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
