Women’s Soccer Ventures Ahead
Every now and then the shrieks from the stands hit a familiar note, ascending to an impossibly high pitch and excruciatingly piercing tone.
For the U.S. women’s soccer team, relentlessly adoring shouts from its legions of young fans used to be as much a part of every game as the national anthem. Mia Hamm, Julie Foudy, Joy Fawcett, Kristine Lilly and their teammates were pioneers, rightly admired by girls and women who had few professional athletes to emulate and respected by men for their undeniable athletic ability.
But Hamm is now watching husband Nomar Garciaparra limp into the playoffs with the Dodgers. Foudy, six months pregnant, is a TV commentator. Fawcett is a soccer mom in a sense few women have experienced. Lilly, the lone holdover from the inaugural Women’s World Cup in 1991, showed she’s still creative and a formidable scoring threat with a one-goal, two-assist performance in a 10-0 rout of Chinese Taipei in a friendly Sunday at the Home Depot Center.
Like the NBA after Michael Jordan’s final retirement and the NHL after Wayne Gretzky skated into the sunset, the U.S. women’s team is learning how to move forward without its most magnetic and marketable faces. The longer time passes since the 1999 Women’s World Cup captured the imagination of a nation, the more certain it is that the golden summer of Hamm, Foudy, Fawcett, and company was a one-time convergence of forces and not a foundation for a viable women’s professional soccer league.
The pity is that the team that wore the white-and-blue of the U.S. on Sunday was probably as talented a group as its predecessors.
Leslie Osborne and Carli Lloyd each scored her first goal for the U.S., and Megan Rapinoe scored her first two goals. UCLA junior Danesha Adams, a second-half substitute up front, recorded an assist in her international debut. They didn’t match Lilly’s output or Abby Wambach’s three-goal, two-assist effort, but their feats may someday be remembered as the first steps of the group that will lead the U.S. into the 2007 World Cup and beyond.
They won’t be the second coming of Hamm, Foudy and Fawcett. Nor should they try to be, said defender Kate Markgraf, a member of the triumphant 1999 World Cup and 2004 Olympic teams.
“Why would we want to duplicate that? They were the best at what they did,” said Markgraf, who played her first game since she gave birth to a son in July.
“They were the best being Mia Hamm, the best being Julie Foudy. Now you have a new crew, and you’re going to have the new Abby Wambachs and the new faces of this team. Not necessarily better, but different. I don’t think you’d want to walk in their shoes because you can’t. And it doesn’t mean you can’t reach the same heights, but in a different way.”
This team’s identity is still shifting shape as World Cup qualifying games approach next month. But one constant remains from the previous generation: a drive and work ethic that is automatic and unspoken.
“Slowly but steadily the last couple of years, without the old veterans, Mia and Julie, you see certain people stepping up to the plate and taking more responsibility than in the past,” said Wambach, who played on the bronze medal-winning U.S. team at the 2003 World Cup and won gold at the Athens Olympics.
“There’s Kristine Lilly, who had responsibility before and has taken on even more responsibility since those girls have left. Shannon Boxx, even though she’s hurt, has been on the side doing what she can do....
“It’s a great thing because what the foundation of this team has been centered around is still intact, and nobody, whether stars or 20-year-olds, leads this team. The tradition of this team is hard work and doing as much for each other as you possibly can, as a team.”
Markgraf, who said she felt like a kid again Sunday, believes that her new teammates have the potential and will to match the Hamm generation’s success. From idolizing that group, she said, they know the effort required.
“These players are going to have to come together and form their own team and make better strides than the team before,” she said, “because you have to be better than the team in ’04. It’s a whole new territory for all these players.”
And for U.S. soccer as a whole.
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