A Team of Their Own

in the Women's World Cup final against China. Male soccer players take off their shirts to celebrate goals all the time, but chas Stain's exuberance became the talk of the nation. Some found it inappropriate, others had more elaborate theories. I was amused at the time by the people saying, oh, Nike set that up. I was like, no, I don't think China would have agreed to that. And if Nike really set that up, I'm sure Brandy Chastain's sports brawl

would have had a big white swissh on it. Eventually, the controversy died down, and chass stains sports braby came synonymous with women's soccer, a symbol of triumph. But back in almost fifteen years before chess Stain and the ninety nine women's team won the World Cup, the very first US women's national team. Well, they had an even bigger issue with their wardrobe. Let us play, Let us play,

Let us Play, Let Us Play. Welcome to the Thread, a podcast where we unraveled the stories behind some of the most important lives and events in history to learn more about the surprising connections between them. I'm Sean Braswell. This season's Thread started with the ninety nine Ers, the U S national team whose triumph in the nine World Cup launched women's soccer into the stratosphere. I don't know

if anything tops that moment still. Caitlin Murray is a journalist and author of the National Team, The Inside Story of the Women who changed Soccer. For the players who were around, who were kids at the time, they all talk about remembering World Cup. They remember that changing the idea of soccer and what they wanted to do when they grew up. But the nine ninners victory would not have been possible without another group of women, a team who also wore the team USA uniforms, even if they

were a bit baggy. There wasn't a whole lot of need for a US women's national soccer team in the mid nineteen eighties. There was no Women's World Cup and the sport was not in the Olympics. Yeah, there had been paper teams of the national team from nine eight two to nineteen eighty four. These were teams where the best players in the country were picked and their names were on a sheet of paper, and that was that

they didn't actually play any games. All that changed in nine five at the National Sports Festival and Baton Rouge louis an event of the U S Olympic Committee. The Sports Festival is america centerpiece of amateur athletics, and this summer it comes to Louisiana. Women's soccer was featured in this event for the first time, and it was sort of a many Olympics that they had on non Olympic years where athletes from around the country would compete against

each other. Organizers announced a list of players for the women's national team after the tournament concluded. For the players whose names were read on that list, it took them by surprise. They didn't know anything about it. After the Sports Festival happened, they pulled us together and they basically said, you're not only a paper team, but we're also going to go to Italy in two weeks and we're going to go play in this moondi Alito, which then was,

you know, a mini World Cup. Stacy was a member of that national team. It definitely took us all by surprise, the immediacy of it. Had a chance to go home for a few days after the festival, and then we flew to New York and we stayed out on Long Island and we trained for a week or so, and then we all hopped on a plane and flew over to Italy. The hastily assembled national team had a shoestring budget. They were given uniforms commonly called kits, but they were

not women's soccer uniforms. Journalist Caitlin Murray. They didn't have names or any information that would make it seem like they were designed for the players who were about to wear them and for the women who got these kids. They really didn't look like they were designed for the team at all, and they didn't fit very well. It was apparent they were men's kids because they did not fit them at all. They were huge, They you know,

came around their ankles. So the night before the team went to Italy, they were up late with their trainers. They had you know, threads and needles, and they were cutting and sewing their outfits to make sure they actually fit them properly. The players made it work. Stacy Enos again, I don't know if we looked the part like I don't know if people recognize that we were a soccer club, but you felt proud to step on it with your teammates and get on the plane and share with people

that you were the U S women's national team. The team arrived in Milan, Italy, then took a five hour bus ride to a small resort town near Finnis, where the soccer tournament was to take place. Emily Pickering Hardner was also a member of that first national team. It was a beautiful beach town. The pasta was awesome, the food was great. I mean, the whole thing was incredible. We're on a beach resort. It was vacation. Bruce Spreensteen had just come out with this big album I'm Born

in the USA, and everybody in Italy loved it. So when we walk out on the field, they usually played this song Born in the USA, which we would kind of look at each other out on the field and just start laughing. It was the first time that women had represented the US in an official international soccer match, and they were playing against other national teams like Italy, England, and Denmark with much more experience. Stacy Enos, it was

definitely eye opening, just brilliant, high level soccer. We had to fight for every moment and every opportunity in a match, and it was definitely harder than anyone could have ever anticipated. The Americans also dealt with more than the tough competition on the field. Just getting to the field was a challenge. Before their match against England, Emily Pickering Harner, our boss got lost. We were traveling and driving in the bus for an hour and we barely got there in time

for game time. I think we were flat going into it, and boom they scored, Boom they scored, and boom they scored. The team lost to England and would go on to lose three games and draw one. At the tournament, journalist Caitlin Murray, the US looked like they were playing in their first ever games, and that's how the results went. The US did not look prepared for facing the teams that they met at this tournament in Italy, but the U S team did win over many of the local

Italian fans who attended Stacy. We always thought they were booing us because they were going Oosa USA. And so eventually when we stopped to look at the fans and they want your autographs and they were cheering you, they were all saying USA for USA. Going to Italy was a formative experience for the young team. I felt like we had a strong presence and we made ourselves known

and uh, we learned a lot. It was invaluable. Then we we kind of knew the landscape, we knew our competition, and we knew what we had to do for the moment. There was no prospect of going to a World Cup or to the Olympics. It was just the beginning of a journey. This group of pioneers was just learning how to play together and overcome adversity. It was the start of a team culture that would endure countless challenges in

the upcoming years and eventually conquer the world. If there was no glamor in US women's soccer in the nineteen eighties, there was also certainly no money again, Caitlin Murray, the players on the early national teams were not doing it to be famous or get rich or be on TV

because those things were even possibilities. Yet, the players were getting ten dollars per diem when they played in the US, they got fifteen dollars when they traveled abroad, and the first national teams received little attention from either the public or the press. You know, we look at where the team is today, the endorsement deals they get, the salaries that they make. That was not even I think a

remote possibility in the players minds at the time. It was purely for the love of the game, purely to represent the country. The lack of compensation and resources only further motivated the players. Tim Nash is the author of It's Not the Glory and has covered the women's national team for decades. What really helped the team develop and become what they are is the attitude that, well, we're not getting any money, so how do we go out and win? So they would do whatever they could. They

would get very creative. Take for instance, midfield or Michelle Acres, one of the team's best players. She sometimes worked out on racquetball courts. She didn't need anybody to pass the ball to or shoot at when she had four walls around her, so she'd just going there and bash them off the wall and work on striking the ball and

work on receiving the ball all at once. The players were largely responsible for maintaining their own fitness during the long periods of time in which there were no games. Stacy Enos, I had already graduated, so I needed to jump in any scrimmage game or any pickup game I could find. I used the weight room a lot and just ran on my own. So it was a lot of just self discipline. Basically, the discipline extended into all parts of their lives, including what jobs the players could take.

Caitlin Murray, and you have a player like Karen Jennings, she was the best player on the team at the time. She also was working in a marketing job, and she had to keep quitting her jobs so she could keep playing soccer, because she would go to her employer and say, hey, can I have a couple of weeks off to go to camp with the national team and train, And of course the employer was like, no, you can't just keep

leaving your job to go play soccer. So she would quit the job that she had compete with the national team, and then I have to get a new job. And she did that multiple times to the point where it was a running joke within the team, like, oh, Karen quit another job today, And there was certainly no career to be had in playing soccer, so it wasn't like you're paying dividends towards something that's going to materialize. Lauren Gregg was the assistant coach of the nine that we

heard from an episode one. She was also a player on the early women's national teams. There was no promise of anything more than what was right in front of you, which was very little from the outside, but for those of us in it, it was everything. Greg slept on the floor if someone else's apartment so she didn't have

to pay rent. It was very difficult to have, you know, full time job and train at the level you needed to and then be able to up and leave um for you know, a couple of weeks at a time, and people weren't so forgiving as they are now because it's so popular now. Back then, it was like we were doing all this in an abyss. Early on, the team only played about five to eight games a year. When they traveled for tournaments, their trip expenses were paid,

but it was not exactly luxury travel. The players tease today about wanting to have you know, like a jet service, you know, and not fly commercial, and we're like, are you kidding me? Like back then, it was like from row thirty back was smoking, and you know, twenty nine above was non smoking, and so obviously the entire plane was, you know, a smoking plane or you know, so we'd just literally be like covering ourselves in blankets. The team

wrote on low flying propeller planes in China. They played on dirt fields in Sardinia, Tim Nash. They rode on a coal train through Bulgaria. Their faces were just black with coal set. The restroom was a hole in the floor. At one hotel they stayed in Haiti, they got one hour each day of running water and electricity, so they would be jumping in and out of shower trying to get and then the ones who couldn't do that just bathed in the pool. And I said it was pretty

nasty by the time they left. But in such environments the team really had time to get to know one another. They did not complain about how they were treated. They just worked harder. Again, Lauren greg we never felt deprived, and I felt very lucky to have the opportunity. Uh, and we grew tremendously from that, and that foundation of training when no one's watching became sort of the foundation for the success I think of the team over the

next decade. The drive and the resilience of this group of women would shape a national team that has won gold medals in four Olympics and three World Cup Championships. Here's how three national team players express what those early days meant to them. You look back and you think, to me, is some of the happiest days of my life. Still to this day cry at the national anthem because I was the best of the best of the best,

you know it was. It's a cool feeling. There's also, um, just a great sense of pride that knowing that we were one of the foundations and one of the building blocks were the start of the history of the women's national team. I'm proud to be on the team. It opened doors and um yeah, I carry it. I carry it with a full heart. It was no accident that the team players got the chance to be pioneers and women's soccer. They were part of a generation of women

that played on the front lines of history. Thanks to a controversial new law that's up next. Things really started to change for women's sports in nineteen seventy two. That's when Title nine, a law banning sex discrimination and federally funded education programs, was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Richard Nixon. Nixon signed the bill on June twenty, nineteen seventy two. It did not get a lot of attention. Six days earlier, something even more momentous

happened in the news. What do you think we have a mystery story out of Washington. Five people have been arrested and charged with breaking into the headquarters of the Democrat a National Committee in the middle of the night. The Democratic National Committee is located in the Watergate Office building. For the next two years, while President Nixon and the American public were distracted by the Watergate scandal, Title nine

was slowly remaking the sports landscape. The law meant that young women everywhere, at least in theory, had access to competitive sports. Sports programs for girls exploded in the decades that followed. In nineteen seventy four, for example, there were only about one hundred thousand girls across the country that were registered with the US Youth Soccer Association. Now that

number is in the millions. The women of those first national soccer teams were among the earliest beneficiaries of Title nine. Karen Blumenthal's a journalist and author of Let Me Play, The Story of Title nine, The Law that changed the future of girls in America. The women athletes of the nineteen seventies were sometimes called Title nine babies. For girls born in the nineteen seventies, the opportunities were vastly different

than for girls born before that. There were sports teams from an early age, and so there were soccer leagues and soccer teams for three year old girls, just like there were for three year old boys. There were gymnastics opportunities for younger kids. There were um volleyball teams in elementary school. National team player Emily Pickering Harner again. As a girl growing up in the seventies, sixties and seventies, I was involved in all kinds of sports and wanted

to play them all. And as soon as I was allowed to play Little League baseball due to Title nine, I played Little League baseball and so Title nine was big and huge for me. I knew about it at a very early age, but it was still hard to be a female athlete. In my high school, we did not have girls soccer. Three of us decided to try out for the boys team. Well, they put an obstacle in our way that we were required to ron do

sit ups, do push ups, and things like that. Suffice it to say none of us be prepared for it past the test, so we didn't get to play on the boys team. Stacy Enos had a similar experience. Sophomore year of high school. We finally got um a girls soccer team. There was a point where my family had considered moving or I was maybe going to go live with an aunt and uncle, just in order to play

high school soccer. Even with Title nine in effect, it took many colleges even longer to get with the program. Soccer analyst Jin Cooper, we all know Title nine passed in nineteen two, but it's not like a light switch was flipped on and suddenly everybody's playing collegiate sports. You know, it took a while for conferences to get organized, schools, to get organized facilities, recruiting all that stuff. It's like

slowly taking hold. If US colleges wanted to offer scholarships to male athletes, they had to offer them to women now as well, Susan Ware as a historian and author of Game, Set and Match, Billy Jane King and the Revolue in women's sports. And then as more and more women are getting these athletic scholarships, it increases the talent pool, it increases the depth and skill of the teams that

they're being recruited on. And then you really see that playing out over the next couple of decades, so you begin to see how these scholarships are so important in the athletic training of our future heroes. And those heroes include the women who played on the first national soccer teams Caitlin Murray. The national team was kind of built on Title nine because so many of those players who went on to have long, important careers with the national

team were identified in college as college players. So you have to think, if there's no Title nine, if none of these women are competing in college, who was going to be on the national team. Some of these women found themselves for repeatedly at ground zero for a changing sports world. Stacy Enos I consider myself a pioneer by

all standards. I mean, I've definitely have been on a lot of first you know, I've been on my first high school team, the college's first and C double a team, and then also had the opportunity to be on the first US women's national team. The women on that first national team were true pioneers. But there was another earlier team that really moved things forward, one in an entirely different sport, A group of women who are not just pioneers,

they were revolutionaries. They were members of the Yale women's crew team. They get on an unheeded bus, they drive thirty minutes to the Hausa Tonic. They'd compete, and they'd train in the wind and the rain and the snow, and then they had to wait on an unheeded bus while every last Yale member of the men's rowing team

would shower. I mean, we're at Yale Universe City. We are incredibly bright women, and if we were to say it's okay for us to be treated this way, what kind of message would that be for us to send out into the universe. And so the women decided to make a statement. We needed to speak our truth and and we wanted our voice to be heard. And I can imagine that in other athletic departments athletic directors all of a sudden said, oh my god, did you hear

what those those women at Yale did? And maybe they started to think could that happen here? In the next episode of The Thread, the story of the Yale nine Team, a group of women who paved the way for the women's national soccer teams and whose bold active defiance since shock waves through college campuses across the nation and changed what it meant to be a female athlete in America. Let Us, let us Right. The Thread is produced by

Robert Coulos, Shannon Williamson, and me Sean Braswell. Evan Roberts engineered our show. This episode features the song let us Play, written and performed by teacup Gin. You can hear more of their songs at teacup gin dot com. To learn more about The Thread, visit Aussie dot com, slash the Threat all one word, and make sure to subscribe to The Thread on Apple Podcasts, follow us on I Heart Radio, or listen wherever you get your podcast