Sixteen years after Brandi Chastain ripped off her jersey in front of millions of Americans following one of the most magical moments in sports, she’s a coach.
At 46, she coaches the soccer team at Bellarmine College Prep, an all-boys Catholic high school in San Jose and has spent years assisting her husband, the longtime women’s coach at her alma mater Santa Clara.
But Chastain has always hoped to return to U.S. Soccer. It’s an organization she helped vault into the spotlight, and team she helped raised to unprecedented heights.
“Hopefully one day I’ll be the coach of a youth national team and maybe the women’s national team,” Chastain told USA TODAY Sports.
What’s preventing Chastain — a player who put women’s soccer on the map for young girls everywhere in 1999 — from being the U.S. Soccer coaching system if she wants to be?
“If you know the answer to that, I’d love to know what it is,” she said. “I don’t know.”
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Her lack of involvement highlights the fact that there aren’t many former stars — especially from the ’99 World Cup-winning squad — coaching at any level within U.S. Soccer.
“That’s an area we could definitely get better at,” said ESPN analyst Julie Foudy, who played on the national team from 1987-2004. “I think that’s an area the whole world needs to get better at in terms of developing female coaches and administrators and just people that come back to the game. I stayed in it through television, but I often think it would have been great to have had a pipeline to say, OK, if you want to get involved while you’re playing, let’s get your coaching license or an administrative degree in sports management.
“We should be mentoring along that younger generation to stay in the game, be the decision maker when you retire and give back to the game in that way and there’s not enough doing it. I think we need to do a better job of re-engaging those players for sure.”
April Heinrichs is the technical director for U.S. women’s soccer. It’s just her most recent title in the U.S. soccer system. Heinrichs won a World Cup in 1991, and was the USWNT head coach from 2000-2005. She’s one of the few former players who has cycled back through the system on the other side, and is very aware the program is lagging.
“Every level we struggle to find women in coaching. They just seem to stay away from coaching,” Heinrichs said. “We estimate less than 5% of our club coaches in America are women. We know that when Title IX was first implemented and 20 years later enforced, there were far more women coaching in Division I colleges. And in NCAA Division I colleges today, the numbers are dropping dramatically. All those play a role into how people matriculate up into the national team level.
We should be mentoring along that younger generation to stay in the game
Julie Foudy
“Less and less women are choosing the career and sticking to it long enough to get to the national team level. We have as a federation not made it a priority for way too many years and in recent years, (head coach) Jill Ellis and myself have made it more of a priority to the point of certainly where we wouldn’t take a female over a man if she wasn’t qualified, but we have been extremely aggressive in recruiting the women that are out there coaching regularly that are making it a career and have really committed to becoming a professional coach.”
April Heinrichs (USA TODAY Sports)
There are a few former national team players currently involved including Michelle French, who coaches the U-20 national team. French appeared in 14 matches for the USWNT from 1999-2001, and enjoyed an eight-year professional career ending in 2009.
Current players, like Abby Wambach, don’t always want to dive into coaching immediately upon retiring, but as the U.S. striker plays her fourth and final World Cup, she too wonders why so many former players don’t find their way back into the U.S. Soccer fold when they playing days have ended.
I’m not sure they want us involved
Michelle Akers
“I’ve been asking that question for a long time and I think the German Federation, they do it the right way,” Wambach said. “They put the women in their full national team, they give them positions, whether it be full administrative side or the coaching side. You see it in their youth teams— they are former players. And right now, we have a few former players, but not as many as some other federations, so I think we have things to learn from different federations and maybe that’s a conversation we have in the near future.”
Germany has promoted coaches from within for years. Women’s national team coach Silvia Neid won the UEFA Women’s Championship three times and was on the 1995 World Cup runner up team as a player, and she’s been the German national team coach for the last 10 years. It was recently announced that when she retires in 2016, former German national team member Steffi Jones will take her place.
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The path Germany has laid before former players is one midfielder Tobin Heath hopes will be available in the U.S. when the time comes to hang up her boots.
“My dream job would probably be to be in charge of youth development for U.S. Soccer,” she said.
“I really like the development side of it because I know that’s where the people were most influential during that period of developing me into the player I am today. I would like to do that for the generations after me.”
My dream job would probably be to be in charge of youth development for U.S. Soccer
Tobin Heath
Heath admits she hasn’t brought this up with Heinrichs or anyone at U.S. Soccer yet — she’s 28, has 94 caps and 11 goals, and isn’t ready to finish her playing career just yet.
For someone in Heath’s position, however, Heinrichs says there are opportunities to begin coaching while still on the national team.
U.S. Soccer has a rigorous coaching education program in place which is available, and required, of anyone with aspirations of coaching at the top youth, professional, and international levels. Amateur coaches must pass a series of written, verbal and physical tests over the course of a minimum of three years to earn a USSF A-License, which is the highest level coaching license offered by U.S. Soccer. By the time a coach has earned an A-License, they will have gone through approximately 270 hours of coaching education on and off the field over a mandatory minimum of three years.
However, players with 50 caps for the national team are eligible for their B coaching license and could coach youth teams while simultaneously playing. Heinrichs says she hovers over the current national team in hopes of starting future coaches on this path, but there are former big-name stars that want to be involved just waiting for the invitation.
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Michelle Akers, arguably the best women’s soccer player ever who was part of two World Cups in 1991 and ‘99, would love to coach in the women’s national team program. She’s been in contact with Heinrichs and did one youth camp in San Diego, but says she hasn’t been connected since.
“I’m not sure they want us to be involved,” Akers said. “Why push and push? They know we’re here. They know what we have to offer.”
Kristine Lily, who retired in 2011, is an assistant coach at the University of Texas. Heinrichs said she’s come to a national team camp and they hope to have her back in the future.
Even if it isn’t a coaching role, Foudy wishes there was a greater connectivity between generations of players, and an open line of communication linking current and future players with those who came before.
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“Even if it’s not coaching, there’s a philosophy and culture you pass on,” Foudy said. “This is what matters and why it matters. I would love for Mia (Hamm) and all those players to be in front of younger kids saying that. Any retired player that’s come through. This is what our culture is. This is our family.”
