Becky Sauerbrunn
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CONTENTS
BECKY SAUERBRUNN: The Basics
CHAPTER 1: Facing a Challenge . . . Literally
CHAPTER 2: Oh, Brother
CHAPTER 3: Nerd Squad . . . Assemble
CHAPTER 4: One of the Boys
CHAPTER 5: Tennis, Anyone?
CHAPTER 6: Girl Power
CHAPTER 7: Coming Up Short
CHAPTER 8: From ODP to UVA to USA
CHAPTER 9: The Long Run
CHAPTER 10: There and Back Again
CHAPTER 11: Ultimate Goals
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ABOUT REAL CONTENT MEDIA GROUP
This story is for all the young girls and boys who appreciate that the third most important three-word phrase in the English language—after “I love you” and “Two scoops, please”—is “Defense wins championships.”
BECKY SAUERBRUNN: THE BASICS
BIRTHDAY: June 6, 1985
HOMETOWN: Olivette, Missouri (just outside St. Louis)
PRIMARY POSITION: Center back. Who better to describe what the position is all about than someone who plays it as well as anyone in the world? “First and foremost, your job is to not let the other team score,” Becky has said. “You’re the organizer in the back line, moving players in front of you into position, interrupting plays before they happen, or disrupting them as they happen. The position is evolving, becoming more of a quarterback role. Center backs, a lot of times, are starting the attack. They have the ball more of the time and are expected to move it forward and find the right pass. It’s a good time to be a center back.”
CURRENT TEAMS: US Women’s National Team ([USWNT]; 2008, 2010–present), FC Kansas City (National Women’s Soccer League [NWSL]; 2013–present)
FORMER PROFESSIONAL TEAMS: Boston Renegades (United Soccer Leagues [USL] W-League; 2005), Richmond Kickers Destiny (USL W-League; 2006–2007), Washington Freedom (Women’s Professional Soccer; 2008–2010), Røa IL (Norway; 2009), magicJack (Women’s Professional Soccer; 2001), D.C. United Women (USL W-League; 2012)
PREVIOUS US NATIONAL TEAMS: U-16, U-17, U-19, U-21, U-23
COLLEGE TEAM: University of Virginia (2003–2007)
SHORT LIST OF SOCCER ACHIEVEMENTS: High school: two-time National Soccer Coaches Association of America (NSCAA) Youth All-American; two-time Parade All-American; 2003 Gatorade Missouri Player of the Year. College: first three-time NSCAA All-American in the history of University of Virginia women’s soccer; 2007 ACC Defensive Player of the Year; 2007 NSCAA Student Athlete of the Year. Professional: only three-time NWSL Defender of the Year (2013–2015); US Women’s National Team: 2011 FIFA Women’s World Cup (runner-up); 2012 Summer Olympics (gold); 2015 FIFA Women’s World Cup (champion).
FIRST GOAL: Even back when she played with the Raiders, the grade-school boys’ team in Olivette, Becky tended to be defense-first. During one indoor tournament, the Raiders were “playing up”—going against teams one or two age groups ahead of them. And in one of those tournament games, the Raiders were getting annihilated. They were down big-time—by ten or twelve goals, as Becky recalls, which was about as lopsided a losing effort as she’d ever been involved in. At some point, Becky found herself deep in the offensive zone. Her teammate was bringing up the ball and decided to drill a pass across to Becky, who hadn’t expected it (and might not have even seen it). “It hit off me and went in,” she said. “I had never scored before.” She remembers the boy who made the pass running over to her and lifting her up, and the rest of the team mobbing them. It was a nice celebration, but not one she would get to experience too often in her career. “From early on, I was a player who stopped goals. That makes me happy,” Becky said. “The joy some people get from scoring goals is what I get from stopping someone from scoring.”
FIRST GOAL FOR US WOMEN’S NATIONAL TEAM: As of this writing, we’re still waiting. But she does have two career NWSL goals for FC Kansas City.
NICKNAME: “Broon,” though the last syllable of her last name is pronounced “brunn” like “won,” “fun,” or hamburger “bun.” In a video produced by the US Women’s National Team, introducing members of the 2011 Women’s World Cup roster to its fans, Ali Krieger mispronounced Becky’s last name, calling her “Becky Sauer-BROON.” It was pointed out—on camera—that Krieger had mistakenly used the more Germanic way of saying Sauerbrunn, which made sense. The 2011 Women’s World Cup was being played in Germany, and Ali had been living there for the four years leading up to the tournament. She quickly corrected herself, but the damage was done. “Broon,” Becky’s new nickname, was born.
HER MANTRA: “Be ready.” Just as Becky prides herself on being prepared for all opponents and game situations, she is conscientious about being ready for whenever an opportunity might present itself. “You never know who is watching or what opportunity is going to arise. When I look back on many moments of my career, if I hadn’t been prepared, the next phase of my career never would have happened. Be ready for every possible opportunity.”
WHAT YOU REALLY NEED TO KNOW ABOUT HER: “You can look at all sports—soccer, basketball, it doesn’t matter. You would not find a better role model, a man or a woman, than Becky Sauerbrunn,” said Steve Swanson, University of Virginia women’s soccer head coach and an assistant coach on the US Women’s National Team. “Who she is, what she represents, what’s truly important to her, is all right there for everyone to see.”
CHAPTER 1
FACING A CHALLENGE . . . LITERALLY
Oh, man. That really hurt. Fifty-nine minutes into the first soccer game she ever played for the US Women’s National Team, Becky Sauerbrunn realized something was wrong. She had just tried something she’d done on the soccer field a thousand times before: battling an opposing player for a ball in the air. Becky attempted to knock the ball upfield with a flick of her head. The forward from Canada’s Women’s National Team had other plans; she wanted to head the ball past Becky and in the direction of the Team USA net. It was a typical soccer moment in the middle of a typical soccer game.
Only this time, the Canadian player missed. Instead of striking the ball with her head, she accidentally headed Becky sharply and squarely in the middle of her face. And, man, did it ever hurt.
For perhaps the first time in her soccer career, Becky wasn’t sure what to do next. She had never been hurt on a soccer field before, at least not to the point of having to leave a game. During her four seasons at the University of Virginia, she had missed a total of ten minutes of game time; she probably couldn’t have given directions to the sidelines, she’d spent so little time there in college.
Should she take a knee, as players are coached to do from their earliest days, when they’re learning to dribble a ball through a slalom course of mini orange cones spread out across a grassy patch in a neighborhood park? Should she try to get the referee’s attention, to stop play long enough to get checked out? This whole situation was new to Becky, the pain and the uncertainty.
She did the one thing she surely knew how to do. She got up. Becky had decided she needed to shake it off, get back in position, and get ready for the next play.
After all, this was her first taste of a dream in the process of coming true: She was playing for her country at her sport’s highest level. Years and years of practicing and playing, training and trying, working and waiting, had landed her here, inside the Foshan Sports Center Stadium in Foshan, China, at the 2008 Four Nations Tournament, starting on the back line of one of the best teams in the world of women’s soccer. After everything it took to get here, she wasn’t about to walk off the field, to leave her first cap—a player earns a “cap” every time he or she plays for his or her national team—while there was still time on the clock.
Becky had
gotten opportunities to play before because teammates had gotten injured. In fact, she was having the rare experience of starting her first game for the National Team because one of the team’s other center backs had sprained her ankle in a training session in the days leading up to the tournament. No one gets to start their first cap. Was she really going to let a missed header knock her out of her National Team debut? And maybe make her lose the spot she’d worked so hard to get?
Then she reached up to feel her nose. And it wasn’t exactly where it was supposed to be.
“My nose felt like it was on the wrong side of my face,” Becky said later. “It was completely pushed in.”
Becky hadn’t noticed that her nose was bleeding, not until she looked down and saw blood flowing everywhere. Her first thought was that she should cup her hands and try to catch the blood. She didn’t want to mess up her jersey—her brand-new USA jersey. Especially since she figured she’d be right back out on the field after the team doctors patched her up. No reason to leave a game over a bloody nose, right?
Wrong. Becky began to realize it was worse than some regular old nosebleed as soon as she saw the horrified reaction of her teammates. She recognized in their eyes the kind of look people get when they’re watching a particularly gross or gory moment in a monster movie. Only they were looking at her face.
That was enough to send Becky to the sidelines for help. The team doctor took one look at her and immediately brought Becky into the locker room and laid out her choices: She could have it reset right then and there, endure one long bleed and be good to go, or she could go back to the hotel, calm down, and have it fixed later.
Before Becky was allowed to decide, the doctor told her to take a good look at herself in the mirror. That was all the convincing she needed.
“It was horrendous,” Becky said. “I said, ‘We absolutely need to do this right now.’ ”
That’s what they did. The doctor laid her back, started feeling around her nose, noting all the cartilage that had been displaced. On the count of three, the doctor said, he would snap her nose back to where it belonged.
One . . . two . . .
“He did it on two. That’s what doctors do,” Becky said, recalling years later how with one quick move the doctor squished her nose back into place.
The team didn’t have a protective face mask available for Becky to wear, so they fashioned one out of random equipment they could find in the kit—“MacGyver-inspired,” Becky called it, remembering an old TV series from the 1980s about a secret agent who defuses bombs and saves the world by using whatever household items happen to be lying around at the moment. They fastened the mask to her face with Velcro from shin guard straps, and Becky was back on the back line.
Not for that game, of course, or the next one. But she was back in the lineup for the Four Nations final, which the United States won, 1–0, against China. The tournament-winning goal was scored by veteran midfielder Shannon Boxx. On a header. On an assist from her newest teammate. The one wearing the funny makeshift face mask.
In the years since, Becky Sauerbrunn has established herself as one of the premier defenders on the planet. She was honored as the Defensive Player of the Year in each of the first three seasons of the National Women’s Soccer League’s existence. She has earned more than a hundred caps for the US Women’s National Team, winning an Olympic gold medal and a Women’s World Cup for her country along the way. In 2016, she was named one of the cocaptains of the USWNT as the team prepared for the Brazil Summer Games.
Her playing style is defined by her smarts and her toughness. “A silent assassin” is how National Team coach Jill Ellis once described her. Where did she first develop those traits that have been so vital to the success she has experienced on the soccer field?
Easy. Becky grew up with older brothers.
CHAPTER 2
OH, BROTHER
Grant and Adam Sauerbrunn needed a goalie.
It was the late 1980s or early 1990s, and roller hockey was gaining popularity in the suburbs that surrounded St. Louis, Missouri. Kids all across St. Louis County were lacing up their new Rollerblades and letting loose slap shots, either with hard plastic street-hockey balls or pucks (the ones with the buttonlike bumps designed to minimize friction and keep the pucks flying and gliding smoothly along the surface of a paved street).
The fever captured the Sauerbrunn brothers, as well as most of their friends in Olivette, a community about ten miles from St. Louis city proper. Roller hockey quickly caught on as the pickup game of choice, the sport all the kids would play together in the fading daylight after dinner until their parents called them indoors either to finish their homework or go to bed.
Scott Sauerbrunn, Becky’s father, had grown up a couple of blocks away, and now he and his wife, Jane, were raising their kids in classic suburban style. The kids had everything they could have thought to ask for: big yards and a nearby park to play in, plenty of friends within walking distance, streets quiet enough for long chunks of roller-hockey action, uninterrupted by passing cars.
What they didn’t always have was a willing goalie. So Grant and Adam got their little sister to be one.
Rebecca Elizabeth Sauerbrunn was born on June 6, 1985. By the time roller hockey was catching on, young Becky had already proven she was always game. She loved the times when her older brothers—Grant was about eight years older, Adam about four—included her in their games. They might be shooting baskets or throwing a baseball around the backyard, and they would ask Becky to chase down loose balls for them. That was a lot more fun than those times when the focus of their games shifted to something more along the lines of tormenting their baby sister.
“Sometimes, I was a plaything for them,” Becky said. “They’d get bored and say, ‘What do you want to do?’ ‘I don’t know. Let’s torture Becky for a while.’ ”
What Becky recalls as occasional “torture” her mother remembers more as “a fair share of brotherly mischief.” (It should be noted that Jane Sauerbrunn is considered something of an expert on mischief, having spent thirty-three years teaching middle school, not too far up the road from Olivette in Ferguson, Missouri.)
Still, it sure felt like torture. Becky’s brothers might, for instance, break into her room and kidnap one of the stuffed animals from her beloved menagerie of leopards, tigers, and cats of all stripes. Becky was cat-crazy in those days. When her brothers went into “mischief” mode, Becky would be ready to launch a full-on rescue mission. Many an afternoon was spent chasing down her brothers and retrieving her furry animal friends from wherever they had been imprisoned.
Later, Becky’s brothers behaved more like the preteen boys they were at the time. Boys that age don’t always want to play with their little sisters. For Becky, that was worse torture than the stuffed cat–nappings, and she didn’t suffer those times graciously. Grant and Adam might, for example, be in the middle of a marathon game of Double Dragon on the family’s Nintendo and Becky would want a turn.
“She’d come in, we wouldn’t let her play, so she’d turn off the game,” Adam said.
It’s little wonder, then, that Becky jumped at the chance to play whenever her brothers asked. To play with them was far better than to be ignored by them. Even when playing with them meant playing goalie for their roller-hockey games.
However, there were a couple of problems when it came to playing goalie. First, Becky was only about five or six years old. She was so little, as Grant recalls, her Rollerblades could fit only three wheels down the middle of the skate. Standard blades for older kids always came with four.
The second and potentially more serious dilemma was that there wasn’t goalie gear small enough to fit and protect the pint-size pip-squeak between the pipes.
Still, the siblings, like all creative kids, found a way to make it work. The boys improvised a set of goalie pads. (Turns out the Four Nations face mask from her National Team debut wasn’t Becky’s first exposure to MacGyver-inspired ingenuity.) Th
ey stuffed couch cushions into her shirt, slapped a catcher’s mask over her head, and gave her a baseball glove.
Then there was the pièce de résistance, the ultimate finishing touch: Becky’s brothers took plywood planks and duct-taped them to her forearms. Years later, Grant insisted that the planks were taped to hockey gloves, not directly to Becky’s arms. Still, she must have been quite the sight: a tiny, towheaded goalie with a puffed-out shirt, pink three-wheeled skates, and makeshift waffle-boards, fashioned from scrap wood and taped to her arms, flailing to fend off slap shots from fifteen feet away taken by the biggest kids on the block.
“She stood right in there and took a lot of pucks off the face,” Grant recalled with more than a trace of admiration in his tone.
Essentially, that was the start of Becky Sauerbrunn’s proud athletic career. Everything she achieved on the soccer stage—the All-America honors in college, the Olympic gold, the World Cup—can be traced back to those early years when she was a willing target in her brothers’ street-hockey shooting gallery. But playing goalie wasn’t all Becky had to endure.
When Grant and Adam got into tae kwon do, who do you think served as their dummy (with proper couch cushioning, of course)? When they wanted to test the laws of gravity, who do you think they launched into orbit off their couch, forever trying to see if they could toss her farther than the last time? It was fairly typical playful older brothers/willing little sister shenanigans, and occasionally the results were predictable.
Like the time the boys were playing baseball in the backyard and needed a catcher. No surprise, Becky—barely three years old then—was only too happy to oblige.
Memories of that event differ in the minds of the participants, as is to be expected after nearly thirty years have passed. Still, the basic facts of the case remain undisputed:
Grant was pitching.
Adam was batting.
Becky was playing catcher, probably a little closer to the batter than was safe.