Champions of Chapel Hill : Anson Dorrance Nurtures Dynasty of Women’s Soccer at North Carolina

Along Tobacco Road, in the shadows of the monstrous and shiny Dean E. Smith Center, there is a gray concrete hut, its shingles falling off.

It stands apart from the other buildings, like some kind of antique, and bears a wooden sign that modestly proclaims, “North Carolina Soccer.”

As if 11 NCAA women’s soccer championships in the last 12 years were something to be modest about.

This three-room cottage is the thinking space of Anson Dorrance, women’s soccer guru and coach of arguably the most dynastic team in any college sport.

In the back room, past the piles of awards, beyond the stacked coach-of-the-year plaques, Dorrance sits behind a desk piled high with papers. The phone is ringing. He is smiling. He knows why the reporter has come.

Reporters always come to ask about the winning streak.

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Since North Carolina made women’s soccer a varsity sport in 1979, Dorrance has led the Tar Heels on a tear unprecedented in college athletics. Consider:

--Their 92-game winning streak, which was ended Oct. 2 when Notre Dame held the Tar Heels to a scoreless tie in St. Louis, is an NCAA soccer record. Although the NCAA lacks adequate records to accurately rank this streak in the scope of all sports, it is often compared to the 88-game streak by the UCLA men’s basketball team. That was ended in 1974, also by Notre Dame.

--Their 101-game unbeaten streak, which came to an end this season in a 3-2 overtime loss at Duke on Oct. 19, is the second-longest in college soccer history. Who holds that record? Who else? The Tar Heels went 103 games without a loss from 1986 to 1990, when they dropped a game to Connecticut before starting the second streak. They have lost only two games in the last nine years.

--The only time North Carolina missed the national championship in the last 12 years was in 1985, when it lost at George Mason. North Carolina’s 11 national championships are more than any other Division I women’s team in any sport.

The Tar Heels are in a slightly unusual position in this season’s NCAA semifinals, which will be played today at Portland, Ore., because they are underdogs, having finished the season ranked second, behind Notre Dame. North Carolina (23-1-1) plays sixth-ranked Connecticut (19-3) and Notre Dame (22-0-1) plays fifth-ranked Portland (16-5). The winners will play for the championship Sunday.

Regardless how the Tar Heels fare this weekend, people will still seek out Dorrance, just as they still go to John Wooden, hoping to learn the secret of building a dynasty.

Dorrance has been asked for it, oh, maybe a thousand times, but he patiently discusses it again in typical coaching style--get some good soccer players, blend in a few other good athletes and train them well.

But as Dorrance continues, he digresses into the politically dangerous territory of female competitiveness. It becomes clear that although Dorrance also coached the North Carolina men’s team from 1976-1988, he has spent years hammering out a theory on the female psyche and using it to get the most from his players.

Put simply, Dorrance says women need to be taught to compete.

“Women don’t have a natural aptitude to beat the hell out of their friends like men do,” he says. “Men don’t take direct confrontation personally, so you can play against your best friend in a one-on-one basketball game in the back yard and just mangle him for 45 minutes and there’s no sort of . . . relationship problem.

“Women . . . don’t really enjoy that sort of bashing the heck out of their best friend; it’s more of a personal issue. And what we try to do here for the young women we bring in is to get them to accept the fact that it’s OK to win. It’s OK to be the best. It’s OK to go after your best friend. All this is going to make you and her a lot better.”

The Tar Heels’ intense practices have been called “a caldron of competitiveness.” Every drill is recorded, every play an opportunity to be won or lost. In a short, 1 1/2-hour practice, there is more yelling of encouragement, more sprints to the ball and more bodies flying through the air than many teams would see in several games.

Dorrance said he believes women can compete as fiercely as men. His younger sister, Maggie, used to beat him in every sport when they were kids. And his mother used to beat his father in golf.

“I was never really brought up with the mentality that women were inferior athletes to men,” he said. “In fact, for the first 12 years of my life, I thought they were superior.”

The realization that women handle competition differently from men came to Dorrance when he recruited April Heinrichs in 1983. Heinrichs was named the player of the decade in the 1980s by Soccer America after leading North Carolina to three NCAA championships and becoming the NCAA’s all-time scoring leader with 225 points.

But she was tormented by jealous teammates.

“(April’s situation) convinced me that even though women can compete effectively, they don’t improve their popularity by being this competitive,” Dorrance said. “It was still important for April to have our support and the support of her teammates, so I learned a lot about how women want to play for each other.”

Once Dorrance learned how to get his players to accept competing against each other in practice, he was on a roll.

For Tisha Venturini, the latest North Carolina superstar, the competitive atmosphere is welcome.

“Everyone goes after one another and it’s not personal at all,” she said. “And that’s what you just have to figure out and deal with, here, is that nothing’s personal.”

For Venturini, a senior midfielder from Modesto, the loss to Duke was the only one in her college career. She is a three-time first-team All-American and could become the second player in the sport to earn the honor four times. U.S. national team player Kristine Lilly, who led North Carolina from 1989-92, was the first.

Venturini is the latest in a long line of Tar Heels on the national team, which until August was also coached by Dorrance. He retired from that to spend more time with his family and his Tar Heels.

Under Dorrance, the U.S. women won the first FIFA women’s World Championship in China in 1991. A week earlier, with Dorrance and his two stars, Lilly and Mia Hamm, in China, the Tar Heels had won the national championship.

Including Lilly and Hamm, nine Tar Heels were members of that World Championship team. Many of them still train at North Carolina, playing pick-up games on a field adjacent to where Dorrance conducts the Tar Heels’ practices.

“Sometimes I catch myself watching them during practice because they are so good,” Venturini said.

Hamm, the national player of the year in 1992 and 1993 for the Tar Heels--she is one of four North Carolina players to have been named national player of the year twice--serves as a volunteer assistant for Dorrance while she trains for next summer’s World Championship in Sweden.

“You always have someone who will go out and work out with you,” Hamm said. “All you have to do is pick up the phone.”

There is another reason Dorrance’s players stick around.

“I love playing for him,” Venturini said. “I’ve never enjoyed playing for anyone more and I don’t think I ever will. He’s basically my main source of motivation, every game. I look to him and he says something, or just looking at him makes me want to go after it.”

Dorrance, however, believes he got the better end of the deal by teaching women how to go for the jugular in athletics.

“(The players) have taught me, basically, how to relate and communicate more effectively. Basically, how to care,” he said. “I think what I have gained from them is a heck of a lot more valuable than what they have gained from me.”