The USWNT didn’t just change the game — they changed the country
How the U.S. women’s national soccer team rewrote the rules — for sports, for equality and for America.
In honor of July 4th — our nation’s birthday — I’m celebrating a cornerstone of American identity: the U.S. women’s national soccer team, a living embodiment of freedom, resilience and progress on and off the field.
It was the kind of heat that clung to your skin — oppressive, unrelenting. July 10, 1999. Pasadena, California. Ninety thousand souls packed the Rose Bowl, a cauldron not of routine sporting cheer but of crackling, historic fervor. American flags snapped like battle standards in the warm breeze. Faces smeared in red, white, and blue warpaint began to melt into streaks of sweat and something fiercer — a visceral patriotism, a collective longing that surged through the stands.
The U.S. was facing China in the Women’s World Cup Final — a tournament that, mere months earlier, had registered barely a blip on the American sports radar.
I am too young to remember to have lived it — but I’ve watched the full match more times than I can count. I know the precise frame where the camera trembles as Chastain scores. I’ve memorized how Hamm slides into her teammates, grinning like a girl who just redrafted the national canon.
But tonight was different. The air vibrated with more than anticipation. It thrummed with the weight of a cultural reckoning — a tectonic shift in how we define who gets to be seen, heard, and celebrated. This wasn’t just a final. It was a frisson of justice wrapped in cleats, sweatbands, and stubborn dreams.
Because the U.S. women’s national team didn’t play merely for goals. They played for recognition, for equity — for the right to matter in a country still catching up to their worth. More than a team, they became a conduit — a mirror to the nation and a challenge to its conscience.
And there, at the epicenter of it all, stood Brandi Chastain. Alone. Twelve yards from the goal. Fingers knotting her cleats with a calm born of quiet ferocity. Weeks earlier, coach Tony DiCicco had spotted something in her left foot — an edge honed, sharper and more decisive than most dared to trust. She had practiced with the assiduous focus of a strategist and the grit of a pugilist. She wasn’t even supposed to take the fifth kick. But when it came, Chastain stepped forward. Not nervous. Just certain.
The ball rocketed off her left foot — a comet streaking through the humid night — and thudded into the top left corner, beyond the desperate reach of China’s keeper. Then Chastain dropped to her knees, tore off her jersey, and let out a guttural cry of triumph. That moment wasn’t just a goal. It was a coronation — for her, for her teammates, and for every girl who had ever been told “no.”
That penalty didn’t just clinch a World Cup. It detonated ceilings. It pried open locked doors — and pulled the world streaming through behind her.
They came from nowhere — in borrowed kits and borrowed time.
The roots of the USWNT were humble, nearly spectral to the wider sporting world. In 1985, a national team was cobbled together as an afterthought, summoned for a low-profile tournament in Italy. The players wore jerseys designed for younger boys — oversized, stiff, ill-fitting. They were unpaid, unheralded, nearly forgotten. Coach Mike Ryan barely knew the roster. The players barely knew each other. They lost every match. No crowds. No cameras. No applause.
But they showed up.
That ragtag collective planted a seed — a quiet defiance that would one day grow into a forest of champions.
Three years later, U.S. Soccer handed the reins to Anson Dorrance, a relentless competitor obsessed with talent cultivation. At North Carolina, he had already built a juggernaut. And he had discovered something rare: a 15-year-old Mia Hamm from Alabama, whose soccer IQ and svelte speed felt almost extraterrestrial. "She’s different," Dorrance would later say. "She’s the one."
Under his dogged tutelage, the team played with a ruthless grace — grit cloaked in artistry. Dorrance demanded fitness, aggression, tenacity. But he also gave them permission to imagine.
Their reward came in 1991 in China.
The inaugural Women’s World Cup — clumsily named the FIFA World Championship for Women's Football for the M&M's Cup — was theirs.
Michelle Akers was a juggernaut of will and wattage, scoring 10 goals in six games. Her dominance bordered on mythic. But behind the legend was pain. Akers battled Chronic Fatigue Syndrome in silence, her energy draining like a leaking battery. She curled up in hotel bathtubs, iced her face, and played through agony. Her teammates called her the toughest human they’d ever met.
Their triumph was met with indifference. No live TV. No parades. The world simply wasn’t ready.
But the ground was shifting.
Their next inflection point came on home soil in 1996. Women’s soccer made its Olympic debut at the Atlanta Games. Hamm, Foudy, Akers and the rising cohort bulldozed through a gauntlet to beat China in the final. That gold medal wasn’t just hardware. It was validation.
By 1999, the USWNT wasn’t an underdog. It was a cultural powder keg waiting to ignite.
The World Cup that summer wasn’t just a tournament. It was a turning point. The U.S. team carried the burden and brilliance of something much bigger than sport — a movement.
They were a constellation of stars: Hamm, the graceful assassin; Foudy, the fearless general; Lilly, indefatigable; Scurry, stoic and spring-loaded. And Chastain, who had a flair for moments that demanded boldness.
The semifinal against Brazil was a gauntlet. Tight, tense, taut. The U.S. emerged with battered shins and belief intact.
Then came July 10.
Pasadena. The Rose Bowl. Ninety thousand strong. An anthemically American day.
The final against China was brutal and beautiful. The match ebbed into a shootout — a test of nerve and mettle.
Chastain answered.
Her celebration, kneeling and bare-armed, became an instant icon. It was more than a release. It was a revolution in slow motion.
That victory didn’t just lift a trophy. It lifted a nation’s gaze.
The ’99ers weren’t merely athletes. They were trailblazers. Their wins were paeans to possibility.
But the story was never just about wins and losses. It was about identity, resilience, fracture — and rebirth.
The 2000s brought glory, yes, but also deep fissures beneath the surface — cracks spidering across a once-gilded façade.
April Heinrichs, once a blazing forward and talisman of the 1991 championship squad, stepped into the head coach’s seat with steel-eyed resolve. She brought structure, discipline, tactical lucidity — a blueprint meant to modernize the team in a rapidly evolving global game. But in chasing the machine, she lost the music. What had once been spontaneous and electric inside the locker room began to calcify. The creative soul of the team dimmed under the fluorescent glare of rigid schemes. A squad that once danced in chaos and brilliance now trudged through matches in a muted, mechanical rhythm.
The 2003 Women’s World Cup became a reckoning. Played on home soil after SARS forced its relocation from China, the tournament had all the makings of a second coronation. Instead, it became a sobering jolt. The U.S. muscled into the semifinals on grit and legacy — but Germany brought something more dangerous: a cold, clinical mastery. Their tactics were sharpened, their technique surgical. A younger generation had studied America’s dominance and returned with a sleeker, deadlier model. They dismantled the U.S. 3–0 with ruthless precision. For the first time in more than a decade, the Americans looked mortal.
Mia Hamm — the heartbeat of a generation, her silhouette etched in Wheaties boxes and childhood imaginations — retired soon after. Her exit was more than symbolic. It was the closing of a chapter, a spiritual and creative rupture the program would struggle to mend.
From the fog stepped Abby Wambach — all fire and thunder. A different kind of star. Where Hamm had glided, Wambach crashed through: a blunt-force instrument in the box, scoring goals with bloodied brows and headers that seemed to defy gravity and anatomy. She was a force. But even her brilliance couldn’t seal the cracks now spidering through the team’s foundation.
Then came Greg Ryan — a tenure remembered not for what he built, but for what he unraveled.
By 2007, Hope Solo had seized the No. 1 shirt — a shot-stopper with reflexes that bordered on supernatural and a combustible edge that terrified opponents and, occasionally, teammates. She was in peak form entering the World Cup semifinal. And then Ryan made his fateful call: he benched Solo in favor of Briana Scurry, the 1999 hero, now past her prime, who hadn’t started regularly in years. He leaned on data — Scurry’s past success against Brazil — but missed the moment. The game had changed. Brazil had changed.
What followed was catastrophe. Brazil ran riot. Marta — elusive, untouchable — conjured a goal that felt mythic, pirouetting through defenders and finishing with casual cruelty. The U.S. crumbled, 4–0 — their worst defeat ever in a major tournament.
Solo, raw and unapologetically honest, spoke aloud what others only whispered: “It was the wrong decision, and I would have made those saves.” The fallout was swift. Honesty turned to heresy. She was frozen out of the bronze medal match, shunned on flights, isolated at team meals. It was as if she had violated a sacred code — one that placed unity above truth, conformity above candor.
Ryan was dismissed soon after. The team was adrift — battered by humiliation, splintered by mistrust.
Then came Pia Sundhage — the guitar-strumming soothsayer from Sweden, a gentle alchemist with a calm smile and a keen understanding of people.
She didn’t arrive brandishing some tactical magnum opus. She arrived with arms open and eyes wide — attuned, receptive. She called players by their nicknames. She asked what made them come alive. She wrapped them in hugs before kickoff. And, most importantly, she restored something that had vanished: joy.
Her approach unlocked the soul of the team. And it worked.
At the Beijing Olympics in 2008, the U.S. faced Brazil once more in the final. This time, there would be no Marta miracle. The Americans — propelled by grief, pride, and a newfound belief — endured and emerged with a gritty 1–0 victory in extra time. It wasn’t their most dazzling title. But it was their most cathartic.
By 2011, the team had evolved again. They weren’t Europe’s tacticians or Brazil’s balletic poets. They were something rawer — full of heart, speed, and a high threshold for drama.
Then came the quarterfinal against Brazil — a night seared into legend.
Down a goal. Down a player. Moments from elimination. The U.S. summoned one last surge in the 122nd minute. Megan Rapinoe — a winger with the daring of a jazz soloist — charged down the left. With the outside of her foot, she delivered a 40-yard cross that bent the laws of geometry and time. Abby Wambach rose like a cathedral spire and met it with righteous fury. Tie game. Pandemonium. Redemption.
It’s still the greatest cross I’ve ever seen — not just because of its physics, but because of the defiance that pulsed through it. It screamed belief.
They won the shootout. America exhaled, then roared.
Though they fell to Japan in an aching, emotional final, the 2011 squad had reawakened the country’s imagination. They were imperfect. They were alive. And they were back.
But behind the triumphs, the scaffolding of the women’s game in America was buckling.
The Women’s United Soccer Association (WUSA) — launched in the afterglow of ’99 — folded by 2003. Women’s Professional Soccer (WPS) arrived in 2009 with sober optimism and faltered under scandal, lawsuits, and red ink. By 2012, it too had shuttered. For a decade, professional women’s soccer in the U.S. floated on borrowed time and fraying hope. World champions slept on couches. Bartended to pay bills. Worked side jobs between training sessions. Aspiring stars had nowhere to grow. Entire rosters fled overseas. The national team soared while the foundation beneath it buckled and cracked.
Still — through it all — the USWNT carried the torch.
Which led to the 2012 Olympics in London, and one of the most riveting matches in team history.
In the semifinal against Canada, the U.S. trailed three times — and clawed back each time. Wambach’s 80th-minute penalty made it 3–3. Then, in the 123rd minute — deep into extra time — Alex Morgan rose and nodded home a looping header, the latest goal in Olympic history. A 4–3 win. Pandemonium again. A gold medal followed, revenge against Japan. But that match — raw, breathless, operatic — became the memory etched in fire.
That tournament baptized my seven-year-old self into the church of the USWNT. My soccer fandom was just beginning, but I was already transfixed — by Rapinoe’s blonde hair whooshing down the wing, by Alex Morgan’s coltish, piston-legged burst (fitting of her nickname, "Baby Horse"), and by the collective voltage this team radiated. Dominant. Defiant. Unrelenting.
But beneath the glint of gold, the scaffolding still trembled.
The NWSL launched in 2013 — not from a flush of corporate capital or gleaming infrastructure, but from sheer, unrelenting spirit. It was a league stitched together with threadbare hope, held up by players living on the precipice of poverty and passion. Locker rooms were often shared with lacrosse teams, their bathrooms echoing with the mixed percussion of cleats and sticks. Minimum salaries hovered just above subsistence, barely enough to scrape together rent. Many players bunked with host families, crashed on friends’ couches, or packed into cramped apartments, all for a chance to chase the game they loved.
The fields were patchy, sometimes more dust than grass, often scarred and weary from years of neglect. The crowds were modest — hundreds, sometimes low thousands — but their voices were full-throated, their devotion undiluted.
My own fascination deepened. In my backyard, Portland, Oregon, the Thorns roared out of the gate. Armed with USWNT icons and international stars, they galvanized a fan base almost overnight. The terraces at then-Jeld-Wen Field swelled with support the rest of the league could only dream of. Success followed. The Thorns became the league’s inaugural champions.
What the NWSL lacked in glamour, it made up for in something rarer: commitment. That commitment — stubborn, soaring, bone-deep — transformed the league into a crucible where legends were tempered and forged. A proving ground where passion bled through every tackle, every sprint, every sleepless, bone-rattling bus ride home.
It became more than a league. It became the backbone of women’s professional soccer in the United States — a sturdy spine where WUSA and WPS had buckled.
The USWNT’s meteoric rise — from the ’99 revolution to World Cup triumphs in 2015 and 2019 — acted as rocket fuel. Interest surged. Sponsorships trickled in, then flowed. Media attention followed, and credibility began to calcify. Fans who once only glimpsed the sport through the prism of quadrennial tournaments now had a full-blooded, season-long narrative to follow. The NWSL cultivated domestic talent, lured international stars, and steadily raised the ceiling for what the women’s game in America could be.
Into this world stepped Jill Ellis — a coach of quiet intensity and surgical detail. She wasn’t flashy or magnetic like some of her predecessors. But beneath her measured demeanor pulsed the mind of a tactician — one who dissected opponents and engineered game plans with the cool precision of a master architect. She made tough calls — unflinchingly benching legends like Abby Wambach, the team’s towering presence for over a decade. Ellis believed in youth. In turnover. In the uncomfortable but necessary art of evolution. Some veterans bristled under her strict rotations and analytical edge. But in the end, results drowned out dissent.
The 2015 Women’s World Cup in Canada became her proving ground — and the USWNT’s emphatic pronouncement to the world.
In the final against Japan — the same opponent that had dealt them heartbreak four years earlier — the U.S. stormed the pitch with a vengeance bordering on mythic. Carli Lloyd’s display was otherworldly — a hat trick in just 16 minutes that left the global audience stunned. Her third goal, a soaring chip from midfield that floated like a spell across the Vancouver night and dropped just beyond the keeper’s reach, wasn’t merely a goal. It was a proclamation. A work of balletic audacity. The final punctuation mark on a 5–2 rout that restored the U.S. atop the world’s summit after 16 years.
I stood there, nine years old, jaw slack in the rafters of BC Place as the Americans barnstormed through Japan. Lloyd’s half-field heat check still replays in my mind in hypnotic slow motion — the pause, the plant, the strike. Everyone in the stadium sensed what was coming. No one in Japan could stop it.
But the victory wasn’t just about tactics or talent. It was catharsis. A reclamation of pride. A healing of wounds etched by past heartbreaks — and a bold, undeniable message that the USWNT was far from finished shaping the future of the sport.
Yet the fight off the field — the fight for equality — was only just beginning.
In 2016, the team filed a wage discrimination complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, igniting a battle that would define them not just by what they won, but by what they demanded. The evidence was damning: the women played more matches, drew larger crowds, won more titles — and yet earned less than their male counterparts. U.S. Soccer dug in. The players refused to flinch.
Hope Solo, never one to temper the truth, said what few dared to voice: “We are the best in the world. And we are treated like second-class citizens.”
I remember reading that quote on Twitter in middle school, my worldview still forming. It landed like a jolt. A paradigm shift. It was the first time I understood that greatness alone didn’t guarantee fairness — that even champions had to fight just to be heard.
But that same summer in Rio, the cracks began to show.
On the pitch, the U.S. women bowed out in the quarterfinals — their earliest exit ever at a major tournament — stunned on penalties by Sweden. Solo called their tactics “cowardly,” drawing ire and scrutiny. Within weeks, U.S. Soccer suspended her and terminated her contract. One of the team’s most iconic and polarizing figures was gone — not with a sendoff, but a rupture. A career bookended not by applause, but by controversy.
Their pursuit of equal pay and equal treatment wasn’t a sidebar. It became the marrow of their identity — a mission braided into every sprint, every goal, every defiant celebration.
Then came 2019 — a World Cup that unfolded like both a spectacle and a statement.
In France, the U.S. team was untouchable. Megan Rapinoe — hair flaming pink, voice sharp with purpose — won both the Golden Boot and the Golden Ball. She was incandescent: a player and protester, radiating both style and resistance. She called out political leaders, embraced social justice, and played with a brilliance that lit up stadiums.
Rose Lavelle danced through defenses with the freedom of a kid in a backyard — her creativity kinetic, her feet painting poetry in midfield. Becky Sauerbrunn anchored the back line like a general — poised, steely, immovable. Alex Morgan struck with clinical elegance, a striker born for the spotlight.
Following the team, first from afar and then from the stands beginning in the quarterfinals, felt like trailing a comet — history in motion, sporting greatness unspooling in real time.
Off the field, their voices crescendoed. Rapinoe took on presidents and patriarchy. Fans chanted “Equal Pay!” in stadiums and city streets. In the stadium, soaking in the scene, I couldn’t help but join in. The world, at last, began to listen.
When U.S. Soccer’s lawyers argued in 2020 that the men’s team possessed more skill, the backlash was seismic.
Sponsors fled. The federation president resigned. Players turned their backs on the crest.
By 2022, justice arrived: equal pay, shared bonuses, parity in travel, facilities, and respect.
The landmark agreement — the first of its kind in global soccer — didn’t merely close a gap. It redrew the landscape.
Under the new collective bargaining agreements, the men’s and women’s teams agreed to pool and split World Cup prize money — an extraordinary concession, considering the historic chasm in FIFA payouts. Match appearance fees were identical. Bonuses mirrored. Flights and accommodations — from charter jets to hotel standards — were locked in as equal. Revenue from ticket sales, broadcast deals, and sponsorships would no longer tilt toward one side.
And perhaps most powerfully, every U.S. player now wore the crest knowing it stood for equal value — no matter their gender.
It was never just about money. It was about dignity. About dismantling decades of second-class treatment and affirming that excellence — when earned — must be equally recognized.
After years of courtrooms, headlines, pressure and protest, the U.S. women didn’t just win the fight.
They rewrote the rules.
Not only for themselves — but for athletes around the world still waiting for their voices to echo.
But every story arcs.
After Jill Ellis stepped down in 2019, the U.S. entered the Tokyo Olympics under new coach Vlatko Andonovski. But the chemistry was off. The attack sputtered. The veterans looked spent. A 3–0 dismantling by Sweden in the opening match snapped a 44-game unbeaten streak and cast an ominous pall over the campaign. They clawed into the semifinals but fell to Canada on a penalty. A 4–3 rollercoaster win over Australia secured bronze. Respectable — but far from transcendent.
Then came 2023 — the real crash.
In Australia and New Zealand, the U.S. arrived fractured. The old guard — Rapinoe, Morgan, Ertz — was fading. The next generation was still finding its voice. A 3–0 win over Vietnam offered a whisper of promise, but then came a 1–1 draw with the Netherlands and a harrowing 0–0 escape against Portugal, saved only by a goalpost in stoppage time.
Just four goals in four matches — the fewest ever in a U.S. World Cup run. Disjointed. Predictable. Cautious.
Waking up in the dark to watch them felt like sleepwalking through a bad dream. The U.S. looked unrecognizable — tentative, disconnected, a spectral version of its former self. I kept willing them to awaken. But the passes dragged, the chances evaporated, and the trademark swagger had vanished.
Then came Sweden — a Round of 16 clash in Melbourne. The U.S. bossed the match for 120 minutes but couldn’t find the net. In the shootout: Rapinoe missed. Smith missed. O’Hara hit the post. Naeher saved one, came achingly close to another — but VAR confirmed Sweden’s final kick had crossed the line by mere millimeters.
The earliest World Cup exit in U.S. history. A dynasty in freefall.
A Round of 16 bow-out. The worst ever.
The golden generation had aged. The world had caught up. And for the first time, the U.S. looked not just vulnerable — but lost.
Chelsea’s architect of dominance. A coach with vision, charisma, and edge. She arrived in 2024 with fire in her belly and a blueprint in hand.
She inherited both promise and scar tissue. Sophia Smith. Trinity Rodman. Naomi Girma. Rose Lavelle. Alyssa Thompson. Names still ripening, full of brightness and burden.
At the 2024 Paris Olympics, Emma Hayes took her place on the sideline — and the team began to look reborn. Gone was the paralysis of 2023. In its place: directness. Urgency. Hunger.
They handled the group stage with poise and edged Japan in a tactical quarterfinal. Germany pushed them to the brink in the semis — but Lavelle, reborn in the big moment, buried a late winner for a 2–1 triumph.
The final? Brazil — Marta’s farewell. The U.S. stood firm. They absorbed. Then struck. Swanson’s finish, subtle and clinical, sealed it.
Gold — their first Olympic crown in over a decade.
Watching it unfold — Swanson’s serenity in front of goal, Lavelle’s return to brilliance, Girma’s steely elegance — felt like watching history gently reset. Not a nostalgia-fueled return, but a step forward. Into something new. And necessary.
This gold was more than a medal. It was a statement.
Through storms and struggle, the USWNT had reclaimed their throne. A promise renewed — to those who fought in silence before, and to the generations now dreaming bigger than ever.
Because this team doesn’t just win. It demands.
Demands to be seen. Demands to be valued. Demands to be heard. Demands equality. Demands respect from a country that hasn’t always lifted them up.
They have been the best in the world while fighting for the right to be treated like it — walking tightropes men never even see. Winning, then having to explain why it matters.
And still — they lead.
Not just America’s most decorated team but its most vital.
They don’t simply reflect this country. They challenge it. They push it. They raise the bar.
That’s why they matter. That’s why they always will.
That’s why you watch — not just because they win, but because of what winning has come to mean.
This Fourth of July, we celebrate more than a flag.
We celebrate every sprint on the wing, every penalty saved by a fearless keeper, every player who dared to believe in equality when the world still hesitated.
From Brandi Chastain’s triumphant kneel in Pasadena to Mallory Swanson’s golden strike in Paris — and everything before, after and in between — this team has always known how to rise when it matters most.
Because their fight is our fight — and their victories, ours too.