I was excited. Less than a year ago, during the World Cup, I had hoped to be on the national team. And now I was in the player pool. I withdrew from school for the spring quarter, with Lesle and Amy’s support—even though I would miss spring practice and possibly the fall season if I made the Olympic team. They knew how important this was. Back in Richland, a rumor was going around that I had withdrawn from school because I was pregnant.
I was one of the youngest players of the thirty in that camp. I roomed with another young player, Aly Wagner, who was from Santa Clara and a year older. Aly was good friends with veteran Tiffeny Milbrett, so I got to know Millie a little. I was full of confidence coming into camp. I didn’t idolize the national team players. I just wanted to compete with them. But when I got to Chula Vista, I was hit in the face by what a big deal the team was. Reporters and television crews were hovering. Fans crowded outside the training camp fence. And the skill and confidence level of the top players was daunting.
In one of my first practices, Brandi Chastain turned around and barked at me, “That’s your ball.”
Oh fuck, I thought. Brandi Chastain is yelling at me.
Brandi was always yelling. She had made the winning penalty kick at the World Cup and had triggered a national debate about how women athletes should behave with her bra-baring celebration that made the cover of every newspaper and magazine in the country. She had posed nude in Gear magazine. Her teammates called her Hollywood, for her skill at grabbing the spotlight, and I could tell it wasn’t always a term of endearment. I liked Brandi, but she intimidated me. She had a lot of opinions and a lot of advice—whether you asked for them or not.
When we were on the road, I roomed with Brandi, but I rarely saw her. She was so busy, rising early, coming back to the room late, locking herself in the bathroom to talk on the phone to her husband while I sat on my bed and studied for my UW independent-study classes.
As much as Brandi talked and yelled on the field and off, Joy Fawcett was the real leader of the defense. She was the smartest defender I ever played behind. She was very even-keeled and didn’t try to intimidate the young players, as I felt Brandi did. I loved playing with Joy.
Michelle Akers had helped me get ready for camp. She was also from Washington, and she came out to UW and did drills with me after I got my camp invitation from April. When I arrived at camp, Michelle was my partner in fitness tests. I was honored and in awe of her. I knew that she suffered from chronic fatigue syndrome and that every physical activity was a challenge for her.
Julie Foudy was the team leader off the field. She would meet with the media; she was the team voice. The quietest veteran was Kristine Lilly. The other players were always trying to set her up on dates and give her a makeover—her hair was too big and bushy. The team’s most famous player, Mia Hamm, was also pretty quiet—that is, unless she wanted to get her point across. In one practice game, I was playing with Mia, and I ran out at the top of the box to punt the ball: it went straight up in the air. Mia stopped playing and looked at me. “Do you want me to fucking head the ball? Then you need to fucking learn how to drop-kick it.”
Oh God, I thought. Now Mia Hamm is yelling at me.
I stayed behind after practice that day to work on my drop-kick. If I was going to play at that level, I couldn’t rely every time on my booming punt—I needed to perfect a lower-trajectory dropkick.
The veterans clearly felt invincible. They were taking full advantage of the success they’d had the summer before. Around the time I joined the team, they had successfully negotiated a new contract from the U.S. Soccer Federation, putting them on equal footing with the men’s national team and gaining more control over things like their victory tour. They had just helped found a new league—the Women’s United Soccer Association—that was scheduled to debut in the spring of 2001. They had fought a lot of battles together. I was just a kid, an outsider, and was kept out of the inner circle. The veterans were making decisions for the group on things like the new league and our contract. They didn’t seem interested in the younger players’ opinions—they just told us what had been decided.
The enduring image of the team was of best friends who would have two fillings for each other, but I quickly learned that there were cliques and jealousies. For the younger players, it felt like joining a sorority, as though we were going through some sort of initiation process. There was tension surrounding Michelle’s chronic-fatigue issues, which prevented her from practicing all the time. I figured she was a star and deserved accommodations: not every top-level athlete should be treated exactly the same.
I just wanted to compete. April had only a few months to figure out her goalkeeper situation. When I joined the team in Chula Vista, I was surprised to see that
