Julie Foudy Quotes

I hope things get better, but it's a difficult process,' Foudy said. 'You're dealing with governments that don't care about children working. And it's hard to put our Western ideals on their situations. If you don't pay people enough so they can survive with only the father or mother working, how can they expect the kids not to work?

At one point with the San Diego Spirit, Foudy was getting to know Chinese defender Fan Yunjie when the conversation went something like this, at least as far as Foudy heard: “What’s your husband’s name?” “Who?” “Your husband.” “Yeah.” “No, what’s his name?” “Who?” “YOUR HUS-BAND. WHAT. IS. HIS. NAME?” Yunjie finally looked at Foudy and said: “Julie, my husband’s name is Hu.” Everyone burst out laughing.

When Solo got back to her own hotel room, all her emotions were unleashed. As one player puts it now: “All the sudden, we were seeing furniture fly into the hallway.” Several players who decline to speak on the record say Solo trashed her room and punched a hole in the wall. Nicole Barnhart, the backup goalkeeper who was her roommate at the time, picked up the furniture and put the room back together. Later, Aly Wagner, Cat Whitehill, and Angela Hucles went to Solo’s room to check on her. She was crying. The trio understood why Solo was so upset. The decision to change a goalkeeper in the middle of a World Cup was unprecedented, and everyone knew it. The players tried to support her and give her a pep talk to be ready, just in case. “We get it,” the players told her one by one. “This is an awful thing to go through. We’ve all been there. But you are still part of this team, and we still need you. You never know what’s going to happen in the game.” The press corps in China was small, but once reporters there learned about Ryan’s decision, it was all they could ask about. Would it shake Solo’s confidence? “That’s not our concern,” Ryan said. “We came here trying to win a world championship and put the players on the field that we thought could win each game.” Was Ryan concerned that Scurry would be rusty? “She’ll be ready—wait and see,” he said. Julie Foudy and Tony DiCicco were now both working as broadcast analysts for ESPN. On air, they expressed astonishment at Ryan’s decision and both said, in no uncertain terms, that it was a bad move.

We’re talking about them as athletes, rather than some of the conversations we had in ’99: My god, who are these women? They’re kind of hot!” Julie Foudy said. After the team won in 1999, the players turned into one-of-a-kind heroes, pioneers, and role models overnight. Many people rooted for them as a larger statement about women in sports. But by 2015, the players of the national team were athletes that America grew to love simply as athletes. If fans were going to be jubilant about a victory in the 2015 World Cup final, it wouldn’t just be because of some deeper meaning or greater impact—it would be because fans knew these players and wanted them to win. It was evidenced by Alex Morgan’s almost 2 million followers on Twitter, Hope Solo’s autobiography becoming a New York Times bestseller, and Abby Wambach appearing in Gatorade television ads on heavy rotation. No longer did the players need to show up at schools and youth clinics to hand out flyers, like the 1999 team did. The word about the national team was already out. In the team’s three May 2015 send-off games, they sold out every match, drawing capacity crowds at Avaya Stadium, the StubHub Center, and Red Bull Arena. Consider what Foudy told reporters in 1999 after the World Cup win: “It transcends soccer. There’s a bigger message out there: When people tell you no, you just smile and tell them, Yes, I can.” By 2015? Players like Carli Lloyd were talking about world domination. It was all about the soccer—and that, in and of itself, was something special and powerful.

Chastain had watched teammates like Mia Hamm and Julie Foudy end their careers with testimonial matches—the special farewell games that important players earn—but she was never going to get one. Her last game was the final stop of the post-Olympics victory tour in 2004, the same last game as Hamm and Foudy, only Chastain didn’t know it at the time. “It wasn’t on my radar—it wasn’t supposed to happen like that,” Chastain says. “He was the assistant coach. I’m not sure how he became coach of the national team, to be honest, and there was no discussion.” Shannon MacMillan, another veteran, tells a similar story. She, too, was surprised to find herself left off rosters, but in her case, it was because Greg Ryan had reassured her that she was in his plans. As time went on and she still hadn’t gotten a call, at age 31 she gave up hope of ever returning to the team. Her career ended at 176 caps. “I was like, Enough’s enough,” she says. “That’s kind of what forced my hand into retiring. I just got sick and tired of the politics and the B.S.

One by one, the players expressed their anger and disappointment. They said Solo had torn down what the players before her—players like Julie Foudy and Mia Hamm—had built up. This team had a vitally important culture that Solo was destroying. Solo argued: “This isn’t about Julie Foudy or anyone else from the past.” But her pushback only seemed to further upset the veterans. “I didn’t know to handle this betrayal of the team culture,” Markgraf says now. “I was tired, I was hurt, I had blown my ankle out after a poor World Cup. We played horrible soccer. And she blasted Bri, who had handled the transition of power at goalkeeper in a very classy way, so when she did that, it became a mess. I wish I had kept my cool, but her actions were the telling sign that the old culture would no longer work.” For the rest of the players outside that leadership group, the situation was viewed with a range of attitudes, but everyone knew it was something that needed to be dealt with. The problem was that there wasn’t a consensus on what to do.

While the women carried their own equipment, the players on the men’s team didn’t have to worry about such things. While the men’s team traveled to games in luxury buses, the women traveled in vans. The men stayed in better hotels and had better accommodations for flights, too. “We were staying in hotels that had cockroaches in them, and we had to drive to games in hotel shuttle buses. We actually went to a game on a Holiday Inn shuttle bus once,” Julie Foudy says. “I’d take pictures of us in every single middle seat going up the plane. Back then they had the smoking section, and our seats were always the ones before smoking—we were sitting 10 hours in smoke-infested quarters on long flights. Little things became big things.” At

An all-star game was the post–World Cup opportunity the national team was looking for. After all, the players had already asked U.S. Soccer how the federation planned to capitalize on hosting the Women’s World Cup on home soil. The answer they got back, essentially, was that the federation wasn’t really thinking about that. “We pressed them on it and said, Hey, what are you doing? What are the plans?” remembers Julie Foudy. “They said we were going to Africa. We were like, Africa? We need to grow the game here. Why are we going to Africa? We had never even been to Africa.

With a quiet post-Olympics year ahead, U.S. Soccer secretary general Dan Flynn informed the players that the national team would “go dark” for 2005 and play between four and six games total that year. Rather than schedule the usual slate of games, the federation would instead focus on scouting new players. “If there are no games, where will the women play?” Langel asked. “The W-League,” replied Flynn. “Are you kidding me?” Langel said. The W-League wasn’t a professional league. It was a development league that included amateur, unpaid players. There was no comparison between playing international opponents with the national team and competing in the W-League. “We told them we don’t necessarily need a residency camp, but we don’t have anywhere to play at all,” says Cat Whitehill, who graduated from the University of North Carolina with a degree in communications. “They wanted nothing to do with us.” U.S. Soccer argued the next World Cup wasn’t for another three years and there were no major events the team needed to prepare for. It would be similar to the team’s schedule in 2001, when U.S. Soccer hosted just two home games for the national team. But for the players who had now made soccer their living and didn’t have the WUSA anymore, that was unacceptable. It’s not as if U.S. Soccer was simply scaling back friendlies. The federation said it had no plans to send the team to the annual Algarve Cup in Portugal, which the team always competed in. A team wouldn’t be sent to the Four Nations Tournament in China either, despite the competition being a usual fixture on the team’s calendar. The players demanded to know how U.S. Soccer could justify skipping the tournaments. Flynn replied that it was “the technical director’s recommendation” to play a lighter schedule. The technical director? April Heinrichs. The players wanted to figure out if Heinrichs really believed the team should play so few games in 2005, so Julie Foudy reached out to her. “Is that true? Did you tell U.S. Soccer we should only play five games?” Foudy asked. “I never said anything like that,” Heinrichs told her. “I told them you should play 20 games.” If Heinrichs hadn’t recommended such a sparse schedule and, in fact, recommended around 20 games, it seemed that U.S. Soccer was making a decision that went against what was best for the players. The players saw a clear double standard—the men’s team hadn’t played so few games since 1987, almost two decades earlier. They concluded U.S. Soccer’s real reason was the same one behind most disputes between the players and the federation: money. The federation, it appeared, did not want to spend the money for training camps, player stipends, and travel for overseas competitions, even as it was sitting on a $30 million surplus at the time. “In 2005, they had no plans for us and wanted us to go quiet so they didn’t have to pay us the entire year,” says defender Kate Markgraf.

So, after that meeting with the Women’s Sports Foundation, she called King to ask her how the national team could get the federation to listen to them. “You just don’t play. That’s the only leverage you have,” King told Foudy. “They depend on you, you’re representing them, you make them money, and you have to say no.” And that’s exactly what the veteran players did. Julie Foudy, Mia Hamm, Briana Scurry, Michelle Akers, Joy Fawcett, Kristine Lilly, Carla Overbeck, Carin Jennings, and Tisha Venturini rejected U.S. Soccer’s offer for a contract for 1996, and the nine players did not attend a training camp in December 1995, just months away from the Olympics. Hank Steinbrecher, U.S. Soccer’s secretary general, told reporters that the players were being greedy, quipping that they were more worried about lining their pockets—or, rather, shoes. “Our team is favored to win it all and we