by Hope Solo
In basketball, Richland went from having a losing program to being a regional contender while I was playing. We had a two-story gym—with that mushroom cloud painted on the middle of the court—and our games were packed with fans, some hanging over the top balcony. We made it to the state semifinals my junior year—and I had my nose broken in the process. I was an aggressive basketball player, stealing the ball at will and snatching rebounds.
All the state semifinals and championships were played on the other side of the mountains, just outside Seattle. My father came to those games. Marcus picked him up in downtown Seattle, drove him to the games, and then dropped him back off on the streets afterward.
IV.
In the winter of my junior year, I was named a Parade magazine All-American as a goalkeeper. I made the under-seventeen national team, which was coached by April Heinrichs. She had been a national team assistant coach when the United States won gold in Atlanta. I went to train with the team in Chula Vista, California, and played a tournament in Florida. April told me I was the top goalkeeper in camp. All around the country, coaches were noticing me: the up-and-coming goalkeeper who only trained at the position half the time.
The recruiting letters started to get serious. And I was beginning to understand that goalkeeping was going to be my ticket. Some coaches promised I could also be a field player, and others dangled playing basketball as an incentive as well. But it was clear that my major selling point was my ability in the net.
I didn’t know what I wanted out of college. When asked by local reporters, one day I would say, “It’s been a lifelong dream to go to Portland or North Carolina.” Another day, I’d say, “It’s my dream to play at Stanford, but Santa Clara is very interested.” What did I know? I just wanted to go to college: somewhere—anywhere—far away. All I knew about North Carolina was that it was really good at women’s soccer: the Tar Heels had won fourteen national championships, and the school put players like Mia Hamm on the national team.
Other schools were interested in me. Portland was a perennially good team that was the pride of the Northwest. Stanford was a top program and was flooding my mailbox with letters. April Heinrichs was the head coach at Virginia and was recruiting me hard. And then there was Lesle Gallimore at the University of Washington.
I knew Lesle, and I was scared to death of her. For years she had been a regional ODP coach—one of those frightening people sitting in a chair on the sideline with a clipboard, evaluating every player on the field. I think that every time I talked to her I started crying.
One summer we were at a regional ODP camp in Laramie, Wyoming. I was selected for the national pool of players, which meant I had to stay for another week. I started to cry—I was just a kid and sick of being in Wyoming. I wanted to go home. Lesle walked over to me. “Hey, Hope,” she barked. “The bus is warming up, but it hasn’t left yet. Go ahead and get on it if you don’t want to be here.”
I stopped crying right away. Lesle was intimidating.
Oh my God, I thought. She hates me.
Her goalkeeping coach at Washington was Amy Allmann, another one of the ODP regional coaches. She was scary and blunt, and I was pretty sure she hated me. Of course, it didn’t really matter. Lesle and Amy were coaching at Washington, which was about the last place on earth I was planning to go to college. I was going somewhere far from my family.
College coaches could finally contact me directly the summer between my junior and senior years. When the restrictions were off and they were allowed to call, my phone rang constantly. Even Anson Dorrance called. Though I had expected that to be a big moment—after all, he was the most famous soccer coach in the country—it was a letdown. He made me feel that I’d be lucky to go to North Carolina, and he said something about not usually offering goalkeepers full-ride scholarships. That bothered me; it made me wonder if he respected the position. Maybe every other player in America wanted to go to North Carolina, but after that phone call, I didn’t.
I started to get sick of the phone calls from recruiters. I just wanted to find a school, make a decision, and get on with my new life. And then the phone rang again. It was Lesle.
“I thought you guys hated me,” I told her.
Back in Seattle, Lesle and Amy had flipped a coin to see who would call me. I was intimidated by them, and now they were intimidated by me. They thought it would be a difficult conversation because they knew I had no interest in staying in Washington. But they also knew they’d be crazy not to call a kid in their backyard, one they’d been coaching for years. “Well, we thought you hated us,” Lesle said with a laugh. “But we’d like you to come to take a recruiting visit.”
I knew that Cheryl really wanted to go to Washington, which was her father’s alma mater. She didn’t have any expectations about getting a scholarship to play Division I soccer, but she was a good player and might be able to make the team.
“OK,” I said. “Do you think Cheryl Gies has a chance of making the team?”
Lesle said that she would absolutely have a chance to walk onto the team. That made me happy and I decided I would visit.
I didn’t want to go to the University of Washington. But at least I was going to get a cool trip to Seattle.
CHAPTER FIVE
Bare-Branched, but Ready to Bloom
From Richland, head west, out of the dry desert of the Tri-Cities, down through the vineyards of the Yakima Valley and across the apple-covered belly of Washington State. Then up into the snow-dusted Cascades and finally down through the pine forests and into the Emerald City.
I was taking my recruiting trip to the University of Washington on a clear, cold weekend, the sky a clean blue slate above Puget Sound. I had a full itinerary: a team breakfast, lunch with Washington’s head coach, Lesle Gallimore, a team dinner, and a soccer game to watch. My main goal was to have fun, hang out with a boy I knew from Richland, and go to a fraternity party or two. I would humor Lesle by showing interest in the soccer team, but I wasn’t going to college at Washington.
The Huskies pulled out a close match against USC, winning 3–2. They had a defender playing goalkeeper because their regular keeper had been injured in the previous game and they didn’t have a backup. It didn’t matter. There was no way I was going to college there.
I liked the team’s determination and the way Lesle coached them. I liked the rowdy support they got from their fans—surprising considering their relatively low profile in the sport. The enthusiastic Huskies fans reminded me of our boisterous Richland fans. And I liked the fact that Lesle and her assistant, Amy, weren’t trying to bullshit me—they didn’t even promise me a starting spot. They said that maybe I could play forward at times but that I belonged between the posts.
I was the top goalkeeper prospect in the country, one of the top ten recruits overall. But Lesle and Amy were as blunt and honest as they had been back when they had coached me in the Olympic Development Program when I was fourteen and an unknown. They hadn’t changed. They weren’t fake. I felt I could trust them. I also liked the fact that they had experience on a national level. Lesle had been part of the talent pool in the early years of the U.S. women’s national team but had never played in a match. Amy was a goalkeeper on the national team from 1987 to 1991 and was on the roster in the very first women’s World Cup in 1991, which the United States won. They knew the history of the sport. I didn’t.
“Hope,” Lesle told me, “I can see you on the gold medal podium for the World Cup.”
It was nice to hear that kind of stuff. But really, I had other plans. UW wasn’t even considered much of a soccer school. It definitely wasn’t a powerhouse like North Carolina. It didn’t place players on the national team the way Stanford or Santa Clara did. I knew I could get a full ride at the school of my choice.
On the last day of my UW recruiting trip, a Monday, I took a walk across campus. I saw students just hanging out, enjoying the sunshin
e. It was an eclectic crowd by ethnicity, age, fashion sense, and social stratum. I felt comfortable. Unscrutinized. I stopped by the university’s music building at the top of the steps leading down into the main quad. The campus spilled out in front of me, the Gothic-style redbrick buildings arranged in a rectangle, the bare cherry trees that would blossom in clouds of pink the following spring. In the distance, Portage Bay glistened. Beyond it, snowcapped Mount Rainier, the jewel of the Northwest, sat on the horizon like a scoop of ice cream.
I suddenly realized that this was my corner of the country, where I belonged. I felt a rush of emotion and a click of recognition so strong that it forced me to sit down hard on the stairs. I wanted to be more than a one-dimensional athlete, a number on a jersey, a prize to be attained by some coach. I wanted more—from my college, from my family, from myself. I was like the cherry trees on the quad—bare-branched but ready to bloom.
There on the steps, my future was abruptly rearranged. I wasn’t going to UW, and then suddenly I was. I could see myself here. I could be a normal college kid, without having to flee from my roots. I could be far enough away to have independence, yet maybe my family could participate in my success and be proud. Maybe my mother and I could build a relationship. My father could even watch me play. I almost started to weep from the force of my sudden conviction. I looked out at Mount Rainier, the smooth white crust covering the volcano below and knew I should be here.
Grandma would have said God was speaking to me.
II.
By the time I got back to Richland, I knew I was going to be a Husky. But I told Lesle and Amy that I didn’t want to announce it yet. I wanted to keep my private business private and be 100 percent sure of my decision, so other coaches were still recruiting me. April kept up the hard sell from Virginia. I knew that April—who had been one of the main assistants to national team head coach Tony DiCicco—could be my ticket into the national team pool. She kept nagging me to take my official visit to Charlottesville, so I finally scheduled it.
Somehow Lesle found out. My phone rang again. “Hope, don’t go, don’t get on the plane,” she said. “You’re good enough that no national team coach is going to pick you based on where you go to college. You’ll end up getting picked for the national team on merit.”
We were on the phone for more than two hours. “If you’re just going because of the national team, that’s the wrong reason,” Lesle said. “That’s not fair to Virginia. That’s not what the college experience is all about. Don’t get on the plane.”
I didn’t get on the plane. To this day, I’ve never been to the University of Virginia.
III.
With college still in the murky future, I concentrated on enjoying the present, my final year of high school. On November 21, we capped our undefeated soccer season by winning the state title, the first-ever championship for Richland High. I scored two goals in the game to bring my four-year total to 109. Within a couple of weeks, I was back on the basketball court, determined to enjoy my last season of competitive hoops. The year before, we finished third in the state, but we’d lost some key players to graduation, including Liz, who was playing soccer at Washington State. Our basketball team wasn’t as strong in my senior year, but I was having fun. I was key to our man-to-man defense. I loved shutting down the other team’s best player, and I was our second-leading scorer.
Senior year was going well. Glenn and I were getting along better—he even used a chunk of money from his disability checks to buy me a white Nissan Maxima. I felt special, that he wanted to invest in me. Marcus was away at college, so the house was calmer. There were a lot of parties with the other seniors—we were getting sentimental about going our separate ways, leaving old friends behind. The weekend before national signing day, our basketball team played Walla Walla. Afterward, there was a big party. My entire team was there, and everyone was drinking and telling stories, laughing about old times. I was a few days away from signing my national letter of intent with UW. Cheryl and her boyfriend were there, and I was with a date who went to a different school. In fact, my date was the designated driver for the evening. When Cheryl and her boyfriend left, my guy was eager to leave too—he didn’t know anyone, and he wasn’t drinking, so we left, while the party—and my teammates—raged on.
We headed home. Suddenly the car filled with red light. I turned around and saw a police car behind us, pulling us over. Thank God my date hadn’t been drinking. The officer shined his flashlight in the car.
“Hugging the line there a little tight,” the officer said. Then he shined the light over toward the passenger seat, on my face.
“Hope Solo?” he asked. Then, “Have you been drinking?”
There was no point in lying. I was kind of buzzed and I was a minor. It probably didn’t help that I was also a Solo. He gave us both a Breathalyzer test. It proved what we already knew: my date hadn’t been drinking, and I had. But the cop let us go. He just used the opportunity to give me a lecture. “You know you’re a role model to a lot of people,” he said. “You should be making better choices.”
I was just a seventeen-year-old kid. And I thought my choice about leaving with a designated driver had been a pretty good one, but ours was a small town. Somehow our athletic director, Mr. Potter, got wind that I’d been pulled over and that I’d been drinking. He started digging around. Though I had great relationships with most of my teachers and coaches, I didn’t have one with Mr. Potter. He had had run-ins with my family. Even though I was one of our school’s best athletes—something I thought should make our athletic director proud—I never got the sense that Mr. Potter was on my side.
And this time was no exception.
He suspended me from the basketball team for violating team rules. Even worse, the news came out in the paper on February 3, 1999, the same day as the big news that I had signed with UW. Letter-of-intent day is a proud moment, when you get to tell the world that you’re going to be a college athlete. But my day was sullied by the suspension. There was news that two of my Admiral club teammates and one of my Richland High teammates had also signed letters of intent to play college soccer, Bradee Fitzpatrick signed with Idaho, Megan Maxwell with Utah, and Jessie DeLucchi with Montana.
Further down in the story, behind a few basketball scores, was this line:
The Bombers will be without Solo for this weekend’s games as she serves an indefinite suspension for violating the school’s athletic code.
My teammates told Potter and our coach that they’d also been at the party. They knew that they would have a tough road in the playoffs without me. In the hallways of Richland, students and teachers expressed outrage over the decision. Even the principal and vice principal gave me a word of support.
But a week later, the suspension was made permanent. I was kicked off the team for the season. I was very hurt—I had made a bad decision, but so had others on my team. I was being made an example of. It was the first time I realized that by excelling I could become a target. I thought about appealing the decision. Glenn went down to the school and fought hard for me. It made me realize that, in many ways, he was my dad. But the season was almost over, and I knew that basketball wasn’t my ticket out of Richland. So I let it drop. I never played organized basketball again.
IV.
We graduated in June. My cap and gown were shimmering gold, and I wore a white Hawaiian lei around my neck. When I looked out at the audience, there was my father. Terry had made sure he was there—picking him up, getting him cleaned up, putting him in a nice blue shirt and driving him out to Richland with her son, Christian, who was just a toddler. I was thrilled to see my father, but his presence made anxiety bubble up inside of me. I would be going to college in the same city where he lived. Would I see him on a regular basis? Would it be embarrassing? Would my new teammates and friends judge me because of my dad?
We went out to dinner that night with both my family and Cheryl’s.
It was awkward trying to share my attention among my mom, Glenn, my grandparents, and my dad. I felt divided, trying to please everyone. I wasn’t concerned just about my dad. I didn’t know how things would be with my mom when I got to Washington. Our relationship was still tense. It was hard to imagine how we could change our deep-rooted habits of arguing and accusation.
That summer was a very cool time to be a soccer player. The Women’s World Cup was taking place, and everyone in the country seemed to be talking about women’s soccer. A few weeks before my graduation, the U.S. team had played in Portland, and some of my soccer teammates and I made the trip down to see the game. The players signed autographs afterward, and my teammates pushed me toward Briana Scurry. “You should meet the goalkeeper,” they said. But the player I really wanted to meet was Michelle Akers. She was from Washington state and was a strong, physical player. She seemed to stand apart from the others, with her bushy hair and powerful game.
I watched every minute of the World Cup games, some of them with my grandparents and some at Cheryl’s while we were making plans for our big move to UW. America’s penalty-kick victory in the championship over China was thrilling. Scurry made a save that helped set up the game-winning penalty kick by Brandi Chastain. I was captivated by the effort of Akers, the aging lioness of the team who gave so much that day that she had to take an IV to rehydrate and wasn’t available for penalty kicks. I loved her power, her ability to impose her will on opponents. I was still thinking like a forward.