Away from It All, Close to the Center
“Where are you?” That’s the question I’ve been asked most in 2019.
“What are you doing there?” That’s a close second.
I usually answer the first question with a sarcastic or existential response, “right here, where I’ve been all along.” Then I’ll give some geographic touch point so that should I go missing the person I was talking to could launch a search party from my recent whereabouts.
At the end of May, I found myself in Seattle, Washington. I was taken there, I didn’t choose Seattle — but that’s a whole different story. And I found myself pondering the event that had loomed over the calendar for the past four years, the Europa League Final in Baku, Azerbaijan. Actually, I’d only been thinking about that for a few weeks once Arsenal improbably found their way back to a European Final.
Staying just north of the city in a Studio 6 with the two English labradors who dominate my instagram feed and whose happiness was the top priority in my life, we waited. We walked. We lapped Green Lake with two of my favorite humans, Nikki & Blaire. We became regulars at a brewery down the street that had a bar dog who could’ve easily passed for their cousin. And I watched the match with Nikki which outweighed any pain of the defeat by a factor of ten.
To be in the presence of those who are part of your journey is the power of human connection. The thing I had come to understand in High Rockies of Colorado in the months leading up to this point — I told you, that’s a totally different story — was that isolation is not possible beyond the human condition. And we all exist beyond the human condition. But it is in our humanity that we suffer. Fear. Loss. Absence. Loneliness. Our divinity looks at those temporary states with humor, for they are but a single pixel of the screen on which you’re reading this. Their irrelevance cannot be overstated. But to the human, we can fixate on it. A single pixel not presenting in the color that it should. The tiniest crack on our phone’s screen taking our attention away from this magical device that has the capacity to connect us to THE ENTIRETY OF THE HUMAN SPECIES.
But while the Europa League Final didn’t loom large in the scheme of my psyche, the Women’s World Cup was tattooed on the calendar in my mind as it had been since 2015, since 1991.
My father’s absence, the first Women’s World Cup ever that he wouldn’t have a role to play in as coach or commentator existed as a fixed wall that I neither wanted to brace for, nor wanted to Wile E. Coyote myself up against.
There was nothing to do. There was nowhere to go. There was no escaping it. And yet, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
So the dogs and I boarded a ferry. And we headed west, to a place that I’ve known existed my entire adult life, but had never explored. We went out to the islands and ultimately to the Olympic Peninsula and Olympic National Park.
Instead of bracing for the tournament or following the final preparations the way I always had, I sought refuge. I left cell service and the happenings at Spurs Training Center and anger around the lack of media coverage and the expectations and the possibility of a fourth star behind. I removed myself from the stimuli of everything that I had told myself for so long mattered so much.
I had spent so much of 2019 trying to not want anything and now suddenly even aware of what was about to take place in France, I shed the last thing that I had spent all year wanting — to be there. In the forests of Washington, I found Heaven and freedom and peace and I communed with the Ghosts of the Forest.




You see, my father was not one dimensional, even though in his death we frequently portray him that way. He was an exceptional coach, one of the greatest to ever do it. But in those woods, I was reminded of just how much more he gave us than his love for soccer. In those woods, any and every result that the US Women’s National Team came home from France with was going to be a result I could celebrate. Victory was redefined.

That doesn’t mean that I didn’t want or expect the team to come home with the trophy, it just meant that I could see beyond that. If France had beaten us in the Quarterfinal, they would’ve had their ’99 moment. If England had beaten us in the Semifinal, they would’ve demanded respect after having been through 50 years of the game being deemed illegal (think about that) in the last century. If Holland had beaten us in the Final, the women would have fulfilled the promise of ‘Total Soccer’ that their men’s side had never been quite able to achieve. And if any of those teams had done any of those things, they would’ve earned it because the United States never yields. You have to excel beyond the global standard that we have set for three decades.
I say ‘we’ because it is always ‘we.’ We all have our roles to play in the context of soccer in this country and soccer on the global scale. No matter how close or far from the center of energy (the field) we are, with perspective we understand that it is our collective power that determines outcomes and shapes the future.
Alyssa Naeher had be widely questioned coming into the World Cup. I had many conversations with commentators, pundits and fans about the level of belief I had in her. She’s a winner. She always has been. She just wasn’t outspoken in the way her predecessor had been. Her presence was different. But her energy, her competitive fire was always there.
In 2007 and 2008, we started a WPSL team in Connecticut, the SoccerPlus CT Reds. During those years when there was no top-flight women’s pro league in the US, we assembled an incredible roster of players who still aspired to be professionals, who carried themselves as professionals, who kept the dream alive when it had burned down to a few scattered embers.
People we were in business with didn’t understand why we would invest money in that team. It was largely unsupported and laughed about. It was expensive and it was my job as the CEO of the SoccerPlus companies at the time to find the money to keep that team alive. And it was hard to justify on paper. It was even harder to manifest it into the environment the players needed to focus on their own development.
It took an army to make it happen, people you may have heard of — or not, Lisa Cole, Shawn Kelly, Heather Hathorn, Chris Bart-Williams, Janusz Michallik, Mick D’Arcy, Megan Jessee and more. We all played our roles and it was special. And here more than a decade later, the US Women’s National Team was headed to the World Cup with two goalkeepers (Ad Franch played for the team after Alyssa) from our little WPSL team from Connecticut.

I couldn’t have predicted then the impact the Reds would’ve had. And the environment and the team takes nothing away from the work before and after their time with us that Alyssa, Ad and every other player had to put in to see their dreams realized. But that’s the point, we can’t know. We can never know.
It’s just one manifestation (in my life) of the well circulated quote from Steve Jobs 2005 Stanford Commencement address:
“Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.” — Steve Jobs
Our objective wasn’t some speculative future victory lap. It was never even about claiming the players as “ours” — most of you probably have never heard of the SoccerPlus CT Reds until reading this today. It was and is about doing the right thing. It was an is about serving the game and supporting as many people along the journey as we possibly can. It was and is about understanding the game as connective tissue that should unite us and all too often, especially in recent years has divided us.
US Soccer has created an “us” and a “them.” Even within the Federation that exists. There’s the Federation and there’s the Players. There’s the leadership and there’s everyone else. It doesn’t have to be this way.
And in the future, my faith allows me to rest with the knowledge that it won’t be. That the path we are on and have been on is unsustainable. People have known of the cultural issues out of US Soccer for years, for decades. And they have never been discussed as openly and as candidly as they are today.
It takes time to turn the ship. But the good news is, it’s not about us — me or you. We will not be here to see the end of the path, just as Dad wasn’t here to see the players he brought into the National Team program in 2008 summit the mountain (again).
But what I said to Jill Ellis on the field in Charlotte after she overtook him for the most wins in the history of US Soccer was that, this summer, I didn’t miss him. I didn’t feel his absence. I felt and saw his presence everywhere. He didn’t get it all right, but he always tried to do the right thing, even when it was hard, especially when it was hard. That was what made him an exceptional leader and a wonderful coach.
What I knew coming out of the woods to a full brewery in Olympia, Washington for the opening game of the 2019 edition of the World Cup was that we are victorious because our ranks (those of us who care to our core) continue to grow. We are victorious because there is no turning back to the days before the impact of all of this was understood (although if you want to revisit them, two spectacular podcasts came out this summer about that era gone by, Throwback from Grant Wahl and Sports Illustrated and Backpass from 30 for 30/ESPN).
Someone today asked me to write about “that magical fine line between creating a system that will benefit the sport long-term while maintaining on-field success in the short-term.” The answer to that is to do the right thing, even when it’s hard, especially when it’s hard. We can get more into that in the future but it’s where we’re headed — forward is the only direction we go.
As for me, I am currently coaching youth soccer in Utah and active on Twitter. I continue to look for my next big project. In the meantime, I feel privileged to get to work with the youth players I do, to commentate on the direction of the game in the US and globally and to be a resource to those in the arena working towards the best days of soccer in this country, which are most definitely ahead of us!
Thanks for taking the time to read this and for being with me on this journey through soccer and life.
Sincerely,
Anthony

