Dad was mowing the front lawn.
It may have been on Adam’s backswing or as he followed through after taking a full swing; no one is quite sure. At some point, though, the bat left Adam’s hands, bounced, and smashed Becky in the face, splitting open her upper lip. As Grant put it many years later, “It exploded.” [Author’s note: Don’t worry, not every chapter in this book features a facial calamity. I promise that this will be the last bloody episode in Becky’s story.]
Becky, as you would expect, freaked out. The boys saw the blood, and they freaked out. Terrified of the unimaginable consequences of their parents finding out that they’d broken their baby sister’s face, the brothers smuggled Becky inside and upstairs to a bathroom, where they found enough bandages to cover her bleeding mouth.
“Don’t tell Mom and Dad,” they pleaded with her, hoping perhaps that their parents would never notice that they’d practically mummified the bottom half of Becky’s face. Becky made her way to the front lawn, where their father was mowing. Unfortunately for the boys, Dad noticed.
Scott took one look at Becky’s bandaged mouth—wrapped so thoroughly she couldn’t talk (part of the brothers’ plan?)—and suspected right away that this was more serious than mere “brotherly mischief.” He removed the bandage, saw that Becky’s face was split from the bottom of her nose to the top of her upper lip, and decided a trip to the emergency room was in order. A plastic surgeon met them there, and Becky received her first six stitches.
“The boys got a talking-to after that one,” Scott said.
As adults, neither brother will claim even partial credit for their sister’s toughness, though clearly it was first honed at their hands. Is it any wonder that after a childhood spent being a crash-test dummy for her brothers’ antics, Becky Sauerbrunn would be unfazed by anything she might face on a soccer field? Would suffer a broken and displaced nose and still not think about coming out of the game?
The best and most skilled scorers in the world can bring the ball deep into Team USA’s zone, and yet Becky doesn’t flinch. After you’ve survived a flurry of slap shots with only a plywood blocker pad and a couch cushion, there’s not much you find too frightening to handle.
Actually, there was one thing in Becky’s case. And her brothers played a big role in helping her overcome that, too.
CHAPTER 3
NERD SQUAD . . . ASSEMBLE
Starting at center back for the US National Team is something to be proud of, and Becky Sauerbrunn certainly is. Not many soccer players reach that level of success, men or women. But Becky is also a proud participant of another exclusive group.
She is a founding member of the US Women’s National Team’s Nerd Squad.
It’s not some secret society or squadron of superheroes, though Becky once tweeted that “the #USWNT Nerd Squad is kind of like the Avengers” (and that she, obviously, would be Thor). Basically, the Nerd Squad is a group of teammates who like to make the most out of all the travel the National Team does to amazing places around the world. Rather than spending their days off and their downtime resting around the hotel, the Nerd Squad goes exploring. They go sightseeing, check out the local culture, try to experience what is unique and special about every place they visit. As Becky described during a 2015 interview on the television show Men in Blazers, all it takes to be a member of the Nerd Squad is “an interest in taking part in your surroundings.”
Consider the team’s trip to England for the 2012 Summer Olympics. On their first full day after arriving in London, several members of the American squad—Becky included, of course—took a side trip to somewhere particularly cool: They went to Hogwarts. Seriously. The group visited Alnwick Castle up in the county of Northumberland. It was built in the eleventh century and is home to the Duke of Northumberland and his family, but that wasn’t the attraction. They went because it was one of a handful of castles used to represent Hogwarts in the Harry Potter movies (Harry’s first flying lesson in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone took place right there on the grounds of Alnwick).
Becky’s curiosity, her interest in taking part in her surroundings, can in many ways be traced back to a (near) lifelong love of reading. Wherever she travels, Becky goes with an open mind, and usually an open book—typically something you’d find on the shelves in the science fiction or fantasy section. She reads an hour or two every day that she can, especially during the most intense periods of National Team training camp.
She was into Game of Thrones before it was an HBO show. She is such a big fan of the Harry Potter series, she was tempted during the summer of 2011 to find a midnight screening of The Deathly Hallows, Part 2 when the movie was released in Europe (unfortunately, she was pretty busy at the time—playing for the US in her first Women’s World Cup, in Germany).
She loves The Martian by Andy Weir, Ready Player One and Armada by Ernest Cline, Fates and Furies and The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff. According to her biography on the website for FC Kansas City, her NWSL team, her favorite book is Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. She is always up for reading anything that will transport her to a richly described world—and temporarily away from the hard work she’s putting in at soccer practice.
“Reading is my escape,” Becky said.
That wasn’t always the case.
When she started grade school, reading didn’t click for Becky right away, which was a little odd considering her mother was a teacher and books literally lined the walls of the family home in Olivette (apparently, the Sauerbrunns boasted some well-stocked bookshelves). She enjoyed school and liked to learn, but she hadn’t been bitten by the reading bug yet.
That’s where Grant and Adam came in.
School nights in the Sauerbrunn household made for a scene familiar to many families: mom, just home from work, scrambling to get dinner ready; kids gathered around the dining room table doing homework. Often, the boys—when they weren’t busy bundling Becky in blankets and propelling her off the couch—would help their sister as she struggled to make sense of the mysterious words on the page.
“They would be reading me a story and pause during a sentence, point to a word and ask me, ‘What is that word?’ If I didn’t know it, they would act it out until I would get it. ‘Oh, that’s “rowing.” I get it now,’ ” she said.
Soon enough, the light went on and a passion for reading was kindled. She read every Goosebumps book she could get her hands on and everything in the American Girl series, as well as all the different escapades of the Boxcar Children and the Baby-Sitters Club. That she would go on to major in English at the University of Virginia should have surprised no one.
Reading, though, would become more than a favorite leisure-time activity. Reading played an important role in Becky’s development as a thoughtful, strategic soccer player—someone her club coach would one day describe as “playing chess while everyone else is playing checkers.”
Back when Becky was beginning to learn the intricacies of playing a defensive position on the soccer field, a coach was trying to explain the importance of anticipating the play. There was an advantage to be gained by knowing what was going to happen before it happened. To improve as a defender, Becky was told, she needed to become better at reading the game.
She didn’t quite understand what it meant to “read” a game. So she asked her mother, the teacher and avid reader, to explain it.
“As a defender, you’re watching a story play out in front of you, just like in a book, where you have the plot and the characters and you can interpret what you expect their actions are going to be,” Jane explained to her.
That made perfect sense to Becky. The better you know a character in a story, the easier it becomes to guess what he or she will do in a given situation. Same thing with a soccer player. If you know what her tendencies are—what she tends to do with the ball at certain times of the game or in particular parts of the field—you know what to expect. Then you can put yourself in position to stop her.
&n
bsp; When Hall of Fame catcher Yogi Berra famously said, “Ninety percent of the game is half mental,” this is what he was talking about.
“I get a feel for attackers, and sometimes I can guess what they’re going to do even before they know what they’re going to do,” Becky said. “I’m sure it’s frustrating for them, but it’s really enjoyable for me.”
That ability to read a soccer game has served Becky like any other skill she’s picked up and polished along her way to the National Team back line. She is credited with and celebrated for being a cerebral player—a player who thinks and plans rather than just reacts. In fact, one of the best examples of her game-reading powers came in one of the biggest games of her career.
An in-game injury to one of Team USA’s starting center backs created an opportunity for Becky to take the field in the middle of the gold-medal game of the 2012 Summer Olympics. The American team had advanced to the final of the London Games by beating Canada in the semis, 4–3, and was now facing Japan. A year earlier, the United States and Japan had met in the final of the 2011 Women’s World Cup. That game was tied 1–1 at the end of regulation and 2–2 after the overtime period expired. The World Cup came down to penalty kicks, which the Japanese won, 3–1.
Now the US Women’s National Team and Japan were at it again, facing each other in the championship game, with eighty thousand fans in the stands at Wembley Stadium and the rest of the world watching on TV. And here came Becky Sauerbrunn, off the bench for the second straight game, into the midst of another winner-take-all showdown. Shortly after she entered the game, a turnover by the US created a two-on-one scoring chance for Japan. Two Japanese forwards were on the attack, with only Becky back between them and the US goalkeeper, Hope Solo.
Becky looked up and noticed something about the Japanese player advancing toward her with the ball: She had the ball on her left foot. Thanks to extensive time spent studying film of their opponents—getting prepared, learning those tendencies, reading the game—Becky recognized right away that this player was not a natural lefty. She was playing the ball on her weaker foot.
In a two-on-one situation, the lone defender has to make a decision, usually in the blink of an eye: Do I cover the player with the ball and force her to pass? Or do I take away the passing lane and force that player to shoot?
Becky read the play and knew exactly what to do: She angled her body, positioning herself between the player with the ball and her teammate. She decided the best move was to take away the option of a pass. The attacker would have to shoot the ball—with her weaker foot.
Sure enough, the player took the shot. Solo made the save. And the US went on to win the game and the gold by one goal, 2–1.
“After the game, Hope and I talked about that play,” Becky recalled. “She said, ‘You took away the pass, didn’t you?’ And I said, ‘I knew you were going to make the save.’ She made the save, we won the match.”
Now that’s what you call a good read.
CHAPTER 4
ONE OF THE BOYS
Jane Sauerbrunn remembers a day long ago when her daughter came home from elementary school with a question.
“Mom,” Becky asked, “is it okay if I play with the boys during recess?”
“Sure,” Jane reassured her. “What are the girls doing?”
“They sit and talk. The boys run around and kick a soccer ball.”
Given the choice between gabbing with friends and getting in on a playground pickup soccer game, Becky knew from a very young age where she wanted to be. When you’re used to facing down slap shots from older brothers and their neighborhood buddies, the chance to play with boys your own age must be pretty appealing. It certainly was for Becky.
Becky’s toughness may have sprung from growing up in that test kitchen of brotherly mischief, but the truth is, she also happened to be a pretty good little athlete from the beginning. She was a natural left-handed thrower, but her brothers were both right-handed. Which meant the hand-me-down baseball gloves were for righties. So Becky taught herself to throw and to bat right-handed. Just like her big brothers.
Her father, Scott, remembers there was an evaluation that would be administered to kids in Missouri when they were getting ready to enter kindergarten. The “test” consisted of the usual kindergarten assessments: The kids were asked to identify colors and demonstrate a working knowledge of their ABC’s. And then there was the motor skills portion of the test.
Kids were asked to hop and to skip, not anything much more sophisticated or strenuous than that. Except that they were also asked to try to catch and throw a ball.
“The teacher would grab a ball and throw it to them,” Scott recalled. “We were watching the boys and girls ahead of Becky, and the ball would bounce off their heads or they would hold their hands up and then watch the ball go right by.”
Not Becky.
“Becky grabbed the ball and whipped it back to the teacher,” Scott said. “With a chest pass.”
So when Becky finally got to Old Bonhomme Elementary School, located across the street from Stacy Park and just a short walk from home, she gravitated toward the kids who played sports at recess. More often than not, at that age, that meant playing with the boys.
Soon, soccer with the boys extended beyond recess. From kindergarten into her late elementary-school years, Becky played on a community team with many of the boys from her class and her grade. They competed in the Olivette Athletic Association league, and the core of the teams would stay together through indoor and outdoor soccer seasons.
At some point, the team became known as the Raiders. The team uniform borrowed its logo from the Oakland Raiders, except the eye sockets were soccer balls. “Not exactly feminine,” as Jane remembers.
Not that Becky minded. She loved being part of the team, and each season, as everyone grew and developed, she proved that she could hang with even the best of the boys.
Her teammates certainly didn’t mind either. They respected her as a player and appreciated what she brought to the team. Once, a teammate named Cameron, the coach’s son and the team’s star forward, was lining up for the start of a game. A player on the other team looked at the Raiders defense he was about to match up against and mistook what he saw as an advantage.
“You’ve got a big problem,” he told Cameron. “You’ve got a shorty back there and a girl.”
Cameron glanced back to see what the opponent was talking about. He saw Becky, getting ready for the game to begin, and smiled.
“No, that’s your problem.”
Occasionally, there might be another girl or two on the team. Most of the time, though, Becky was the only girl on an otherwise all-boy team, but she never felt like an outsider. Her parents didn’t mind, nor did any of the parents of the boys on the team.
Perhaps most important, she never felt singled out by her coaches. They treated her like one of the guys, going so far as to include her on trips to watch the Ambush, the Major Arena Soccer League franchise based in St. Louis for most of the 1990s. Sure, there was the one time her team won an indoor soccer tournament and, during the trophy ceremony, her coaches and teammates encouraged her to go stand up in front of everyone (a prospect she recalls as “positively frightening”). When she got her trophy, she understood why. Hers was unique among her teammates’: the soccer-playing figurine atop the base on Becky’s trophy was a girl. But that was about the only time her gender mattered. To anyone.
With her teammates’ unwavering support, Becky was free to do what she loved most: play soccer. She became a fixture on defense for the Raiders, setting the stage for decades of soccer success to come.
A lot of women who grow up to enjoy careers as professional athletes have similar experiences. Many of them, at one time, played with and practiced against boys. Mia Hamm, one of the best players in the history of women’s soccer, grew up playing with her brother. Many women’s basketball teams at colleges practice against a squad of college men. (“It’s not about a girl playing a guy,” U
niversity of Connecticut women’s basketball head coach Geno Auriemma told the New York Times back in 2004. “It’s about two kids asserting themselves as basketball players.”) Women in professional tennis often hit with male partners. Ronda Rousey, the one-time Ultimate Fighting Champion and gold medalist in judo, used to spar with (and beat up) men.
Becky always acknowledges that playing on the boys’ teams gave her skills the time and opportunity to blossom. As she got older, though, she started to become aware that some of the boys were becoming stronger and faster than she was. Slowly, she realized that she needed to level the playing field. That was the first time she recognized the important role that soccer smarts would play in her development.
“I remember one of my teammates once saying to me, ‘You’re always where the ball is somehow.’ He didn’t say it in a mean way, almost more of an admiring way,” Becky said. “Looking back, I think that’s because I was starting to read the game. I didn’t realize that’s what I was doing at the time, but I was starting to figure out how to get myself into position.”
Sometimes, Becky’s approach to the game would result in a big play for her club team. Other times, it just meant being able to slide tackle and erase a scoring chance on the playground for the King of Recess. Wherever she played, it was clear: Becky Sauerbrunn could hang with whomever lined up across from her on the soccer field.
By the time she was nine or ten, it was also becoming clear—to Becky, her parents, and her coaches—that she would eventually need to find a new path forward. She was never one of the biggest girls in her grade to begin with, and the boys she competed with were getting bigger and stronger and faster and heavier. Also, being grade-school boys, they tended to be a little reckless, flying around the soccer field without fear of getting hurt or of accidentally hurting someone else.
It first occurred to Becky’s parents during a game in which they saw two boys come together and kick at the ball at the same exact time. One of the boys wound up with a broken leg.
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