“The vision of a champion is someone who is bent over, drenched in sweat, at the point of exhaustion when no one else is watching.”
—ANSON DORRANCE1
At the 2016 What Drives Winning Conference, a gathering of elite and emerging sport coaches trying to answer the question posed by the conference’s name, Anson Dorrance told the story behind his famous quote about the “vision of a champion” that opens Mia Hamm’s 1999 autobiography. As Hamm’s head coach at the University of North Carolina (UNC) and the U.S. Women’s National Team (USWNT), it was Dorrance who knew that Hamm was destined for greatness the first time he saw her playing in a Texas tournament when she was fourteen. Years ago he described her determination, after glimpsing it for the first time, as “an uncanny ability to go through defenders, as if by molecular displacement.” Sure, the raw speed was there—“she had the best acceleration of any soccer player I had ever seen,” Dorrance said—but she also had an assassin’s calm demeanor: “She had skill and composure. I knew she’d be on the national team. It was just a matter of when.”2
As a Hall of Fame college coach for the last thirty-nine years, Dorrance has won more than eight hundred games, with a winning percentage of 90.7; twenty-two national championships; and the inaugural Women’s World Cup in 1991.3 Having mentored hundreds of young women over the years, it is Hamm whom he continues to hold up as the best example of the ultimate competitor and playmaker. During his conference talk, he described a remarkable encounter on one of his early-morning commutes to campus in 1994, Hamm’s senior year at Chapel Hill. “It’s late winter, early spring. It’s cold out and I’m ripping through the park, and all of a sudden, out of the corner of my eye, I can see this figure going five and back, ten and back, fifteen and back, twenty and back, twenty-five and back, and this is our grueling fitness exercise that we call ‘cones.’ And I’m looking out there and I pull over and I’m just watching and I’m thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s Mia.’ And in between sprints, you can see her bent over and sweat is just flying off her brow, with hot air shooting from her lungs. And I was just so impressed with what I saw, I drove into work, I scribbled a note to her, and I forgot about it.
“Ten years later, after Mia had become world-famous, she wrote a book, called Go for the Goal, and she sent me that book. There in the breastplate of that book was the note that I’d written her. ‘The vision of a champion is someone who is bent over, drenched in sweat, at the point of exhaustion when no one else is watching.’ The final measure of athletic greatness is not what you do in the training session with your peers and teammates, it’s basically what you do on your own . . . [Of] all the incredible gifts I’ve been given by my players over the years, this was the absolute most heartfelt.”4
For today’s generation of girls (and plenty of boys) who are more familiar with soccer stars like Abby Wambach, Alex Morgan, and Carli Lloyd, Mia Hamm was the first true superstar of women’s soccer. In fact, in 2003, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Atlantic Coast Conference, known for its rich history of championship teams, its greatest male and female athletes were named, with Michael Jordan and Hamm topping their respective lists.5 When FIFA, the world governing body of soccer, celebrated their one hundredth anniversary in 2004, they asked Pelé, the Brazilian legend, to compile a list of the 125 best players of all time. Hamm and Michelle Akers, her U.S. teammate, made Pelé’s final cut as the only two women and the only Americans on the list. “When I came up with the names Mia Hamm and the midfielder Michelle Akers, everyone was a little surprised,” he said. “But women’s football in the world is very important.”6
Unlike pure goal scorers, Hamm was the complete playmaker, even though she played forward for much of her career. Best known for her 158 international goals, which still rank her third all-time, more than a decade after her retirement, she is still the all-time career-assists leader. With 144 assists in 276 international games, she averaged more than one every two games over her seventeen seasons.7 With four NCAA championships, two Olympic gold medals, two FIFA World Cups and two FIFA World Player of the Year awards, Hamm could be forgiven for enjoying her fame, but her teammates only talk about her team-first attitude.
“Everyone knows what Mia did as an athlete,” said Julie Foudy, her longtime USWNT teammate. “You know about her successes and awards as the best female soccer player in the world. But it’s her refreshingly sincere selflessness—in everything she does—that helped make her an icon. And that is the essence of Mia.
“This unselfishness, her willingness to deflect and graciously thank others, is what I will always cherish the most when I think of Mia’s many qualities. Because her way of doing things showed her teammates, along with millions of girls and boys and grown-ups, that success is about working your tail off, motivating others to join you and celebrating others when the focus could be on you.”8
Upon breaking Hamm’s goal-scoring record in 2013, Abby Wambach said, “When I look in the mirror I don’t see a person who’s made the kind of impact that Mia Hamm made on the game. She’s still my idol, the greatest player and the greatest teammate. She achieved so much in so many different ways. What she did for women’s soccer can’t be measured.”9
Today, Hamm is teaching the next wave of playmakers through her aptly named Team First Soccer Academy, along with her longtime teammates and friends Kristine Lilly and Tisha Venturini Hoch. In fact, the three-pronged philosophy of their camps is to be a personality, a playmaker, and a factor: “Personality creates a player that knows how to excel individually but still be a team player. Playmakers play unselfishly and create for themselves and their teammates. When you become a factor on the field, you make a difference for yourself and for your team.”10
Now, as a mom of three kids with former all-star shortstop Nomar Garciaparra, Hamm sees life as an athlete from a different perspective, the sideline. While she understands a parent’s drive to help their kids succeed, she advocates letting them learn on their own. “Resist the urge to make excuses for your kids,” she recently told an audience of sports parents. “They look up to you. They are so vulnerable after a defeat. They don’t need to hear, ‘Oh, my, if Suzie had just passed the ball to you.’ Or, ‘If that ref had a clue. Somebody needs to talk to him.’ ” Instead, she asks parents to set the right example about the joy of sports with encouragement. “ ‘I’m so happy watching you play,’ ” suggests Hamm. “When they’re extremely vulnerable, that is your opportunity to set a better standard for them. I think what you’re trying to do as a parent is take the pain away, make them feel better. You kind of get locked into that rather than what example you are setting for them.”11
Growing up, she was never singled out for her performance by her parents. “Nobody made me feel different or strange,” she said. “That acceptance meant everything. I thought, ‘This is normal. This is wonderful. Why not want to be as good as you can be?’ ”12 Indeed, “that acceptance” is needed by every young player—by their coach, by their teammates, and by their parents. It helped Mia thirty years ago and it is still works with today’s generation of playmakers. Meet Mallory and Christian.
“My parents were always super supportive and helpful and understood everything that I was going through,” said Mallory Pugh, who, at age nineteen, wears the thousand-pound yoke of being called “the next Mia Hamm.”13 For other promising players, the burden of high expectations has been too much to bear, but Pugh’s parents, like Hamm’s, know that a child’s athletic talent is no different from their academic or artistic talent. Expose them to new opportunities and let them thrive in whatever direction their passion takes them. As we heard from Brad Stevens, the rush to specialize in just one sport before the age of thirteen is just not necessary and may be counterproductive to excelling later, “in large part, because I think that you figure out what your passion is truly for as you get older.” The Pugh family followed that formula for both of their daughters. “They were little and you just tried everything, and [soccer] is what stuck,” said Karen Pugh. “Like throwing spaghetti against the wall, it stuck.”14
And just like her older sister, Brianna, who starred at the high school, club, and college levels, Mallory showed early interest in soccer. Always with a ball at her feet, she would offer unsolicited coaching advice to her sister’s team from the sidelines or watch entire U.S. national team games on her Hello Kitty television, broadcast in Spanish on Telemundo. Even though her parents kept throwing that spaghetti at the wall, having their girls try basketball and track, it was soccer that lit the fuse, despite any parental preferences. “I loved watching her run track,” said Mrs. Pugh, a former prep track star.15
Even at a young age, Mallory’s playmaker qualities began to emerge, at least to a trained eye, but those elusive cognitive skills take time to develop. “Having done this for so long, you think there’s potential there,” said Jared Spires, her U11-to-U12 coach at Real Colorado soccer club. “You see special qualities but I don’t think there was any way of envisioning she would do it quite like this.”16 Indeed, as we learned earlier, talent identification can be messy, unpredictable, and difficult to measure, which is why the love of playing needs to be allowed over the love of winning at those fragile young ages.
After leading her Mountain Vista High School team to a state championship as a freshman, Mallory exploded on the international stage with the U.S. U17 national team in 2013, then advanced up to the U20 team where she led all scorers and was named the best player at the 2015 CONCACAF (Confederation of North, Central American and Caribbean Association Football) U20 Women’s Championship. At seventeen she captained the team at the 2016 FIFA U20 Women’s World Cup, scoring two goals against some of the top female competition in the world, who were as much as three years older.
Having impressed Jill Ellis, the USWNT head coach, she was called up to the senior team for winter training. “There’s ice in her veins,” said Ellis about Pugh. Playing alongside women she had grown up idolizing, Pugh, still seventeen, was in awe. “This was different than what I was used to,” said Pugh. “I was nervous, oh yeah. I remembered walking into the meal room and just seeing everyone and just thinking, ‘oh my gosh, this is so weird.’ ”17 But Ellis had seen the calm fury of a playmaker. “She doesn’t get rattled, she’s very competitive, always has a big smile on her face. She’s having fun. She’s enjoying it.”18
Later that month, during the second half of a friendly game (a soccer euphemism for “non-tournament”) against Ireland, Ellis substituted star forward Alex Morgan in favor of Pugh, making her the youngest player to play for the USWNT since 2005. In the eighty-third minute, Pugh made history again. The U.S. team was attacking with forward Christen Press slicing through the right side of the Irish defense. Nearing the end line, Press instinctively chipped the ball to the front of the goal, assuming that the precocious seventeen-year-old would probably be close by. Seeing the play develop in front of her, Pugh had already made the decision to make a diagonal run toward Press, splitting two defenders. Her forehead met the ball in flight, redirecting it 90 degrees to the left of the Irish goalkeeper and into the back of the net. Knowing that she had just joined the exclusive “first game, first goal” club, she raced over to Press to celebrate. “I don’t really remember how the goal happened,” said Pugh. “It was so fast, but I do remember not even looking to see if it went in. I just heard the crowd go crazy and I ran straight to Press. The fact that she scored on her first cap and I did too . . . I could just tell when I hugged her that she understood what had happened.”19
Ellis took a calculated chance by adding Pugh to the reduced eighteen-player roster for the 2016 Rio Olympics. “On the field, she’s still continuing to learn there, but because of her technique and her IQ, I think she’s adjusted very quickly. Now it’s just more and more experience against these top, top teams. She’s special.”20 Others in the soccer world were starting to take notice as well. After watching her score a dazzling goal against Costa Rica in a final tune-up game before heading to Brazil, none other than Mia Hamm tweeted, “Speed kills but technical speed absolutely annihilates defenders. Mallory Pugh is for real.”21 In Rio, Pugh delivered once again, playing almost two hundred minutes in three games and becoming the youngest U.S. woman to score in the Olympics.
Two weeks before her nineteenth birthday, Pugh announced her decision to go pro, leaving behind what would surely have been a stellar college career at UCLA, to play for the National Women’s Soccer League’s Washington Spirit. The irony was not lost on Spirit head coach Jim Gabarra that, sixteen years before, Mia Hamm signed her first professional contract with another D.C. women’s pro team, the Washington Freedom. “The best way I can put it is that she is her own player, and it’s kind of a blend of all those players that she sees herself in,” said Gabarra. “She’s different than Mia, but that might be the closest comparison given the pace. The stardom and the fans and the craze that Mia had, always feeling like you’ve got to provide some kind of protection for them because it can be too much, and it can be a distraction to them.”22
Mallory Pugh is an aberration, a young playmaker who has developed the speed, technique, and cognition to be recognized at the highest level of her game. But being put on a pedestal has not affected her confidence or long-term goals. She still turns inward to motivate herself despite outside pressures. “I have expectations on myself, and I think that’s really the only expectations I should put on myself,” Pugh said. “I have to remember I am young, this is my rookie season, so I think it was a great learning experience for me and that’s kind of the biggest thing I took out of it.”23 Sounds like a growth mindset to us.
If ever there was a flashing beacon to highlight a team’s top playmaker, it is wearing the number 10 jersey in soccer. While most sports don’t have a logical order to their uniform numbering (with the exception of American football), soccer has long had an association between jersey numbers and their role on the field. Defenders typically wear low numbers, from 2 to 5, while midfielders usually wear 6 through 8. The star forward usually grabs number 9. But the number 10 jersey carries a legacy and responsibility that is instantly recognizable. Past legends Pelé, Maradona, Ronaldhino, Totti, and Zidane wore the number 10 shirt, while today’s stars—Messi at Barcelona, Neymar at Paris Saint-Germain, Hazard at Chelsea, and Modric´ at Real Madrid—have followed in their footsteps.
While new tactical formations have tinkered with the traditional positioning of a number 10 (no longer anchored to the middle of the field), the symbolism of the team’s most creative playmaker still exists. Messi and Neymar are known for their goal scoring, but because of that threat they also have become disruptors who sense the open man when defenders flock toward them. Luka Modric´, a midfielder for Real Madrid who also captains his Croatian national team, is the calming presence in the middle of a team packed with world-class players. Yet, Zidane, his manager, lauds him as the linchpin that holds the team together. “It’s his tranquility. It’s his tranquility with the ball,” said Zidane. “I have the best players and we could talk about any of them, but if you ask me about Luka, I have to talk about his calmness with the ball at his feet. La tranquilidad. That’s what he gives to the team when he’s playing well. He makes the rest play.”24
Indeed, Modric´ finished tied for third with Neymar for the 2017 World’s Best Playmaker award given by the International Federation of Football History & Statistics (IFFHS) based on the votes of soccer experts in ninety-one countries.25 To no one’s surprise, Messi won the title for the third consecutive year.
The double-edged sword of respect and expectation that comes with the number 10 jersey is reserved for the shoulders of a player that can handle the weight. So when Jürgen Klinsmann, former U.S. Men’s National Team head coach, handed it to seventeen-year-old Christian Pulisic before a 2016 World Cup qualifier game, he knew the load that was being placed on the young playmaker. “The No. 10 has a meaning,” Klinsmann said. “Ask him now how he feels with that heavy number on his back.”26
That night, Pulisic responded brilliantly, scoring two goals and assisting on a third in just twenty-six minutes, making him the youngest U.S. player ever to score in a World Cup qualifier.
Even Bruce Arena, who’s seen his share of promising prospects in his forty years of coaching at the college, pro, and national team levels, believes in Pulisic. “I think he is just a natural,” said Arena. “The game’s easy for him. He’s got exceptional skill, vision, he’s pretty smooth.”27 Wary of anointing him a savior too early, Arena did inch out on a limb when pressed: “It makes you think that this is going to be perhaps the first American superstar in the sport. You have to be hesitant about this but this is a very talented young man.”28
Unlike Mallory Pugh, who has female American role models like Hamm, Akers, Foudy, and Wambach to follow, Pulisic is breaking new ground for American men. Other than goalkeepers, Pulisic is the rare U.S. player who is not just on the roster of a top European club but a regular starter and playmaker for Borussia Dortmund, a perennial contender in the German Bundesliga. Signed at age seventeen, he scored his first goal for the senior team that same season. For a five-foot-eight-inch kid from Hershey, Pennsylvania, performing in front of 80,000 loud, demanding German fans against some of the world’s great players could be overwhelming.
However, like Pugh, Pulisic is grounded with his own expectations. “Of course, I hear about all the stuff people talk about, the hype and whatever, but I just try to keep it out of my mind as much as I can, because it doesn’t really matter to me. I put enough pressure on myself. I don’t need all this outside tension or whatever.”29
Because both of his parents played college soccer at George Mason University, you would expect early pressure, even obsession, to have their kids excel at the game. But Mark and Kelley Pulisic purposely avoided the temptation to push too hard. “I just think what we did differently was made sure that we didn’t put him in a structured environment all the time,” said Mark. “He played for one team. He would practice twice a week and play a game on the weekend.”30
But as Christian’s skill became obvious and he moved up the ladder of competition, his parents instilled one word into his vocabulary. “He was always playing up against older kids so I said there was only one thing you can never lose—you always have to play with confidence,” said Mr. Pulisic.
What are the early signs that you might be raising a playmaker? Much like Pugh, Pulisic showed an unusual early passion for perfection and for the game. “Everything he does has to be at a very high level,” said Kelley Pulisic. “He doesn’t like to fail. And he wants it to be perfect. When he was two years old he would color. And he would color out of the lines and just flip out. And that’s his personality in a nutshell, at two years old he had to keep in the lines.
“He became obsessed with soccer and before he started kindergarten had mastered one of the sport’s most difficult skills: playing with both feet. He’d play for hours in the yard.”31
Also like Pugh, being undersized while playing against older players has forced Christian to rely not only on his physical speed but also on his brain processing speed. “As he was playing U12, U14, and U16, you could tell he watched,” said Mark Pulisic. “He was trying things that he saw. He was tactically aware, and a lot of that came from seeing games.”
“I had to use other ways,” said Christian, “and try to outthink opponents even more.”
Playing at a top club with so many stellar prospects provides the deliberate practice environment that Ericsson recommends for fastest growth. “In the U.S. it’s very comfortable for players,” the senior Pulisic said. “If you’re successful as a young player, you’re told that a lot. But are players being taken out of their comfort zone? That’s how you improve. When you come to Germany and you’re training every day in January in the wind-driven rain and freezing cold, you’re fighting through that. You’re becoming stronger and better as a player.”32
So far, the new number 10 is living up to expectations. In an eye-opening stat that compared Pulisic’s career prior to his nineteenth birthday to Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo at the same age, the American has played more games and scored more goals for both club and country.33 Pulisic’s performance last season in expected goals and assists for Borussia Dortmund was fifth-best among teenagers across all of Europe’s top leagues in the last six years.34
These days, advice for young playmakers is everywhere: Join the right team, play in all the right tournaments, travel hundreds of miles, hire specialty coaches, and eat ultra-healthy performance diets. However, the Pulisics, just like the Pughs, know that you still need to let kids be kids while they find their way. “After games, we were more Slurpees and Doritos,” said Mark Pulisic.35
Keeping a long-term perspective beyond the latest game helps coaches and parents to stay focused on the real purpose of sports, to teach life lessons. At the same 2016 conference, Coach Dorrance shared a quote from Amos Alonzo Stagg, the fabled head football coach at the University of Chicago for forty years. After winning the 1913 national championship game, Stagg was asked by a reporter what he thought of his team. “I’ll tell you in twenty years,” replied Stagg.
“It’s perfect,” said Dorrance. “He wasn’t going to talk about the championship game because he knew, in the larger scheme of things, it was absolutely irrelevant. But what had huge value was the character of the boys he was coaching.”36
And that may just be the Playmaker’s Advantage. We wish you the best as you develop your future playmakers!