a few months out of the year—it was an actual annual salary.

  The first-tier players who competed in the highest-profile competitions would earn $70,000, mid-tier would earn $50,000, and bottom tier $30,000. It was hardly a windfall for the players, but it allowed them to make a stable living playing soccer, and that’s all they had ever wanted.

  “The 20
05 contract was really the contract that secured them without regard to residency,” Langel says. “That’s when they earned a true salary and injury protection.”

  Robert Contiguglia says the idea for guaranteed income for the players was his. Langel vehemently denies that. Regardless of how it came about, however, it was a historic step forward for the players.

  “All the other soccer federations and in all the other sports, the women had to have outside jobs, working as secretaries or as coaches or other employment, because the pay for playing for the national team wasn’t adequate,” Contiguglia says. “So, we were the first as far as I know in the world to do that, giving them a guaranteed income. They got paid whether they played or not.”

  * * *

  The most vocal players on the national team got what they wanted when they pushed out April Heinrichs as coach. The only problem? They wouldn’t get to decide who took her place.

  While U.S. Soccer interviewed several candidates for the job, Greg Ryan, who was Heinrichs’s assistant, took over in the interim. Ryan was among those being interviewed, but he wasn’t a frontrunner—at least not among the players.

  As Hope Solo later put it in her book, Solo: A Memoir of Hope: “Of all the candidates, the one who seemed the least qualified was Greg Ryan. Before coming to the national team, he had coached at Colorado College, never earning an NCAA berth there before becoming April’s vanilla assistant. The consensus on the team was that we needed a fresh start, and Greg was a leftover from the past.”

  Other candidates reportedly being considered for the job included former coach Tony DiCicco and University of Santa Clara coach Jerry Smith, who was Brandi Chastain’s husband. But this was a new generation of players—Mia Hamm, Julie Foudy, and Joy Fawcett had all retired—and the remaining national team wanted an outsider. They wanted someone new, like Sweden’s Pia Sundhage. But the federation, which was in the middle of the contentious 2005 contract negotiations with the national team, wasn’t exactly keen to follow the team’s wishes.

  The players unwittingly helped Ryan’s case for the job with a string of dominant wins at the March 2005 Algarve Cup, beating France, Finland, Denmark, and Germany without conceding a goal.

  On April 8, 2005, the federation announced that Greg Ryan would become the new head coach and dropped the interim tag. Players suspected it was a power play by U.S. Soccer. When the hire was announced, one player anonymously told the San Diego Union-Tribune’s Mark Zeigler: “The federation wants to show us who’s running the show.” Hope Solo later said: “It seemed to me that Greg was a pawn in a power struggle.”

  Robert Contiguglia admits he hired Ryan on April Heinrichs’s recommendation. Some players, declining to speak on the record, long suspected that was the case—they are convinced that Heinrichs knew the players didn’t want Ryan for the job and that he wouldn’t be a good fit. Recommending him was a final dig, they believe, in the back-and-forth between the players and the coach they had butted heads with for nearly five years.

  Whether the players favored Greg Ryan to be their new coach didn’t matter now. He got the job, and the players had to abide by whatever decisions he made.

  PART II

  CHAPTER 11

  “If There Isn’t a Goalkeeper Controversy, Why Make One?”

  One of Greg Ryan’s first acts as coach was to cut Brandi Chastain from the team.

  There was no last call-up as a courtesy or the opportunity to let her try to earn a spot. One day, shortly after he took over, Chastain’s national team career was suddenly over.

  Chastain asked to have a meeting to talk through it. She told him: “Look, I’m not assuming I should be on the team. But I do think the fair thing to do is to give me a chance. Put me on the field with the players you believe belong, and then everyone will know.”

  She was 36 and not in her prime, to be sure. But it’s also not unheard of for a top defender to keep playing at a high level at that age. Maintaining a veteran presence on the team would also have its benefits.

  Chastain, who had 192 caps for the national team, just wanted a tryout. Ryan met with her in person, where he told her, to her face, that he had no plans to call her into the national team ever again.

  “He flew up to San Jose and we had a meeting at the hotel where he was staying,” Chastain remembers. “I can’t say I begged, but I asked very strongly to be given the opportunity, and I was denied that.”

  Chastain had watched teammates like Mia Hamm and Julie Foudy end their careers with testimonial matches—the special farewell games that important players earn—but she was never going to get one. Her last game was the final stop of the post-Olympics victory tour in 2004, the same last game as Hamm and Foudy, only Chastain didn’t know it at the time.

  “It wasn’t on my radar—it wasn’t supposed to happen like that,” Chastain says. “He was the assistant coach. I’m not sure how he became coach of the national team, to be honest, and there was no discussion.”

  Shannon MacMillan, another veteran, tells a similar story. She, too, was surprised to find herself left off rosters, but in her case, it was because Greg Ryan had reassured her that she was in his plans. As time went on and she still hadn’t gotten a call, at age 31 she gave up hope of ever returning to the team. Her career ended at 176 caps.

  “I was like, Enough’s enough,” she says. “That’s kind of what forced my hand into retiring. I just got sick and tired of the politics and the B.S.”

  Briana Scurry took some time off after the Olympics before she returned to the fold, but the team under Ryan largely skewed toward new players. Tiffeny Milbrett returned to the team with April Heinrichs gone but was quickly cut, ending her career at 32 years old. With some of the veterans pushed out of the way, there was room for up-and-coming talent.

  Ryan’s new roster had a dozen players 23 years or younger and a dozen players with five or fewer caps under their belt. One of them was a midfielder named Carli Lloyd. Ryan gave Lloyd her first cap on July 10, 2005, during a friendly in Portland, Oregon, versus Ukraine just before her 23rd birthday.

  At the time, Lloyd wasn’t a well-rounded player. She wasn’t strong defensively. She wasn’t consistent. But she had lofty ambitions and allowed her wildest dreams to produce special, unexpected moments.

  A native of Delran, New Jersey, a suburban town near Philadelphia, Lloyd had risen through the youth ranks of U.S. Soccer on her natural abilities as an attacker with a nose for the goal. When she had gotten cut from the under-21 national team in 2003, the coach, Chris Petrucelli, told her it wasn’t for lack of talent—she just hadn’t worked hard enough.

  Lloyd eventually hired a personal trainer, James Galanis, whose role morphed into something of a life coach, mentor, and spiritual advisor. Together, they set a course to make Lloyd the greatest soccer player in the world, which started with having Lloyd earn back her spot on the U-21 team. She did that, and in 2005, with her first cap, Lloyd took another major step toward her goal.

  Though Lloyd would describe an up-and-down relationship with Greg Ryan in her memoir, When Nobody Was Watching, he ultimately became the one who gave her the chance to develop into a core national team player.

  As a coach, Ryan emphasized letting players make their own decisions on the field and expressing themselves how they wanted—a stark contrast to April Heinrichs.

  “For a long time—and I think this may be with American coaching—we want to be the ones to tell the players what to do,” Ryan told reporters. “But soccer isn’t a game where that works very well at the highest level, not unless you’re a lot better than everybody else. I’m giving some of the responsibility and freedom back to the players.”

  In another one of his first moves, Ryan quickly anointed Hope Solo the team’s new No. 1 goalkeeper. Solo was a dominant force in goal. Her natural athleticism was one reason for that, but another one was her fearlessness. Nothing seemed to rattle her between the posts.

  Many of the players on the national team had similar middle-class, su
burban upbringings—they were, in some ways, the personification of the so-called American dream. But Solo’s background was different. She was conceived during a conjugal visit when her mother had visited her father in prison. When she was 7, her father was arrested for kidnapping her and her brother—police with guns drawn surrounded her father as he took Solo to run an errand at the bank.

  She grew up hoping soccer would help her escape her hometown, Richland, Washington, which happened to be where plutonium was created for Fat Man, the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, during World War II. Locals embraced the city’s uneasy place in history—Richland High School’s logo features a mushroom cloud and its mascot is the Bombers. A popular cheer when Solo was in school was: “Nuke ’em, nuke ’em, nuke ’em ’til they glow!”

  Solo had always been a forward growing up—she scored 109 goals for the Bombers and reached a state championship her senior year. But when her academy team had a goalkeeper shortage, she stepped in, even as she continued as a forward for her school. It was as a goalkeeper that she caught the attention of the youth national team.

  Solo’s tall, muscular stature and far-reaching wingspan were ideal physical attributes for a goalkeeper, and her aggressive style in net made her difficult to beat. From the point Ryan named Solo the No. 1 goalkeeper, she would go on to record a stunning 55-game unbeaten streak.

  But that streak wouldn’t come easily. First, Greg Ryan had to make the worst coaching mistake in the history of the national team—a miscalculation that fractured the team and tested the culture built by the players who came before.

  * * *

  The national team was two days from the 2007 World Cup semifinal versus Brazil when an assistant coach leaned over to Hope Solo. Solo was sitting at a table in the team’s meal room at their hotel in China when the assistant told her Greg Ryan wanted to talk to her once she was finished eating dinner.