The Rise and Rise of the United States Women’s National Team

By
at Internationaled.org

Published: April 23, 2013

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Since winning the inaugural World Cup in 1991, the United States women’s national team has been the team to beat in women’s soccer. Over its brief 20-year history, the team has won two World Cups (1991 and 1999) and an amazing four Olympic gold medals (1996, 2004, 2008, 2012).

The U.S. is currently ranked No. 1 in the world by FIFA and has held the top spot in the rankings for the last five years.

Here is how the U.S. has come to dominate the world of women’s soccer.

 

The 1991 World Cup



In 1986, U.S. Soccer turned to University of North Carolina coach Anson Dorrance to head up the USWNT. Although Dorrance is now widely considered the best coach in NCAA history, having won 23 national championships, at the time, women’s soccer in America was in its infancy.

At the time Dorrance was selected to become the team’s coach, his North Carolina teams had only won four of those 23 national titles. Still, those four titles represented four of the first five national championships awarded, and Dorrance seemed to be the best candidate to take the team forward.

Building a foundation on a core of young players (the average age of the starting XI in 1991 was 23), Dorrance put the team into his now legendary 3-4-3 system, later saying,

We played a 3-4-3 which was like sacrilegious. People thought, ‘you’re not playing a 4-4-2, what kind of tactical midgets are you? You’re going to high-pressure? You can’t high-pressure in an event where you have a game every three days… We were great duelers. We were gritty. We were to some extent irreverent because we didn’t worship at the altar of the 4-4-2 and we didn’t play the ball around in the back for half an hour to show we could possess it. We were different and we scared teams because we were different.



In the tournament, the first women&r...
Article Source: Bleacher Report - International Football

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