Becky Sauerbrunn

by David Seigerman

  “That’s when we started to hunt around for a girls’ program,” Jane said. “We knew we needed to make a change.”

  It’s no overstatement to suggest that the change they made altered the course of Becky’s life—and in some small way, women’s soccer in America—forever.

  CHAPTER 5

  TENNIS, ANYONE?

  For all the positive experiences Becky Sauerbrunn had in her many years playing on the Raiders team and with the various boys’ teams in the Olivette Athletic Association, there was one moment that very nearly derailed her historic soccer career path before it ever really began.

  Youth soccer teams often rotate their goalkeepers. They do it today, and they did it back when Becky was eight or nine years old and in the early stages of playing the sport competitively.

  Once, during that time, Becky took her turn in the rotation and found herself in net on a cold weekend day. The mere thought of being in goal—of potentially being responsible for allowing a goal and losing a game for her team—terrified Becky. Sure enough, on this particular day, one of the opposing players dribbled through the defense and got off a shot. The ball rolled between Becky’s legs, resulting in a goal against her team, the first of her career.

  Even worse, it was the game-winning goal. Or, from Becky’s perspective, the game-losing goal.

  For the brief drive home, Becky sat in silence, fuming over allowing a goal. Her parents pulled their green minivan into the garage and got out of the car, ready to go inside the house and go about the rest of their day.

  Not Becky. She wouldn’t budge.

  “Aren’t you coming?” they asked.

  “No. I’m staying here.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t think I can play soccer anymore,” Becky blurted out in a rush of anger and sadness and humiliation and guilt. “I can’t be responsible for my team losing. I need to do something where I only have to be responsible for myself. I think I need to take up tennis.”

  Needless to say, the Sauerbrunns talked Becky off the ledge. She was back in uniform for her next soccer game (and, mercifully, not back in goal). The tennis career thing never took off.

  Becky moved past that goal, but she never really got over it. That sickening feeling never left her. It still hasn’t.

  “I still carry it with me,” she said, more than twenty years after allowing that game-losing goal through. “I feel responsible. That’s why I never have been content with where I’ve been. There’s always another level I can get to.”

  She is one of the best defenders on the planet, a vital contributor to teams that won both the Olympic gold and the World Cup, and a cornerstone of her professional team. Yet somewhere in the back of Becky Sauerbrunn’s mind, she is still that little girl who gave up the goal that beat her team. Most likely none of the boys who were on her team that day remember it. The kid who scored that goal almost certainly has no memory of it.

  But Becky hasn’t forgotten the feeling. She can’t forget the feeling.

  It’s not the promise of glory that drives an athlete to greatness. Sometimes, it’s the ghost of a long-ago goal that provides that one relentless reminder: There’s always more work to be done.

  CHAPTER 6

  GIRL POWER

  As far as birthday surprises go, this one probably wasn’t as dramatic as, say, a fancy party or concert tickets or a really thoughtful gift (jewelry, maybe, or a puppy) might have been. But Tim Boul knew his wife, Jennifer, pretty well, and he knew she’d enjoy it. He never could have imagined just how well things would work out—for himself and for his wife, the birthday girl on this particular occasion. And for Becky Sauerbrunn, too.

  Tim was on his way back home to St. Louis from Phoenix, where he had been coaching an Olympic development program (ODP) team from Missouri in a U-12 tournament (remember those initials ODP; they are an important part of Becky’s story). On Tim’s flight was a director from the J. B. Marine Soccer Club, where Tim had coached previously. They chatted about the tournament and about soccer in general. Inevitably, the conversation turned to Tim’s future coaching plans.

  Tim had taken a year off from coaching club soccer in order to coach a couple of teams in the Missouri ODP. He was coaching and traveling around the area as a referee, while Jennifer was working on finishing her master’s degree. He had only just started to think about returning to the club level. As fate and good fortune would have it, here was an official from the J. B. Marine program dangling an interesting opportunity. Perfect timing, right?

  By that point, J. B. Marine had already made quite a name for itself in soccer circles. The club was founded in 1978 by St. Louis businessman George Foster, who was coaching his daughter’s soccer team at the time and named her team for his business, Jefferson Barracks Marine Service Company. Foster’s company cleaned and repaired barges that worked the Mississippi River. It was located nearby the Jefferson Barracks Memorial Arch Bridge, a pair of connected bridges that span the river on the south side of St. Louis. Most people didn’t know that history. What they did know about J. B. Marine was that the St. Louis club program had become a soccer powerhouse in a short time.

  Thirteen years into its existence, J. B. Marine claimed its first national championship: the 1991 U-19 girls title. By the start of the 2016 season, club teams from Missouri had won seven national championships across various divisions of girls’ and women’s soccer. J. B. Marine had won six of those seven titles. Missouri is the “Show-Me State,” and no one in St. Louis put on a better soccer show than J. B. Marine.

  Now, J. B. Marine wanted Tim Boul back. And Tim wanted to come back, though there was really only one age group he was interested in coaching: the U-14s. Turns out the U-14 job was the one the director had in mind for Tim all along. Amazing how life works out sometimes.

  The U-13 team from J. B. Marine—the one that would become Tim’s U-14 team the following season—was getting ready to play in a tournament, about two and a half hours away in Peoria, Illinois. Tim thought it would be a good chance to see what he was getting himself into. So he suggested to Jennifer—as her birthday surprise—that they go out of town for the weekend.

  Which she thought sounded great.

  To watch a soccer tournament.

  “I should’ve expected that,” Jennifer told her husband.

  Tim came away from the weekend impressed with what he saw from J. B. Marine. It was a talented group of players. Several of the girls would wind up participating in the Missouri ODP.

  One of those girls was a quiet, confident player who, until a couple of years earlier, had played pretty much exclusively on boys’ soccer teams. Not many soccer fans would have noticed her, doing her thing as a defense-minded midfielder. Most fans tend to follow the ball and see the game only in terms of offensive skills: dribbling, passing, shooting, scoring. Bicycle kicks and fancy footwork are exciting. Marking an opponent, making sure he or she doesn’t get the ball, not so much. Even tackling (basically, winning the ball away from an opponent) doesn’t pack the punch it does in, say, football.

  Offense makes SportsCenter. Defense is an acquired taste. In any sport, really.

  Tim, though, observed the tournament through the eyes of a coach. A youth coach with experience in the ODP, a program that operates under one crystal-clear governing philosophy, according to its own website: “To identify players of the highest caliber on a continuing and consistent basis, which will lead to increased success for the US National Teams in the international arena.”

  Eyes like Tim’s would notice the little things. Tim was fresh off an ODP tournament with U-12 players, so his eyes were tuned in to talent. He noticed Becky Sauerbrunn, though it wasn’t because of any one thing she did out there on the field. It was because of everything she did.

  “She didn’t do anything exceptional,” Tim recalled. “But I watched her play a number of games, and I noticed she didn’t do anything wrong. She was always where she needed to be.”

  Exactly what her old R
aiders teammates used to say.

  Over the course of four or five games, Tim appreciated what he saw Becky doing: positioning herself with purpose, stepping into passing lanes, playing with her head up, moving the ball forward, distributing it to the best option, anticipating the play. You can’t see from the stands when someone’s out there on the soccer field thinking, but you can see the results of a play when someone was thinking about what she was doing.

  She was a couple of years removed from playing boys’ soccer, and Becky was beginning to distinguish herself among the girls her own age she played with and against. Not only was she reading the game. She was getting noticed for doing so—noticed by a coach who understood how special and important a skill that was.

  “I quickly came to realize she was very cerebral about the game. She’s always thinking two, three, four steps ahead, not just ‘What should I do here?’ but ‘If I do this, what will the other player do?’ ” Tim said.

  Once he began to coach the J. B. Marine U-14 squad, Tim—along with Jennifer, an accomplished college soccer player in her own right (maybe that tournament trip was the perfect birthday surprise after all)—saw evidence of Becky’s serious approach all the time. It wasn’t that she was shy or didn’t enjoy her time with her teammates. She did. She would be right there in the mix, smiling and laughing and teasing with everyone else, whenever there was a water break during a practice or in the downtime when the coaches were setting up for the next drill. But when it was time to get back to work . . .

  “When it was time to be focused, boom, she was right there,” Tim said.

  Most youth coaches quickly learn that full-squad scrimmages don’t always make for the most effective practice sessions. When you have twenty-two players to teach and just one ball, 11-v-11 doesn’t provide many opportunities to focus on specific aspects of the game. It’s in the small-scale drills that the best work gets done—when attention could be paid to the details so vital to a player’s development. It was during those drills that Becky’s soccer IQ was most apparent to her coaches.

  Take the Up, Back, and Through drill. Many teams have used this familiar and fundamental two-on-one passing drill over the years, J. B. Marine included.

  What happens in this attack drill is that one player—say, the center midfielder, which was Becky’s position on that U-14 team—starts with the ball and plays a long pass ahead to a teammate in the middle of the field. Player 2 receives the pass, then lays off the ball back to the passer, who must run ahead to follow her pass. Player 1 regains the ball and dribbles for a moment to one side while player 2, who just laid the ball off, spins away from the defender at her back and bends around in the direction of the opposite goalpost. (It’s sort of like a pick-and-roll in basketball.) Player 1 with the ball then feeds it through the defense, across the field, right to her teammate, who quickly blasts a shot on net. (Can you picture what is happening on the field in this drill? The ball is passed Up from Player 1 to Player 2, who lays it off Back to Player 1, who then threads her pass Through the defense back to Player 2, who shoots and, ideally, scores.)

  Lots of players can execute the physical responsibilities required in this drill: passing, laying off, shooting. Becky, though, was able to envision exactly how a play like this might unfold in the course of an actual game. In fact, she was even able to flip that play around in her mind and visualize what would happen if she were on defense and an opposing team tried to pull that very play against her team. Becky could picture herself as the center back, who might be tempted to chase the ball when it was laid off back to the first passer. That would be the wrong move. Instead, it’s her job to drop back and cover Player B—the one rolling wide to get open for a pass and to take the shot.

  It may be hard to picture this as you’re reading. For many players, it’s challenging to understand what’s happening even while practicing the drill. Not for Becky. Her physical skills were there. And those mental skills—her ability to connect the dots in her mind and understand not just how to execute the drill practice but how it might apply in game action—were starting to pay off.

  CHAPTER 7

  COMING UP SHORT

  Before we continue the story of Becky Sauerbrunn’s rise to the top of her profession, there is one thing you need to know. . . .

  Becky isn’t great at everything.

  And she would be first in line to admit it. Not out of humility, though being humble is a cornerstone of who she genuinely is, as a person and as a player. Maybe it stems from her middle America upbringing. Maybe it’s from being raised by parents who kept everything in perspective as their daughter climbed through the ranks of competitive soccer, from the local to the state level, then on to the regionals and nationals, and ultimately onto the world stage. Maybe it’s because it’s impossible to grow too big for your britches when you’re flapping your arms around with plywood planks duct-taped to them.

  Or maybe she’s just wired that way. It’s tough to be a me-first player and excel at playing defense. All positions on a soccer field require commitment, but defense involves sacrifice. You aren’t going to score the game-winning goal or make the breathtaking play that’s going to blow up YouTube. You aren’t likely to wind up featured in the televised highlights (unless you’re being burned for an opponent’s goal). You aren’t going to get your picture on the cover of Sports Illustrated like Carli Lloyd did in 2015 or on a cereal box like Mia Hamm in 1999. You give up the headlines and the spotlight and the stardom when it’s your job to not give up goals. And you have to be perfectly fine with that.

  And Becky is totally fine with that.

  In fact, she’ll earnestly tell you that she isn’t great at any one element of the game. That aside from reading the game (let’s be clear: That’s the exact same skill that separated Peyton Manning from other quarterbacks), she has never found that one thing in her game that shines above everything else. She’s never been the biggest or the fastest player on the field, the one with the niftiest moves or the hardest shot. Since she has never seen herself as spectacular at any one aspect of the game, she’s spent her life training to be proficient at all aspects of the game. The classic jack-of-all-trades, master of none.

  There’s even one thing that was something that Becky wasn’t even good at, let alone great.

  “For the longest time, well after becoming a professional, I could not hit a long ball,” she said. “I was terrible.”

  No joke.

  Becky grew up on teams where long balls weren’t a big point of emphasis. She played in systems that stressed keeping the ball on the ground, making short, accurate passes.

  “That’s one of the reasons I didn’t get onto the National Team for a while. My game wasn’t complete,” Becky said.

  Not only did she struggle to drive a pass long in a game, she struggled to do it in practice, too. In fact, long-ball drills were perhaps the only drills that Becky actually dreaded.

  It wasn’t until her coach at the University of Virginia, Steve Swanson, conducted a series of individual training sessions with her that Becky began to feel competent, if not entirely confident. Coach Swanson broke down every step of her mechanics, discussing with her the proper technique for every aspect of the long ball. He would stop her in midmotion, examining everything from the placement of her plant foot to the way her strike foot grazed along the grass before making contact with the ball.

  “When she came to Virginia as a freshman, she could not hit a long ball with either foot,” Coach Swanson said, noting that her left foot was easier to develop than her right foot, because it hadn’t developed as many bad habits as the right. “Becky deserves all the credit in the world. She went out and worked on it. She understood what she needed to do, changed the bad habits and developed the proper technique.”

  To this day, the long ball is not the strongest part of Becky’s game. It’s certainly not her favorite. But it’s a good reminder that no matter where you are in your career, there is always work to be done.

&n
bsp; Or as Becky puts it, “Anything that you can be trained to do can be improved upon.”

  CHAPTER 8

  FROM ODP TO UVA TO USA

  Remember those three letters we talked about earlier? ODP? The Olympic Development Program? That’s where Becky’s journey to the US Women’s National Team really got going.

  Let’s make sure you understand how the ODP worked when Becky was going through it.

  In soccer, as in many other sports, the level at which a club team competes usually is determined by age. A U-12 team, for example, consists of players under twelve years old (according to an established cutoff date); a U-18 is players younger than eighteen; and so on. When Tim Boul took over Becky’s U-14 J. B. Marine team, everyone on the roster was younger than fourteen years old.

  Each state has its own ODP, and although each runs things a little differently, the basic idea is the same: Players try out for their state’s ODP. Tryouts tend to be open to the public, and anyone at any skill level is allowed to participate (as long as he or she meets the age requirements for his or her division). Many state tryouts are free—at least for the first day. In some states, only those players who are invited back for a second day have to pay.

  At some point, the field of players trying out is cut down to a pool of about eighteen to twenty-four players. This becomes the state ODP team. When Becky made the cut, she was one of eighteen players who played for the Missouri team when it traveled to regional competition. The country is divided into four regions, and each region is made up of somewhere between twelve and fifteen state ODPs.

  State teams come to the regionals and train with regional coaches, many of whom are college coaches, and all of whom were selected by the US Soccer Federation. They train together, and then the teams play each other: Missouri vs. Illinois one day, Missouri vs. Indiana the next.