5

 

Julie Foudy

Know What Matters, Help Others, Challenge the Status Quo

One afternoon in June 2010, a dozen South African boys and girls converted a dusty, all-dirt courtyard in the middle of Soweto Township into a soccer field, using trash cans in place of nets. It happens every day, thousands of times, in every country around the world. Someone has a soccer ball, kids gather, they set up a makeshift field, they play. But there was something special about this game. Julie Foudy—retired American soccer star, member of the team that won the first Women’s World Cup, athlete with two Olympic gold medals to her name—wanted to join. Someone suggested they play boys versus girls.

Foudy had traveled to South Africa to cover the World Cup for ESPN. She was dressed like a stylish TV host, even in the pickup game, wearing a blue sleeveless top, black trousers, and heels. Yet she ran comfortably up and down the impromptu pitch, calling out to other players, still the very image of a national team player, even if her dark brown mane wasn’t pulled into the ponytail of her pro days. And after scoring a goal, she circled back to her teammates, one arm raised in a power fist. “Girls, two-zero!” she shouted. Reaching them, she held both hands up to do high tens with each of her protégées.¹

These days, Foudy is most often in the public eye as a soccer commentator and feature reporter for ESPN and ABC. With her girl-next-door looks, easy manner, and experience on the field, she’s a natural for the part—not to mention that, as she said in her Hall of Fame induction speech, “I’ve never met a microphone that I don’t like.”² She breaks down games, explaining strategy and walking less soccer-savvy viewers through plays, and she doesn’t hold back her opinions, as when she ranted against the use of penalty kicks to decide games still tied after two overtimes. “I think they should play ’til they die,” she once quipped.³ But she is still best known as a soccer star in her own right.

Foudy earned a spot on the US national team in 1987, at the age of sixteen, and played for the squad for seventeen years. For thirteen of those seasons, she served as a captain, exemplifying what could have been the team motto: train hard, laugh harder. The New York Times once described Foudy as “the team’s comic relief and its social conscience.”⁴ The latter label was a nod to the causes she has championed off the field, the most high profile being her support for Title IX. But as captain, she helped manage the inevitable conflicts that arise on a team through a combination of straight talk and humor. She led a squad that supported its players through marriages and divorces, births and deaths.

Through it all, Foudy kept the team focused on the goal: to win. And win it did: two World Cup trophies, three Olympic medals, hundreds of thousands of fans, and oodles of respect. By 2004, when Foudy retired, US women’s soccer had been transformed from a hobby to a professional sport. Foudy’s retirement after the 2004 Olympic games, alongside fellow soccer legends Mia Hamm and Joy Fawcett, marked the end of what the Associated Press called a “golden era” of US women’s soccer.⁵

The First Kick

Julie Foudy grew up in Mission Viejo, California, a mostly residential town south of Los Angeles. Her parents, Jim and Judy, encouraged their children to be active, and Julie, the youngest of four, was kicking soccer balls with her older brothers as soon as she could walk. Although she enjoyed tennis and even surfing, soccer was her favorite sport, and she had mastered dribbling by the age of six. Foudy’s parents made it clear: if she chose to play soccer and to set aside other activities in order to focus on the game, that was her choice to make. As long as she did well in school, they would support it. “They opened the doors for me and said, ‘Walk through the ones you want to—no, leap through them,’” she recalled.⁶

The day she turned seven and became eligible for the local American Youth Soccer Organization team, she signed up. One of the most talented girls in the Southern California AYSO league, Foudy was assigned to play midfield. The position is physically demanding, and it requires a keen sense of strategy. Like a football quarterback or a point guard on the basketball court, a soccer midfielder watches the game as it unfolds and calls out plays. Foudy was named a league all-star and invited to join a traveling team, the Soccerettes.

As a Soccerette, Foudy thrived. She was a natural athlete, but she was also committed to improving her game, spending hours every day kicking a ball against her parent’s garage. She developed the aggressive style that would make her an offensive threat over the course of her career. She was named Southern California Player of the Year for three years straight.

At thirteen, Foudy tried out for the state team run by the Olympic Development Program, an effort designed to sift out players talented enough to compete for a shot at the national team. In a matter of months, Foudy went from the California team to the West Regional team to the US “19 and under” team, landing a spot on the national team in 1987 while she was still in high school.

To play for the national team, Foudy had to devote even more time to soccer. She spent her summer vacations training and traveling for games rather than hanging out with her friends. She missed proms and even her high school graduation.⁷ Foudy told me that her commitment to soccer made such decisions clear, if not always easy. On the evening of graduation, she lay in a hotel bed in Italy, where her team was for a tournament, depressed. Then her coach knocked on the door. He’d come to tell her that her hard work had earned her a spot on the starting lineup. The news erased any lingering sadness, she told biographer Matt Christopher.⁸ And the truth was, she hadn’t given up her friends to train with the national team. Her teammates were her friends.

Heavily recruited by colleges, Foudy narrowed her choices to Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, and the University of North Carolina. UNC had an advantage. Anson Dorrance, the coach of the national team, also headed up the school’s women’s soccer program, and many of Foudy’s national teammates played for UNC. The program was considered the top in the nation, and Dorrance offered Foudy a full scholarship.⁹

But even though soccer was important to Foudy, so was her education. She knew she wanted to attend a college with the highest academic standards. She chose Stanford, helped in her decision by the belief that she could make a big impact on the school’s up-and-coming program.

Foudy majored in biology and fulfilled rigorous pre-med requirements, with the intention of going to medical school. As a Stanford Cardinal, Foudy quickly emerged as the linchpin of the team. Christopher describes her “almost nonstop string of chatter as she encourages her teammates, calls out changes in strategy, and alerts them to what is happening around them.”¹⁰ Her never-ending talk earned her the nickname “Loudy Foudy.”

Foudy was still playing for the national team, and people were starting to recognize its engine. If Foudy’s teammate Mia Hamm was “the face of women’s soccer” in the United States—signing lucrative deals with Nike and other commercial brands—Foudy was its voice. She was the one who set up the offense on the field and, in critical seconds before win-or-lose minutes, urged her teammates to “beat them to every ball.”¹¹

She had to learn how to motivate her teammates, though. “I was incredibly competitive and outspoken,” she told me recently, and that could cause problems. “I would be in the middle of a game, veins popping out of my neck, and in the moment, I would lose it on a player,” she admitted. On the field and in the locker room, though, she observed other styles, from the feisty leadership of the team’s first captain, April Heinrichs, to the quiet, lead-by-example mode of Mia Hamm. “What I learned over the years is that you have to realize who you’re talking to, and which style works best,” she told me.¹²

Playing for the national team wasn’t glamorous. The players earned no salary. They traveled by bus, stayed in cheap motels, and were given $10 a day in meal money. “We were the red-headed stepchild team,” fellow player Michelle Akers recalled. “The men’s team was what was going to give US soccer and this country a name, and so they got all the money and the respect.”¹³ But for Foudy, the national team offered a chance to work hard, fulfill a personal passion, and spend time with friends. Many players on the national team describe it as a sisterhood. As the group grew closer personally, they became stronger as a unit.

“When I first started playing soccer, there was no national team,” Foudy recalled in a 2009 speech. “And then after I made the team people said, ‘Well, there will never be a Women’s World Cup.’ And we said, ‘Yes, there will be, and we are going to win the first one.’”¹⁴ And in 1991, the team did just that, winning the first-ever Women’s World Cup trophy (and beating the US men’s team to a world championship) in front of more than sixty-five thousand cheering, autograph-seeking fans in Beijing. The excitement in the stadium and on the streets after the win gave Foudy the first inkling that her team could make history. The team members thought, Foudy said in the HBO documentary Dare to Dream, “It’s going to be like this when we get home. People are now going to pay attention!”¹⁵

But they didn’t. No media showed up at the airport to capture the champions’ home coming. In Dare to Dream, Foudy recalled that the US Soccer Federation even considered disbanding the women’s national team, thinking a new team could be assembled if and when another Women’s World Cup was announced.

But the national team survived, and soon young fans began showing up at the games, asking for autographs. “My heroes and my role models were three-hundred-pound football players and eight-foot-tall basketball players,” Foudy said about her childhood in the documentary. “I don’t remember ever having a woman that I’ve pointed to and said, ‘That’s who I’m going to be one day.’”¹⁶ But Foudy began to see herself as an ambassador for the sport, as someone who could inspire the next generation of female soccer players.

Activist

Foudy graduated from Stanford in the spring of 1994 and immediately faced a big decision: attend Stanford Medical School, where she had been admitted, or pursue soccer, a less certain career. With the national team on hiatus and no other team to train with over the summer, it would have been easy to retire her number 11 jersey. But Foudy wasn’t ready to leave the sport she loved and abandon the growing numbers of young fans. And her longtime boyfriend, Ian Sawyers—a British-born soccer coach whom she’d met through club circles in Southern California and who would start coaching the Cardinals the following year—supported her.

Foudy chose to pursue what was most meaningful to her. She deferred medical school for a year and moved to Sweden, where she trained with a local team, although she returned the following year to marry Sawyers and continue training with the national team.

“We always said we could really make a huge impact on soccer if people had a glimpse of what we were all about,” Foudy said.¹⁷ And she saw the 1996 Olympic games in Atlanta as an opportunity. But it was an opportunity that Foudy almost walked away from when she learned that the women’s team had been offered a mere $1,000-a-month stipend, with a bonus if it won gold. Their male counterparts had been promised a bonus if they won any medal.¹⁸ This struck Foudy as fundamentally unfair. As the captain and the team’s most garrulous player, Foudy pushed the issue with the US Soccer Federation and found resistance. Fortuitously, Foudy met Billie Jean King.

“I would get these calls, ‘Hey, King—help!’” the tennis legend recalled. “Don’t play,” King advised. “That’s the only leverage you have.”¹⁹ It was a scary proposition for the players, who knew they might be giving up their only chance for Olympic gold. But Foudy convinced eight key players on the team to strike, and she called them daily to bolster their spirits during the tense weeks that followed.

Ultimately, the committee gave in, agreeing to give the women’s team the same deal as the men’s. Foudy and her team went on to win the gold. But the experience changed her. It made her step back and ask what kind of legacy she and her team wanted to leave. As she would later say, “Winning was great, really great. But more important, we wanted to leave the sport in a better state.”²⁰ Inside the Olympic athlete, the seed of activism had been planted. Foudy told me that Billie Jean King “would always say to me, ‘If you had a clean slate what would you want to do, not for you, but for the next generation coming behind you? Think about them. That’s what I want you to think about.’” Foudy brought this perspective to every contract negotiation after that.

Winning at the Olympics earned the players media attention and sponsorship offers: soon, Reebok offered Foudy an endorsement deal, which she was thrilled by but hesitant to accept. She had seen reports about sporting goods companies employing child labor and felt troubled not only by the revelation but also by the apathy of fellow athletes, reported Jeff Savage in a 1999 biography.²¹ Foudy wasn’t about to link her name to a company that was taking advantage of children, even if that meant giving up a lucrative endorsement deal.

Reebok said that its soccer balls were manufactured without using child labor, but Foudy insisted on traveling to the factory in rural Pakistan to see for herself. Satisfied, she agreed to endorse the company. For taking her stand, she was awarded the FIFA Fair Play Award—the first American and the first woman to receive that award.

But if sponsors, not to mention the US Soccer Federation, had come around, the media hadn’t. Broadcasters hadn’t even aired the medal-winning game live. And when the federation announced that the next Women’s World Cup would be held in arenas like Giants Stadium (now MetLife Stadium) and the Rose Bowl, sportswriters ridiculed the decision. Some even accused the federation of lying about early ticket sales.

Foudy and her team went on to win the 1999 World Cup in a sold-out Giants Stadium and to play for the San Diego Spirit, one of the eight teams in the short-lived Women’s United Soccer Association, the first US professional women’s soccer league.

Off the Field

In February 2002, the National Wrestling Coaches Association, the College Gymnastics Association, and the US Track and Field and Cross Country Coaches Association, among other groups representing male athletes and alumni, filed suit against the federal government, challenging the constitutionality of Title IX.

Enacted in 1972 and officially called the Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act, Title IX transformed athletics programs across the United States. If a school received any money from Washington, DC, it had to offer female athletes the same opportunities that it offered male athletes. Foudy has described Title IX as “one of the most profound civil rights laws ever passed in this country.”²² Sports programs for girls and women sprouted in response to the law, opening a world of opportunity for female athletes, Foudy among them. There would be no women’s national soccer team without Title IX, no World Cup trophy. And now it was under attack.

Then, in June 2002, US secretary of education Rod Paige set up a commission to review the impact of Title IX and recommend revisions. It was a move many people read as the beginning of an attack on Title IX from within the US government. Foudy was asked to serve on the commission and poured herself into it, building up a network of experts to help her understand the subtleties of the legislation. “It was clear she wasn’t just taking the party line,” recalled Jocelyn Samuels, a vice president of the National Women’s Law Center, who remembered getting calls from Foudy at all hours. The combination of frequent cross-country trips to Washington for meetings and the high-stress challenge of learning about the law in order to defend it was hard on Foudy. “She felt it was a defining moment for women’s athletics,” said Samuels, “and that took a lot out of her.”²³

When the commission released a draft report in early 2003, suggesting that the policy be weakened, Foudy and fellow commission member Donna de Varona, a former Olympic swimmer, released a much-publicized minority report stating that the commission’s work had not been undertaken in an open, fair, and inclusive manner (for instance, a critical procedural vote had been taken while Foudy was in the bathroom). The two women also argued that the official findings did not properly address the disparity between men and women or the continuing discrimination against women and girls in athletics. The Department of Education ultimately decided not to push to change Title IX.

Foudy continued to take on causes. She has filmed public-service announcements for the American Youth Soccer Organization and antismoking campaigns. She has served as president and as a board member of the Women’s Sports Foundation; on the board of Athletes for Hope, a nonprofit organization that encourages athletes to give back to their communities; and as a spokesperson for GlobalGirl Media, a nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering high school girls from underserved communities through training in media, leadership, and journalism. “When you are holding the camera and you’re telling stories that people are typically not hearing,” Foudy said in one GlobalGirl Media video, “you are providing insight into your community and providing leadership for all of the other young girls out there who want to do the same thing.”²⁴

“During an era in which most athletes stand for nothing more than their shoe company’s logo, Foudy has been called this generation’s Billie Jean King,” wrote USA Today reporter Kelly Whiteside.²⁵

Overtime

Foudy played her final game for the national team in December 2004. She had experienced big-time victories and crushing losses, but most of all, she and her teammates had transformed women’s soccer. “We’re getting paid, and these women provided it for us,” said Cat Whitehill, a current player on the national team. “What my life is like now is completely due to them,” agreed Whitehill’s teammate Abby Wambach.²⁶

Foudy hadn’t achieved everything she’d wanted—most notably, a successful professional women’s soccer league. But she felt upbeat as she spoke to her teammates in the pregame huddle. “Let’s have a ball out there tonight, huh? Let’s have fun. That’s what this team has been about for eighteen years. Let’s do it! Here we go!”²⁷

Foudy was happy to be able to spend more time with her husband. In her national team days, and especially now that the couple had two young children—Isabel Ann and Declan—the travel had gotten hard. “I have gotten very good at saying no,” she told me. “Because every trip, even though you want to do them, is a missed opportunity with your kids.”

But her job as an ESPN sports commentator and soccer analyst still requires a certain amount of time on the road, something that Sawyers encourages. “To have that person in your life who tells you, ‘No, this is great, you’re doing what you love, and I fully support it’ makes a world of difference,” Foudy said to me. She works during early mornings and school hours from a home office. When she flies around the world to cover the World Cup, Sawyers is home with the kids in Southern California. “And he’s a great cook,” she said, adding, “My specialty is cereal.”

Although she doesn’t train as she did in her national team days, Foudy still runs regularly or goes mountain biking. “I exercise for my sanity,” she told Fitness magazine. “I can’t imagine not having some physical activity to de-stress.” She told me that she also wants her children to play sports, though not necessarily soccer. Her attitude, like her parents’, is that her children should play what they want.

In 1995, Foudy and Sawyers launched the Julie Foudy Soccer Camp and, in 2006, the Julie Foudy Sports Leadership Academy. “All these things I learned on the soccer field, they gave me confidence, taught me how to be disciplined—how to deal with loss and adversity,” Foudy explained in a video interview with Soccer.com, her young kids audible in the background.²⁸ The six-day residential academy teaches young girls ages twelve to eighteen how to be leaders on the field and in life. There are different styles of leadership, she tells the girls. “It’s okay to be quiet. You can still make a difference.”²⁹

Foudy and her family attend every academy, and there are always other members of the women’s national team and star athletes such as Billie Jean King, Robin Roberts, and Aimee Mull. Together, these women impart lessons on leadership, volunteerism, and social change. They show girls that they can do whatever they set their minds to and that each girl should feel comfortable with the person she is. “Love the skin you are in” is the watchword. The academy is a place where girls can gain confidence and feel empowered.

“Other than my kids and my family, I am most proud of what we have created with our leadership academies,” Foudy said in 2011. “Sports gives you a gift in life like no other: self-confidence and perseverance, and how to deal with setbacks, how to deal with losses, how to deal with adversity—all these things that are so vital to being a complete human being and a successful leader in life.”³⁰

The Skills Julie Foudy Exemplifies

Countless others have benefited from Julie Foudy’s courage to take action and mobilize people toward goals that matter. Not content with winning at the highest levels of her sport, inspired by the injustices she encountered on her path to soccer glory, Foudy has turned her talents to making things better for future generations of athletes through her political action and her role as an educator.

As a result of her perseverance—and with the support of family, teammates, friends, and coaches—she has cultivated leadership skills as an athlete and as a public advocate for gender equality and human rights. Like the other five examples in this book, Foudy illustrates all the skills, but I focus here on what her life teaches us about how to know what matters (being real), help others (being whole), and challenge the status quo (being innovative).

Be Real: Know What Matters

Julie Foudy knows how important each of the different aspects of her life is to her. She is able to clearly articulate the facets of her life that deserve her attention, energy, and time. Her self-awareness enables her to understand the value of each of her roles and relationships. She is also able to see the bigger picture, in which all her different roles contribute to her vision of the future.

Foudy missed her high school graduation in order to play a critical national team game in Europe. And she missed other normal activities that high school kids look forward to. What’s noteworthy is the confidence she demonstrated in making conscious choices about what mattered to her. It was a method of decision making she learned early from her parents, who compelled her to make her own choices. She didn’t follow the social pressures of the day, as do many teenagers. She knew her mind and her heart, and she acted accordingly.

Leadership requires identifying the parts of your life that deserve your attention. Foudy demonstrated the ability to know what matters when she took a stand against child labor, helping push a global tragedy to the front burner in the wealthy nations of the West by demanding to know whether children were being employed in the production of Reebok gear before consenting to an endorsement. She risked losing a lot of money in doing so, but she emerged as a role model for athletes with a conscience. By having the courage to act on her values, Foudy solidified her sense of purpose and her ability to create positive change.

When Foudy chose to attend Stanford University, she demonstrated a deep understanding of her life priorities. At Stanford, she saw the opportunity to contribute to a growing soccer program as well as to advance her academic aspirations. To make this choice, she had to know she cared about more than just being a great soccer player. She knew enough about her values and beliefs to make a difficult decision.

Perhaps a more profound illustration of this skill was Foudy’s response to the unfairness she observed in the differential stipends for men and women players at the 1996 Olympics and in the early years with the US Women’s national team. Her belief in equality fed her and her teammates’ fight for gender parity. She didn’t deny her feelings of righteous indignation; instead, she used them to refine her understanding of her values. “One of the big issues for me and the team in this fight for equality was to not be angry, but to be strong and to be fair,” she told me. “It was our job to show them the light, not to reach out in anger and disgust, which are completely counterproductive and cause regression, rather than progression.”³¹

Be Whole: Help Others

Foudy looks for opportunities to help many different people. Today she has a strong web of supportive relationships. Whether these relationships are with colleagues, neighbors, past teammates (to whom she often says, “You are stuck with me as my BFF for life!”), friends, or family, she sees the value in helping others. Her relationships are built on mutual trust, with a focus on mutual well-being. She views relationships as a means for enriching her own life and the lives of others.

Let’s look at some of the highlights of her efforts to help people. Foudy grew up in a strongly supportive environment, and this no doubt contributed to her capacity to create beneficent communities for the next generation of girls. Her leadership academy allows her to express most directly her commitment to promoting sports as a vehicle not only for promoting youth fitness but also for building confidence and self-esteem. And in doing so she helps cultivate a new cohort of leaders, one girl at a time. As a spokesperson for GlobalGirl Media, Foudy helped promote the organization’s 2009 Kick It Up! campaign, a program in South Africa and Los Angeles to mentor and train high school girls as digital video journalists for the 2010 FIFA World Cup. Not only do all these activities serve to empower young women, but also they produce in Foudy a sense of meaning and purpose and establish her as a role model for her own children.

In devoting substantial effort to fighting the rollback of Title IX, Foudy again showed her commitment to making things fair for women and girls and to help those coming after her. Her dedication to being an informed and persuasive advocate helped shape the regulatory environment for sports. And Foudy continues to use the opportunities she has as a journalist and public figure to educate and to promote causes—such as Beyond Sport, a nonprofit group committed to using sports as a vehicle for positive social change, as well as Athletes for Hope, mentioned earlier—that provide assistance to people in need. These aren’t just items on a curriculum vitae. Foudy’s many roles as a spokeswoman and board member show her looking for ways to make things better by helping others. By dedicating her attention to providing resources—time, money, ideas, reputation, and contacts—for others, Foudy gives her own life a greater sense of purpose, and, at the same time, she propagates a virtuous cycle, enlarging the reservoir of support for the causes she is passionate about. It’s the law of reciprocity, and it’s true in cultures around the world and throughout history: people want to help people who help people. Great leaders find their own ways to follow this law wherever they go.

Be Innovative: Challenge the Status Quo

Foudy challenges traditional assumptions about how things are done, experimenting to make things better whenever possible. When making decisions about how to spend her time and energy, Foudy is not constrained by conventions. Rather than follow the pack, she is willing to be the first one to try new ways of accomplishing goals. She is not overly concerned about how others will perceive her. Instead, she is willing to step out on a limb to find a creative solution to the challenges she faces.

By traveling to Pakistan to see for herself the conditions under which Reebok products were made, Foudy confronted the traditional path taken by sponsored athletes. She demonstrated that she was not willing to take a great cash deal without first drawing attention to a human rights issue. In so doing she inspired other athletes to follow her lead.

Battling the forces that would repeal Title IX regulations designed to create parity for women’s sports required investing time and energy in a cause about which Foudy felt deeply. Her actions in expressing dissent in 2003 demonstrated her willingness to challenge sexist institutional arrangements. In the face of the review commission’s majority recommendation to weaken Title IX, others might have lost their cool or quit in protest. But Foudy applied the relentless tenacity she had come to know as an ingredient for success on the soccer field. On a team, she recalled, “you’re sometimes going to have to make decisions that aren’t popular … and talk to teammates who maybe aren’t, you know, staying with the team’s principles and foundations.”³²

Asked by an interviewer what she would change if she had a magic wand, Foudy recently said, “You find so many kids who grow up and think, ‘Well, I’m not this or I’m not that, so I can’t be a leader. It’s not what I see in magazines. It’s not what I read in history books. I don’t look that way. I don’t sound that way. I don’t have CEO or president next to my name.’ If I could, which is what we’re doing with the Leadership Academy, I would open up the definition of leadership so all kids understand that yes, you do have it. It just comes in different forms. We don’t all have the same type of leadership skills, so figure out what your leadership skill set is, and be true to that.”³³ Foudy is using her talents and her time in the service of giving younger women the encouragement and tools they need to question cultural messages they’ve internalized about the limits of what is possible. She contests outmoded models.

 

Because she knew what mattered to her, Julie Foudy was inspiring and vivid about the dream: we will have a Women’s Cup team! She had suffered the consequences of gender inequity, she had seen how she wanted women’s soccer to advance, and then she stood up for the rights of women athletes—her people—in the face of injustice, with the hope of leaving the sport in a better state than it was when she started. Foudy’s is an admirable life story, because she has achieved success in her professional world by reaping the benefits of harmonious integration among the disparate parts of her life. We see the pursuit of four-way wins as she strives to create value not only in her career, but also in her role as a family member, as an advocate for women’s empowerment, and for her own personal growth and health.

Based on her own experience, and from what she learned about the importance of girls having a different mind-set about what they could accomplish, she committed to helping build their confidence. “Choose to matter!” is what girls gleefully chant at her training camps. And when she needed support in mustering the will to challenge long-standing traditions, she asked for it, from mentors like Billie Jean King and teachers of her own.