The National Team

by Caitlin Murray

  It was April Heinrichs, the coach of the national team. Mia Hamm was injured, leaving an open spot in camp, and Heinrichs wanted to bring O’Reilly in for the 2002 Algarve Cup.

  “It was surreal,” O’Reilly says. “We thought that somebody was playing a trick on us.”

  If the phone call was surreal, O’Reilly’s first training camp was even more so. She admits that if a veteran like Brandi Chastain or Julie Foudy or Kristine Lilly called for the ball, she just immediately passed it because, well, why wouldn’t she?

  “I wanted them to like me and I wanted to fit in,” O’Reilly says. “So, it took a little while for me to feel like I truly belonged. Like, no, I didn’t just win a contest to train with the team for a day.”

  Nicknamed HAO for her initials—pronounced “hey-oh”—Heather Ann O’Reilly grew up in East Brunswick, a suburban town outside New York City that happened to be what she calls “a soccer-savvy community.” She knew more about the Women’s World Cup than most kids her age—her dad happened to be in Sweden for a business trip during the 1995 tournament and brought her back a T-shirt when she was 10.

  Unlike the veterans—players who admit they knew nothing of the national team when they first joined—O’Reilly grew up keenly aware of the U.S. team’s significance. At the opening game of the 1999 World Cup, she was there at Giants Stadium in the crowd with her youth soccer team. She jokes that she was more excited to see *NSYNC, who performed during the opening ceremony, but then she saw Mia Hamm score the tournament’s first goal, and it inspired her.

  “I remember being in the supermarket after they won and seeing the magazine covers and thinking that was so cool and I want to do that one day,” O’Reilly says. “The ’99 World Cup solidified that it was my dream.”

  Now, she was there with the national team at training camp and feeling like she was out of her depth. But what O’Reilly had going for her was an intensity and mental toughness that would eventually carry her to a 14-year career with the national team. Her friends teased her for being Mia Hamm’s replacement on the roster—how could O’Reilly possibly replace a legend like Hamm?—but she started to belong soon enough.

  The way it worked was that respect was earned and not given on the national team. That was a culture set by the earliest members, and it endured even as players came and went.

  When Cat Whitehill, a native of Birmingham, Alabama, first arrived as a teenager, she knew she made a bad first impression. She had a poster of the 1991 World Cup–winning team on her wall growing up, and she was more than a little starstruck when she walked onto the team bus for the first time and saw Mia Hamm, Julie Foudy, and Kristine Lilly seated in front. Whitehill had a pillow in her hand because she hated the thick pillows hotels used—and it came in handy when that moment on the bus overwhelmed her.

  “All I remember is ducking my head into my pillow and running to the back of the bus before even saying anything to them,” Whitehill says, laughing. “I was so scared because these were my idols and I was going to play with them.”

  It wasn’t until she had a few caps under her belt that Whitehill won over the veterans. She thinks the turning point was a crunching tackle she delivered in an exhibition rivalry game versus Canada.

  “That was the first time I earned respect from them,” says White-hill, who first played under her maiden name, Cat Reddick. “Slowly but surely they welcomed me in because they liked my attitude and that I was a hard worker.”

  O’Reilly will never forget learning what it meant to be competitive in the national team environment. The veterans—including Mia Hamm, Julie Foudy, Brandi Chastain, and Kristine Lilly—all lived together in a house in Manhattan Beach, California, during residency camp. The team would split up into groups to play small-sided five-on-five games, and O’Reilly would watch them scrap and fight like they were playing in a World Cup final.

  “I remember this one day during training, they were all on opposing teams, and some people won and went home happy, and some went home pissed off,” says O’Reilly, a University of North Carolina graduate. “The next day, they were laughing about how some of them didn’t speak until that evening.”

  Everything demanded 100 percent effort. That’s why this team was so good.

  That, in a nutshell, was the culture: If you played hard and could keep up, you were one of them. People may have thought you were on the national team once you got a call-up, but that’s not what it really took to be part of the national team.

  “One of the things that was really special about the veteran players was the way they were able to stay competitive but at the same time find a way to welcome younger players into the squad,” Danielle Slaton says. “The culture they established, that was a gift I didn’t really appreciate at the time. The culture really came from the players because they, quite frankly, outlasted all the coaches. They were the ones who were the guiding force. It really was their team.”

  As much as the arrival of new players sparked alarm among the veterans early on, finding a pipeline of young talent was something April Heinrichs had to do. It was at the core of her coaching philosophy—that every player had to keep fighting for her spot—and it’s ostensibly what U.S. Soccer wanted when they hired her.

  Even if Heinrichs would not be the coach to eventually enjoy the career primes of some of the raw, young talent she brought into the program and reap the full benefits, players like Heather O’Reilly, Hope Solo, Shannon Boxx, and Abby Wambach would go on to have massively influential runs with the team. The crop of skillful players Heinrichs was bringing into the team, perhaps more than anything else, would be her lasting stamp on the program, even as it cycled through coaches.

  But first, the 2003 World Cup was around the corner, and she needed her best players to be ready right away. Many of them were veterans—and that raised a lot of questions.

  Could the USA’s biggest stars still compete, or should they have retired as World Cup champions after 1999? Was the American squad simply past its prime? Media outlets doubted “the Americans’ aging back line” anchored by Brandi Chastain and Joy Fawcett. Long think pieces were written about Mia Hamm and whether, at age 31, she could still lead the attack.

  As one columnist put it: “This is an experienced U.S. team. Alas, by women’s soccer standards, it’s also an aging one. You won’t hear Heinrichs bragging about team speed. If you watched four years ago, you know these women. Hamm is 31. Joy Fawcett is 35, just a few months older than Chastain. Julie Foudy and Kristine Lilly are both 32. Why are they still here? A good question.” The column concluded without an answer.

  The American squad would be the oldest one at the World Cup with an average age of 27.6 years.

  It wasn’t that Heinrichs was resting on her laurels or shied away from spotting new talent. But when she named Torrance, California, native Shannon Boxx to the team’s pre–World Cup camp, she told her on the phone before it started: “I want to see how well you do, but you don’t have a chance to make the World Cup team.”

  Boxx, a disruptive and fierce midfield presence, much like the retired Michelle Akers, remembers: “It was like a dagger right into my heart. I don’t even have a chance for this? I was still excited, but that kind of blew the wind out of my sails. Then it actually ended up being a great thing because I was super free in the way I played.”

  Heinrichs, realizing that Boxx’s physical play and ability to lock down the midfield would be an asset, named the new player to the 2003 World Cup roster before she even earned her first national team cap. Newer talents like Abby Wambach, Aly Wagner, and Cat Whitehill made it, too. But Heinrichs was also counting on veteran experience to guide those younger players.

  ‘‘I would say this is a perfect blend of wisdom and composure, energy and enthusiasm, young professionals and some great stories within this roster,’’ Heinrichs told reporters once the roster was announced ‘‘People ask me, Who can step up? Anyone can move up to be a heroine.’’

  * * *

  If the Ameri
cans were primed to win in 1999, the 2003 World Cup felt very different.

  The tournament was supposed to be held in China, but four months before it was set to start, FIFA moved the event due to fears over the SARS virus, which had killed more than 100 people and had no known cure. The United States was deemed the best option to host the tournament on short notice, but the timing of the event planned for China—September and October—was the busiest season in American sports. Not only would scheduling games in busy venues be tougher, the games would never match the attention and excitement from the 1999 World Cup four years prior.

  Then, there was the news in the middle of the national team’s World Cup camp that the WUSA was folding. Julie Foudy was in her hotel room getting ready to head to practice when she got word the league was officially being shut down. She delivered the news to her teammates, who were devastated but still had to train.

  “There will be a few days that we will have to deal with the black cloud, and then we will have to put it behind them,” coach April Heinrichs told reporters. “I have great faith in these women and know they will be able to handle it during the World Cup.”

  “I wish we would not have this distraction, absolutely,” Julie Foudy said from training camp days before the World Cup was set to begin. “But the reality of the situation and our team is that we are not genetically predisposed to giving up.”

  And so, when the Americans stepped out onto the field for their opening group game of the 2003 World Cup, versus Sweden, it was a bit like sharks smelling blood in the water. Their resolve to win was as strong as ever.

  The national team played a ruthless game at RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C.—it was evident from the 13th minute, when goalkeeper Briana Scurry flattened Swedish striker Hanna Ljungberg in the box, earning a yellow card in the process. The Americans would top Sweden, 3–1, with Hamm assisting on all three goals.

  “It’s the World Cup,” Scurry said of the physical nature of the match. “You’ve gotta bring it, and if you don’t, you’ll go home early.”

  In the next match, against Nigeria in Philadelphia four days later, Hamm played like a woman who wanted to prove her doubters wrong.

  Over her career, she had always been the most reluctant of stars. When reporters shoved microphones in her face and pushed her to talk about herself, she heaped praise onto her teammates. She rarely took penalty kicks and famously tried to get out of the shootout at the 1999 World Cup. But in the 2003, it was as if she was tired of being questioned about whether or not she could still lead the team.

  When the Americans got an early penalty kick against Nigeria, Hamm announced that she was going to take it and then emphatically buried it. When she followed that up minutes later with a screaming free kick that sailed some 35 yards into the Nigerian net, it was a statement all its own. It was as if she was telling the world: “Hey, I’m still Mia Hamm.”

  But then, with the Americans having already secured their spot in the knockout round, Heinrichs rested Hamm for the third group-stage match, versus North Korea, three days later in Columbus, Ohio. It was a controversial decision, not least because Heinrichs had told reporters herself: “If you take Mia out, you run the risk of turning the faucet off.”

  It was a risk, to be sure.

  The reason the Americans dominated so thoroughly over their first two matches was largely due to do Hamm’s efforts. Though the Americans sailed past North Korea, 3–0, without her, that didn’t necessarily mean anything—the Americans should have beaten North Korea, no matter the lineup. Now the knockout round was about to start, and there would be no easy games.

  Heinrichs, for her part, was keenly aware that her every decision would be scrutinized.

  “In coaching, you’re either a jackass or a genius,” Heinrichs said at one point during the tournament.

  Mia Hamm wouldn’t score again for the rest of the tournament. While Abby Wambach stepped up to score the only goal of the match in the quarterfinal versus Norway, there were no goals for the Americans to be found in the 2003 World Cup semifinal versus Germany. The Americans lost in a crushing 3–0 defeat, and Germany advanced to the final, where they beat Sweden to win the tournament.

  “A lot of us played in the WUSA, so we knew that they were not better than we are,” German forward Birgit Prinz told reporters afterward. “In ’99, their pressure scared us. Everybody was like, Oh, my god, don’t give me the ball! This time it was different. We knew we could play one-on-one and beat them.”

  The Americans were thoroughly outplayed. They looked hesitant on the ball. They looked like they lacked confidence and weren’t sure of what to do. The rigid, direct tactical approach the team took under Heinrichs wasn’t working. The German team was just better all around.

  As Grant Wahl of Sports Illustrated put it: “Against the more skillful Germans, Heinrichs never deviated from the curious strategy of sending all-time-leading scorer Hamm out wide, where she air-mailed harmless crossing passes at the goalkeeper. It was like asking Barry Bonds to bunt in a World Series game.”

  For the veterans near retirement, it was a bitter pill to swallow. Their last World Cup had ended in failure. Their only opportunity to end their careers on top was at the next summer’s 2004 Olympics in Athens.

  “Right now, you want another chance, there’s no question,” Foudy said after the Germany loss when asked about the Olympics. “But at the same time, I want to let this sink in. I want to feel that this is the shittiest way to go out.”

  * * *

  For whatever April Heinrichs was doing right, too much was going wrong for the veterans of the national team. They had now lost back-to-back major tournaments they had expected to win.

  Worse still, Heinrichs’s strict coaching style had been wearing on some of the veterans, both on and off the field. It would be tolerable, maybe, if they had some results to show for it. But these veteran players had already proved they were winners—they didn’t need Heinrichs imposing harsh restrictions on what they could and couldn’t do.

  Some players recall bed checks with stringent curfews and limits on how many times they could touch the ball before passing. Others remember that they went to a Garrett Game for Mia Hamm—the charity event in memory of her brother—and Heinrichs fined them for missing a team practice.

  The training sessions became brutal as Heinrichs increased the difficulty of fitness tests to push the players to their limits. Only about a quarter of the team was able to even pass the grueling new tests, shaking some players’ confidence in the process. Many team practices didn’t even involve soccer—the players just ran the entire time. Whatever Heinrichs was trying to do with the change in fitness regime, she didn’t communicate it to the players.

  Some level of dissatisfaction with how things were going wasn’t necessarily a secret. Brandi Chastain and April Heinrichs were known to disagree and spar during team meetings.

  “I remember going to seven o’clock meetings and people would be like, Brandi, don’t ask any questions because Friends starts at 8,” Shannon MacMillan says. “But Brandi was very cerebral and liked to ask questions. It wasn’t disrespect on Brandi’s part, but they’d get into these conversations and the whole team would be like, Ugh.”

  As put by another former player anonymously because of Heinrichs’s connections to U.S. Soccer: “Brandi is a smart soccer player and April wasn’t a smart coach, and that was their biggest issue. April was more, Try hard, be competitive, run a lot, and Brandi was more, Let’s pass the ball around and let’s play good soccer with the ball.”

  Whatever clashes were happening philosophically, it all seemed to come to a head in December 2003. In a meeting that seemed designed to get Heinrichs fired, Chastain spoke with U.S. Soccer president Robert Contiguglia and Dan Flynn, who had replaced Hank Steinbrecher as the federation’s secretary general. (Details of the meeting would leak to the press months later, but Chastain and Heinrichs never publicly commented on it.)

  Asked about it now, Chastain admits she did t
alk to Contiguglia and Flynn about the state of the locker room, but it wasn’t a formal or planned meeting—they happened to be at the men’s World Cup draw in Germany. And it wasn’t specifically about trying to oust Heinrichs—Chastain wanted to make sure both Contiguglia and Flynn knew the team was unhappy.

  “It was about what the overall sentiment at the time was and how something clearly was not going well,” Chastain says. “I felt that it was need-to-know information for the president of U.S. Soccer. I didn’t want to hear any more complaining—I was done complaining.”

  The meeting didn’t have the effect she probably hoped it would. Contiguglia stood firm in his support of Heinrichs, and the relationship between the veterans and Heinrichs frayed further.

  Contiguglia says now that he doesn’t remember the meeting, but he had been keenly aware of problems between the players and their coach. From his perspective, however, it was the players who were the problem.

  “There was a lot of feedback to me that there was disrespect from the players to the coach,” he says. “There were instances where players didn’t come to team meetings because they were watching Friends on TV or times where players would openly say, We’re going to win this game despite the coach. You had leaders on the team walking around the locker room saying the federation is the enemy.”

  “Part of it had to do with their mentality,” Contiguglia adds. “Their mentality was to fight to the end and make everything a combat sport. Part of that was reflected in their attitudes toward April.”

  Tiffeny Milbrett, who was for a spell the most dangerous attacking weapon in the world, decided she’d rather retire than keep playing under Heinrichs. The authoritarian methods of Heinrichs didn’t sit well with the outspoken and creative striker.

  “I’m an adult. I’m 31 years old,” Milbrett told reporters after she announced her decision. “I’ve played maybe a thousand more games in the modern era of the women’s game than April has, and I feel like there’s things that need to happen in order to facilitate an environment for professional women soccer players.”