When Nobody Was Watching

by Carli Lloyd

  It is the grayest, grimiest place I’ve ever seen, the smog thick, the air smelly, with many people walking the streets in masks. Got to go to the bathroom? No worries. Most little kids I see wear these outfits where they can just undo the butt part of it, open a flap, and pee right there on the street. How convenient. Food is another adventure. I am finicky to begin with, and with offerings of dog meat and pigs’ feet and other mystery items, I am completely grossed out. I eat mostly bread and grains and any fruit or vegetable I can find. Put it all together, I am not even close to being in my comfort zone, but thankfully the soccer part of the trip is much more agreeable.

  I score a goal in a 4–0 victory over a top club team in the first game, and then we travel to the city of Jiangsu, not far from the Yangtze River, to play the Chinese women’s national team. When we walk out, I am stunned by the sight before me. About 10,000 people are in the stands, nearly all of them wearing black or gray clothing. It is by far the biggest crowd I’ve ever played in front of. It makes me nervous. I keep looking up at all these people, a monochromatic sea of fans who are mostly quiet and polite, and I can’t fathom that they are all there to see us play. The fans in Jiangsu do not get a whole lot to cheer about. I open the scoring in the eighteenth minute, and then feed our striker, Natasha Kai, who scores another goal two minutes later.

  We win all three games and return home, and I’m happy with how things go and delighted not to look at a cut of meat and wonder if it’s a dog. We continue with our monthly camps in preparation for the Nordic Cup in July. When I am not there, I am working faithfully with James, who more and more is drilling me on the psychological piece of this. It is so easy for me to lose faith and doubt myself and let little things distract me. Being aware of such tendencies is the first defense to reining them in. James helps me see that I don’t have to listen to those self-critical and negative tapes that might be playing in my head. I have a choice. I don’t have to go there. It’s hard to break an ingrained habit, but being able to see it and step outside yourself and catch it is the way to start.

  In one camp session, I struggle with my first touches and get stripped a few times. I don’t have the right weight on several passes, resulting in giveaways. It doesn’t take much to set my head spinning and get the doubts firing up. I am disgusted that I am not playing up to my level. James is working hard with me on not being overly self-critical and not listening to those voices when they show up. With his guidance, I constantly remind myself:

  Just because you might have those thoughts doesn’t mean you have to pay attention to them.

  Just because you have them doesn’t mean they are true.

  “If you make a mistake, forget it and get on to the next play, the next touch or pass or tackle. Be the hardest-working player out there, always,” James says.

  In our April camp I get a chance to play with some national team players, and at the end of the month my phone rings. It is April Heinrichs, coach of the U.S. Women’s National Team.

  “The whole national team staff, along with Chris [Petrucelli] and his staff, have been very impressed with your ability and your potential to grow as a player at this level,” April says. “We’d like to invite you to train with the full national team next month in Carson, California.”

  I am not expecting this. I am so thrilled I have a hard time finding the words, before stammering out a few.

  “Thank you so much, Coach. It will be an honor to be there.”

  I have final exams coming up at Rutgers, but as much as I know it’s important to get my degree, my entire focus is on Carson. When I walk out on the field for the first time, I know I will look around and see players such as Mia Hamm, Kristine Lilly, Briana Scurry, Julie Foudy, and Joy Fawcett. I know I will be as nervous as I’ve ever been in my life.

  Calm down, Carli. They are soccer players, the same as you, I tell myself.

  It doesn’t work.

  I mean, these are legends of the sport. I have their posters and autographs. I don’t know what to call them or how to interact with them. Do I walk up to Mia Hamm and say, “It’s an honor to be on the field with you”? Am I supposed to act as if I am a peer? I don’t know. April Heinrichs is super-nice and welcoming. I hope as I prepare to take the field that the players are the same way.

  Two of the first people I meet are Shannon MacMillan and Tiffeny Milbrett, two very gifted forwards. They could not be nicer.

  “It’s great to meet you and have you in camp,” Shannon says. “I remember when I came into my first camp. It’s not easy, but once you settle in and play your game, you will be fine.”

  Tiffeny is the same way. She greets me warmly. She feels genuine. “Let me know if you need anything,” she says. I find out quickly that Shannon and Tiffeny are more the exception than the rule, because from the outset most everybody else is somewhere between aloof and downright chilly.

  I am reserved to begin with, not someone inclined to be chatty in new situations, but the atmosphere makes me that much more of a loner. Almost nobody introduces herself. I’m not expecting a basket of fruit, but I barely even get acknowledged. I get the feeling that they would much prefer it if I were not there. Heather Mitts, a friend and longtime national team defender, tells me later she had the same experience when she first came on. So does Danielle Fotopoulos, a reserve on the 1999 World Cup championship team and another player in the 2004 camp who goes out of her way to make me feel a part of things.

  “Don’t take it personally, because it’s not about you in the least,” Danielle says, before sharing a story about her own early years, when she was sitting in the locker room, not far from a veteran team member who did her best to ignore Danielle. A few other newcomers came in, and the vet still wasn’t talking. Then another longtime player showed up and the veteran suddenly turned into Ms. Sociable.

  “Finally, somebody who I actually care about,” the veteran player said.

  When I hear this story, I make a promise to myself: If I ever make this team, I am not going to freeze out the young players this way. I am going to treat people with civility, the way they should be treated—even someone who plays my position.

  It’s not only the nice thing to do. It’s the right thing to do.

  It feels as if it’s a girls’ club, and no, new members are not exactly welcome. It’s a strange dynamic when you get to the national team level, and it’s probably this way in every sport. There are very few spots on the team, and the competition to get them is wicked. Anyone new who shows up is viewed, to some degree, as the enemy. That goes double if you prove yourself on the field and draw praise from coaches. I wish it were not that way. To me, it should all be a meritocracy, with everything coming down to what you do on the field. If you deserve a spot because of your play on the pitch, that should be the only criterion that matters. I am not naive; I know there’s politics, that some people have private agendas, that coaches might be looking out for players they have a history with. I totally get that. I just think it’s pretty small-minded to try to keep the club closed to newcomers, as if that could ever work.

  April is extremely positive and encouraging to me, praising my technical skills and first touches, so no doubt that makes me even more of a persona non grata. I do my best to put it all out of my mind and play, but it isn’t easy. The pace of play is so fast—faster than any field I’ve ever been on. All around me are world-class athletes who are on you in a second, primed to pounce on every loose touch. I feel as though I am barely able to keep up. One day we are playing 5 v. 5, and I am on Briana Scurry’s team.

  “You’ve got to do better than that,” she snaps when somebody gets around me.

  I get a glare and another dressing-down from Mia Hamm, who doesn’t like the pace and location of a pass I make to her.

  “C’mon! That’s not a ball I can do anything with!” she says.

  I know I’m on the field with the best players I’ve ever played with, and it’s going to be an adjustment. Nerves aren’t helping. I do my best to
let the criticisms come and go.

  Remember what James said, I tell myself. Be the hardest-working player out there. Leave it all on the field. Every practice is a World Cup final.

  On a day when we’re supposed to do fitness training—a series of punishing 800-meter runs—several team leaders get together and complain to April that it’s too much strain on their bodies and the fitness work needs to be called off.

  The players get their way. People have told me that the inmates run the asylum on the women’s national team. Here is the first example of it I’ve encountered. It’s hard for me to believe that the players have the ability to dictate to the coach, but apparently that’s how things work.

  I work hard and take chances, and I shoot from distance whenever I have an opening. Even when I am nervous and insecure, I always have confidence in my ball-striking. It is my calling card. Early in camp I rip a shot from thirty yards out that sails high but has a lot of pace on it.

  “Wow,” I hear a couple of the veterans say. April notices too.

  “There were a lot of conversations among the staff about how well Carli strikes the ball,” April says. “It was so technically perfect, with both feet, and that is so rare, even at this level. Her long-range passing was a real separator too. Lots of players can make the short-range pass, but Carli can hit it with precision fifty yards across the field.

  “The more I watched her, the more I saw that the way she strikes the ball, dead center, makes it move in a way that is very difficult for a goalkeeper to handle. It reminded me of Michelle Akers. Here was a kid in her first national camp, and she struck the ball better than almost anyone who was already on the team. It was impossible not to see that.”

  I don’t make the eighteen-player roster for the Athens Olympic Games later that summer, but I never really expected to. (April tells me much later that I was one of the final cuts and that if I’d been in camp a little longer I would’ve made it.) I shift my focus to another Nordic Cup for our U-21 team, this time in Iceland, where the water smells like sulfur and the scenery and hot springs are divine and it almost never gets dark, at least not in July. We cruise again, beating all four opponents by the same 3–0 score. I score from distance to finish off Germany and put us in the final, and then we crush Sweden for the championship.

  The much bigger women’s soccer tournament of the summer, though, takes place in Athens. The U.S. wins the gold medal on a diving header in overtime by Abby Wambach, a 2–1 victory over Brazil that is the final international game that Mia Hamm, Kristine Lilly, Julie Foudy, Brandi Chastain, and Joy Fawcett will ever play together. It’s truly the end of an era, and twenty-four-year-old Abby is figured by many people to be the team’s next breakout star, the player who will keep the U.S. on top.

  I am six months into my work with James, and as much progress as I’ve made in that time, I am impatient that it hasn’t happened faster. Twenty-year-old Lindsay Tarpley is a lethal hybrid forward/midfielder, a rising star who scored the first goal in the final. Aly Wagner is twenty-two, but she’s been a U.S. Soccer golden girl since she was a teenager; an attacking midfielder of the future with transcendent skills and vision, she’s another 2004 Olympian.

  Where does this leave me? Why does there have to be a talent clog in the exact position that I play?

  In national team camp one day early, I am sitting alongside Danielle Fotopoulos in a van on our way to training.

  “I’ve been working so hard for the last five or six months to get ready for this,” I say. “I feel like I’m not even getting a look. Sometimes I don’t feel like I’m getting anywhere.”

  Danielle looks at me like a kindly older sister.

  “You have to try to be patient, Car,” Danielle says. “Five or six months is just warming up. It is nothing in the big picture of things. This is hard, and you can’t forget that. It doesn’t happen all at once, and you can’t expect it to and can’t let yourself get frustrated by that.

  “It just takes time. Even Mia Hamm was a backup for a number of years. You just have to make up your mind that you are going to outlast everybody else, and then you will be exactly where you want to be.”

  I think about Danielle’s choice of words . . . outlast everybody.

  I like the way they sound.

  For me, soccer was love at first kick.

  Welsh Photography, John Welsh

  I've loved the Phillies since I was a little kid. That's me on the left, with my cousin Jaime Schoeffling Bula, at old Veterans Stadium.

  Courtesy of the author

  The Delran Dynamite helped get me on my way, thanks in large part to coach Karen Thornton and her assistant coach, Steve Lloyd, my dad.

  Welsh Photography, John Welsh

  Playing for the Medford Strikers was one of the best times in my soccer career.

  Courtesy of the author

  Making the Olympic Development Program Region I team was a big deal for me as a thirteen-year-old kid. I'm the runt in the front row holding the plaque.

  Courtesy of the author

  Family of five: the Lloyds of Delran. From left to right: my dad, my sister Ashley, my brother Stephen, me, and my mom.

  Courtesy of the author

  The early years training with James Galanis. I call him the Wizard because there’s nobody like him.

  From Courier-Post, 2012-07-06, © 2016 Gannett-Community Publishing. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this content without express written permission is prohibited.

  On the attack in my days with the Rutgers Scarlet Knights. (If you think I don't look as lean or fit as I am now, you are right.)

  Courtesy of Rutgers University Division of Intercollegiate Athletics

  There's no such thing as a snow day when it comes to getting in my training.

  Courtesy of FOX Sports

  My closest friends, Heather Mitts and Hope Solo, and I took a climb up the Great Wall of China before we got down to the business of soccer at the Beijing Games.

  © Brad Smith/isiphotos.com

  My longtime teammate and fellow midfielder Shannon Boxx and I are all smiles before a game at the 2010 Algarve Cup in Portugal.

  © Leslie Benedict/isiphotos.com

  There's no sweeter feeling in soccer than scoring at a big moment. Here's the strike that beat Brazil in the 2008 Olympic gold medal game in Beijing. That's Formiga looking on.

  © Koji Watanabe/ Getty Images

  Then-coach Pia Sundhage had open arms after I scored the game-winner against Brazil in Beijing.

  © Brad Smith/isiphotos.com

  My mom and dad (behind me at right) and most of our family gathered at the Philadelphia airport to celebrate after we won gold at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

  Courtesy of the author

  We gave it our all against Japan in the 2011 World Cup final in Germany, a heartbreaking loss in PKs.

  © M. Stahlschmidt/SSP

  France, one of the best teams in the world, gave us a battle in the 2011 World Cup semifinals.

  © M. Stahlschmidt/SSP

  5

  One Cap at a Time

  IT’S AN IDYLLIC SUMMER SUNDAY in Portland, Oregon, six days before my twenty-third birthday, in one of the prettiest soccer settings in the United States. The date is July 10, 2005. The U.S. Women’s National Team is about to take on the Ukraine at Merlo Field on the campus of the University of Portland. The day’s dominant story line centers on Tiffeny Milbrett, a hometown girl who starred at Portland before going on to a superb career as a high-scoring forward for the national team. Tiffeny is one goal shy of 100 for her career, and what would be better than for her to reach the milestone here at home?

  Everybody hopes Tiff gets it done and cooperates with the story line, though the truth is that I am preoccupied with my own milestone, albeit a much humbler one. Several days earlier, at the end of a training session in a national team camp I’d been invited t
o, Greg Ryan, April’s assistant who had just replaced her as the national team coach a few months earlier, gathered everyone together.

  “It’s been a good camp. Thank you all for your hard work,” he says. “Okay, this is the roster we’re going to go with for the Ukraine match.”

  I feel as if I’ve had a good camp, but I’ve already learned that you can’t take anything for granted when it comes to the national team, whether it’s being invited to camp or making a roster cut. I’ve gotten really good news from coaches, such as when April invited me to my first full national team camp fourteen months earlier. I’ve also gotten really bad news, such as when Chris Petrucelli sent me home from the U-21s.

  Greg starts to read the list. I am on the outskirts of a circle of players around him. I can barely stand the anticipation. Greg begins with the team captain—Kristine Lilly, of course.

  He goes on, running through a familiar group of names, in alphabetical order: Fotopoulos . . . Markgraf . . . Milbrett . . . O’Reilly . . . Tarpley . . . Wagner . . . Welsh.

  Somewhere in the middle he says:

  “Lloyd.”

  Did I hear that right? Lloyd?

  Did Greg Ryan just announce my name?