O.C. Women Kick Soccer Into National Awareness

Julie Foudy was 6 years old when two boys in her first grade class at Del Cerro Elementary in Mission Viejo asked her to come outside and play soccer at recess. Joy Fawcett was about the same age when the boys and girls in her Huntington Beach neighborhood asked her to join their games.

Neither had any thoughts about finding a club team that would offer the most exposure to college recruiters. There weren’t any scholarships for soccer-playing girls back then, no plotting the proper path to make the national team and play in the Olympics and the World Cup. There were no Olympics or World Cup for women soccer players.

And yet somehow, with no grand plan nor magical vision, Foudy and Fawcett have helped put women’s soccer in the spotlight it is in today. They will start for the U.S. national team this afternoon when it takes on Denmark in the opening game of the Women’s World Cup--a match the Americans are expected to win.

Interest is so intense that even at the team’s isolated hotel 40 miles away from the game site--Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J.--little girls wearing soccer shorts and jerseys, knee-high socks and cleats clog the lobby hoping to get an autograph from Fawcett, a defender, and Foudy, co-captain and a midfielder, and their teammates.

Back home in Orange County, Lauren Orlandos, an El Toro High senior and recipient of a soccer scholarship to the University of Portland, says of Fawcett and Foudy: “I look up to them. It gives you hope that some day you’ll be there. I’d love to be the next Julie Foudy. I got to play in a practice game with Julie and Joy against the Mexican national team in March. That was overwhelming.”

And that’s the thing. Fawcett, 31, and Foudy, 28, never had a “them” to look up to.

“I was lucky to grow up where I did, in Mission Viejo,” Foudy said Friday afternoon. She is an 11-year veteran of the U.S. national team, a starter in 136 of the 138 national games she has played. “There were plenty of fields and lots of kids. I talk to some of my team members who grew up back East, and they had to fight with boys over fields and would get told women shouldn’t be playing or they’d have to play on boys’ teams because there weren’t any girls’ teams.

“I didn’t get any of that. I didn’t realize how progressive it was in Orange County,” Foudy said. “There were always fields and girls’ teams for me to play on. I always got good coaching. My first coach, Mr. [Jim] Hutchinson, really knew the game. But I never thought about the next step because there wasn’t really a next step out there.”

Foudy’s mother, Judy, said her daughter never had a soccer-playing role model. The new wave of soccer players do.

“I’m just starting to realize how important Julie is to other people,” Judy Foudy said. “I’m a nurse at Mission Hospital [Regional Medical Center in Mission Viejo], and I can’t tell you how many little girls tell me they have her poster on their wall. We’re sort of in awe of the fact that she’s so well-known.”

Scholarships Were Almost Nonexistent

Terry Biefeld, Fawcett’s father, recalled Joy playing on only the second girls’ soccer team at Edison High. When it came time for college, Joy was only offered two partial scholarships--to UC Santa Barbara and UC Berkeley. She chose Cal. Today, she might have offers for full scholarships from 100 colleges or more.

When Fawcett speaks of days running next door to grab a friend and a ball for a game, she begins to smile.

“It was so simple,” Fawcett said. “You played with your friends. Everybody started out in AYSO. Parents coached. Everything was done with volunteers.

“And high school was the biggest thing. I loved playing high school soccer at Edison more than anything. It was the most fun I’ve ever had. There wasn’t any pressure. Things are so different now.”

Foudy said her training consisted of either kicking the soccer ball hundreds of times against the garage door--”My mom hated that”--or going over to Del Cerro and kicking against a wall.

Now women’s soccer is big stuff. More than 7 million girls are playing some level of soccer in the U.S. When the U.S. women won the inaugural World Cup in 1991 in China, Foudy said when she came home and told people the U.S. had won, they responded quizzically: “There’s a U.S. women’s soccer team?”

Everybody knows now. The U.S. women’s team charmed America during the 1996 Olympics. Even though it got little live television coverage, the exuberance the women showed in winning the gold medal, as well as their undeniable soccer skills, made them crowd favorites. “We weren’t jaded or anything,” Fawcett said. “People seemed to like that.”

Her media skills brought Foudy to the attention of ESPN, where she was hired as an analyst for the men’s World Cup last summer in France. While the U.S. men were duds on the field, Foudy thrived in the booth. She was a great ad-libber.

Ad-libbing is a skill Fawcett and Foudy know well.

“People call us pioneers,” Fawcett said, “and I guess we are. But I don’t think any of us set out to be. We were just little girls playing a game that was a lot of fun. I never set out to be the first this or that.”

Said Foudy: “None of this was planned. I played as a little girl, then I played in high school. I got picked for the national team when I was 17, and I didn’t even know there was a national team. When I was looking at colleges, pretty much only North Carolina was offering full rides, and they recruited me. But I had always wanted to go to Stanford. They didn’t offer full scholarships, but I went to Stanford because that was the school I’d always wanted to attend. It wasn’t about the soccer.”

Now girls as young as 7 and 8 are on conditioning programs. “I’ve got mothers coming up to me,” Fawcett said, “pointing to a 7-year-old and asking what kind of weight program I’d recommend and I just shake my head. I didn’t think about weight training till I was out of college.”

Two years ago, Fawcett, a mother of two herself, was back in Orange County coaching a club team while she was also coaching the UCLA women’s team.

“It was a real eye-opener for me,” Fawcett said. “It was the Mission Viejo under-14s, and I couldn’t believe the recruiting that was going on. Recruiting 11- and 12-year-olds. It was wild. When I played for the Hot Spurs, we just played for the club in the neighborhood where all our friends played.

“Now, certain clubs are pipelines for certain colleges. Parents are driving kids 30 and 40 miles to different clubs because they think a certain college coach will pay more attention. There seems to be so much pressure on kids now. They’ve got personal trainers, they go to the gym, they’re looking for weight programs.

“A lot of them won’t play on their high school teams because it interferes with their club team. That’s terrible. Everybody should play for their high school.”

Club Team Expenses Price Some Girls Out

Judy Foudy remembers when Julie was 8 and the Mission Viejo Soccerettes wanted an extra $50 on top of the $25 a year club fee. “I was hesitant,” Judy Foudy said. Now it can cost $2,000 to be on a club team because of extensive travel expenses.

“Kids are getting priced out, I know that,” Julie Foudy said.

Jack Peterson, coach and trainer for the Irvine Strikers club team and coach for Capistrano Valley High, said: “The difference between today and back then is like night and day. I’m a personal trainer for a girls’ soccer player. Who would have thought of that 15 years ago? The things that I knew at 15 or 16, we’re teaching girls at 8 or 9 years old now.

“The class of 2000 is one that every single college coach has been recruiting for three or four years. There might be 30 or 40 players in the county to get scholarships.”

This year, Lauren Orlandos is the best local example of a player benefiting from improved training, fitness and coaching. “She will be the next one from Orange County to watch on the world stage,” Peterson said.

It is a stage created largely by the U.S. team. Making the sport popular here has brought the World Cup to the U.S. because TV was willing to pay, because tickets could be sold, because Foudy and Fawcett and Mia Hamm and Michelle Akers and Kristine Lilly can sell merchandise and shoes and equipment, and because Foudy can go on TV to talk about the men. Now there’s a switch.

It is a world where Fawcett has shown girls that you can grow up and be a full-time, high-level athlete and also have a family.

“When I got pregnant the first time,” Fawcett said, “I talked it over with my teammates, with my coaches, with everybody. I mean, I had nobody to pattern this after.”

Indeed, Fawcett and Carla Overbeck, who has a 2-year-old son, persuaded U.S. soccer officials to pay for a full-time nanny so that during this year of extensive travel and training for the World Cup, they could have their children with them.

“Nobody wants to be my roommate,” Fawcett said. “It’s not always easy. But I wasn’t ready to quit soccer, and I wasn’t willing to wait for kids.” Katey Fawcett is 5 and Carli is 2, and Fawcett is still considered by her coach, Tony DiCicco, to be the world’s best defender.

“I’m in awe of what Joy has done,” Foudy said.

Katey Fawcett is signed up for a youth soccer group next fall. “She can hardly wait,” Joy said of her daughter.

But while the U.S. women’s team is eager to play in sold-out stadiums, and as little girls wear Foudy and Fawcett jerseys, and diligent parents attempt to raise their own little World Cup soccer players, as more colleges add more scholarships, and as players allow themselves to dream of a women’s pro league, Fawcett sounds a little wistful.

“If I had the choice of coming up in soccer now or when I did,” she said, “I think I’d pick the way I did it.

“No great expectations, no pressure. We just played with our friends. Everything that is happening is great. The Olympics, the World Cup, the attention, I love it all. But I hope we don’t lose something. I hope we don’t lose the innocence.”

*

Staff writer Dave McKibben contributed to this story.