The U.S. women’s national soccer team goes for its third straight World Cup championship beginning Friday evening Pacific time (Saturday afternoon in Auckland, New Zealand), when it opens the 2023 tournament against Vietnam. No country has ever three-peated at the Women’s World Cup, and none has won as many as the Americans’ four out of the eight previous tournaments.
And that, strange as it may seem, might be the least interesting aspect of the USWNT’s impact, both nationally and globally.
Through the years, the players in this program have set examples as agents of change, and as strong women who stand up for what they believe — be it equal pay, diversity and inclusion, support for players who have young children (i.e. the ultimate Soccer Moms) or just challenging each other day after day to be their best, on and off the field.
These are benchmarks that have been handed down through years and generations. The 14 newcomers to this year’s World Cup roster are learning the same lessons that players like Michelle Akers and April Heinrichs passed on to Mia Hamm, Kristine Lilly, Julie Foudy and their teammates in the early 1990s. Those players then taught Abby Wambach and Carli Lloyd and their contemporaries, who in turn instructed Alex Morgan, Megan Rapinoe, Crystal Dunn, Lindsey Horan and the rest of today’s veterans.
“I’ve been talking to ’Pinoe a lot, and she’s just very open to kind of being realistic and not sugarcoating anything with me,” 21-year-old Trinity Rodman said during the team’s media day in Carson last month. “She says it’s a test. And the biggest thing that she kind of told me is, ‘You’re here for a reason. Do you, and if you (stray) from that you’re not going to perform the way you want to. … When you’re on a big stage, you feel like you need to live up to everyone’s expectations, and in reality, you need to play the way you played when you first came and the reason that you’re here.’”
It’s inherently understood that meeting those standards and then passing the torch, goes with the territory.
“You have to work while you’re on the team and continue that work once you’ve retired to make sure when you leave that it’s in a better place than where you entered it, that the next generation coming up gets to enter into an even better place,” said Victoria Jackson, a sports historian and clinical associate professor of history at Arizona State, in a phone conversation. “And then you’ll continue to work so that the group that follows that will be in an even better place too.”
Do not ever say that these women aren’t tough, or committed, or determined. This is a group that picked a fight with its own federation over equal pay and working conditions, won a World Cup in 2019 in the midst of that fight, and — after a hideously misogynistic response to their lawsuit by the federation’s lawyers — eventually won a landmark agreement with U.S. Soccer that created not only pay equity with the men’s program in dividing World Cup proceeds but equity in medical and support staffs, travel and the like.
Clearly, their definition of what constitutes a distraction is different from that of most athletes. Then again, the stakes were that important, and this too comes under the heading of leaving a place better than you found it.
“Some of the players who are new on the team now are never going to experience inequalities as a professional athlete under U.S. soccer,” Morgan said, proudly. “We actually just got our first settlement check in the mail (a while back). And Naomi (Girma) was joking that she didn’t get one. And I was like, ‘Be grateful. You just get equal.’ ”
The bigger picture — specifically the imbalance between FIFA’s disbursements from the men’s and women’s tournaments, as well as the difficulties some other countries seem to have regarding the concept of “equal” — still represent battles to be fought.
“The vibe’s been the same since, you know, 100 years ago,” Rapinoe said during the session in Carson. “Obviously, just wanting to constantly strive for whatever the next thing is. This is not a team that does any sort of resting on its laurels. It’s always about, you know, the next game, the next progress we can make, the next thing that we can fight for, where we can use our platform and how we continue on the field to be the absolute best team that we possibly can.”
As noted, those lessons are handed down. In response to a question from Moreno Valley soccer correspondent Jackie Gutierrez last weekend in San Jose, at Rapinoe’s retirement announcement, she discussed her first dose of the USWNT ethic as a rookie in 2006, dispensed by Lilly.
“I think we were running and obviously everyone knows Lil, she could run for days,” Rapinoe said. “She’d probably still outrun all of us to this day. I’m sure I was like, you know, not doing very well, you know, complaining about how hard it was and how easy it looked for her. And she just looked me dead in my face like, ‘It’s hard for everyone.’
“Everybody’s going through something,” Rapinoe said, adding that the overriding message was not only doing your best but “demanding that of your teammates as well, knowing that you’re not always going to get the best, but just that like all of us are in this together.”
The events of 2019, when the USWNT sailed through the turmoil and wound up in a champions’ ticker-tape parade in New York with spectators chanting “Equal pay,” might have been the ultimate in multitasking. Standing up for their beliefs is expected, and as Kristie Mewis put it, “Using our platform as much as we possibly can to implement things and to affect things that are happening off the field is super, super important to us, and we take a really big responsibility for that.”
It might have a lot to do with being a female athlete in a space that for so long was considered limited to men. WNBA players feel the same responsibility to stick up for what they consider important, and maybe it’s just that the commercial aspects of professional sports don’t outweigh their need to speak up.
“I think when you’re a member of a group that’s been historically kept out of sport, you understand that the fight for the right to play within sport is mirrored in other parts of society too,” Jackson said. “It might be more explicit in a sporting space, but it happens in other elements of society in more subtle ways. And if you’re a member of multiple marginalized groups … you’re much more attentive to the privilege of the opportunity to do that work.
“There’s an awareness that the core fan base in women’s sports is on the right side of history when it comes to inclusion, when it comes to creating a society which lives up to its founding principles and ideals.”
Then again, considering the commercial growth of women’s sports — consider the TV ratings for the NCAA women’s basketball championship game or the Women’s College World Series if you doubt it — maybe speaking up isn’t a deterrent to those who pay the most attention.
“I think everyone is sort of hip to the game now and understands that this is not just, ‘Oh, we should cheer for the Women’s World Cup because that’s the right thing to do,’ ” Rapinoe said. “This is actually a terrible business move if you’re not getting in on it, if you’re not investing, if you’re not putting resources into it, and if you’re not tuning in, you’re sort of missing out on a massive cultural moment in so many ways.”
Oh, and as for that competitive standard the USWNT has set? Other powers — Germany, England, France, Sweden and Canada, to name a few — have narrowed the gap substantially, as the Americans’ performances at the last two Olympics would suggest.
So if the Americans are stopped short of a three-peat, maybe it’s their own fault for forcing the rest of the world to catch up.
