2012: The Year That Saved Women's Soccer

by Beau Dure

In 1999 and 2019, women's soccer was the talk of the United States. The time in between was much less glamorous. No parades. No massive crowds. No money. The mid-2000s were women's soccer's Dark Ages. After the WUSA collapsed in 2003, the USA went five long summers without a professional league. Fans had little to watch. Scores of talented players, many of whom had played on the national team or had the potential to do so, drifted away from the sport. Women's soccer gained the spotlight again in the 2011 World Cup, only to see another professional league (WPS) fade away. U.S. players who didn't get one of the golden tickets on the small roster of the 2012 Olympic team were staring into another abyss. This time, women's soccer refused to go away. In the East and Midwest, former WPS teams joined teams from the amateur WPSL to form a pro-am hybrid called the WPSL Elite League. In the West, a couple of teams in the amateur W-League stepped up efforts to give promising young players and experienced national team players some competitive games. Olympians Alex Morgan, Hope Solo, Sydney Leroux, Megan Rapinoe, Becky Sauerbrunn, Tobin Heath and Heather O'Reilly signed on for whatever games they could play when they weren't across the Atlantic chasing the gold they would eventually win. So did Olympic alternates Lori Lindsey and Meghan Klingenberg. So did national team pool players Whitney Engen, Stephanie Cox, Yael Averbuch, Brittany Taylor and Sarah Huffman. And so did a lot of future U.S. national team players such as Lindsey Horan, Lynn Williams, McCall Zerboni and Allie Long. If not for these leagues and teams, U.S. women's soccer might have lost players like Engen and Zerboni, just as it did in the mid-2000s. Their contemporaries could have gone a year without playing solid competitive games. This book is the story of that season. Dozens of players, coaches, team staff members and journalists talk about what happened when few people were watching and how it kept them involved. And it laid the foundation for the third pro league, the NWSL, to build up and give another generation of players — Crystal Dunn, Abby Dahlkemper, Emily Sonnett, Julie Ertz, Samantha Mewis, Rose Lavelle and Lynn Williams — a place to develop into world-class players who have now won back-to-back World Cups. Without 2012, the United States may have had much less to celebrate in 2015 and 2019.

116 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 25, 2020

About the author

Fitting neither the mold of a traditional sports journalist nor that of a modern-day snark merchant, I spent a couple of decades with newspapers, the second one with USA TODAY. While there, I covered a lot of soccer, went to four Olympic Games, became the paper's first MMA writer, and wrote the book Long-Range Goals: The Success Story of Major League Soccer.

More books are in the works.