Coach Pia Sundhage plays her final note for U.S. soccer team
As farewell speeches go, it wasn’t the best of all time. But it was memorable.
Because after second-half goals from Alex Morgan and Shannon Boxx lifted the U.S. women’s soccer team to a 2-1 exhibition victory over Australia on Sunday, Coach Pia Sundhage grabbed a guitar and serenaded the Home Depot Center crowd in Carson with a bluesy stanza of Elvis Presley’s “Jailhouse Rock.”
It was a fitting ending for Sundhage, who opened her first meeting as coach five years ago by singing Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are a-Changin’.”
In between, she managed to squeeze in 90 wins, two Olympic titles and a runner-up World Cup finish. Now, however, she has run out of challenges in the U.S., and with the next World Cup three years away and the next Olympics a year beyond that, there’s no reason to stay.
So after Wednesday’s exhibition rematch with Australia in Colorado, Sundhage is returning home to Sweden to coach the national team there. Cue Celine Dion’s “It’s Hard to Say Goodbye.”
“It’s a special feeling being around winners. It’s a special feeling being around this team,” said Sundhage, 52, who led Sweden to two World Cups and the 1996 Olympics as a player. “It’s hard to explain how much that meant to me and my coaching. I am a much better coach today than I was five years ago.”
Sundhage was hired two months after the U.S. failed to the make the final of a 2007 World Cup made notable when goalkeeper Hope Solo was kicked off the team following her verbal attack of Coach Greg Ryan. Two months later Solo was back in goal for Sundhage’s debut — and the U.S. has lost only three of the 73 games Solo has started since then.
“She’s done so well for us,” forward Abby Wambach said. “Getting us all together. It’s not easy. We’ve got personalities on this team that are hard to deal with.”
That now will be someone else’s headache.
“When the opportunity showed up and I got a chance to coach Sweden, that was very …challenging, because this [U.S.] team is the best team in the world right now,” she said. “There are things I probably can take from the American way of playing soccer, the American attitude. And hopefully it’s contagious so I can bring that home to Sweden.”
And it’s that attitude Sundhage says she’ll miss most. Well, that and Wambach.
“The atmosphere, being around proud Americans,” he says. “It seems like people are very proud of this team and being a winning team. That is something that is just hard to go away from. And of course I will look back and I will say, ‘You know what? I stood close to Abby Wambach and I talked to her.’ That is cool.
“[But] I’ve been away from Sweden now six years. So it’s time to go home.”
