The Girls of Summer Quotes

“In three weeks, the women's team had done more for soccer in the United States than any team had ever done. Yet, the United States Soccer Federation was unprepared and unwelcoming in its acerbic response to the women's success. With petty, resentful, chauvinistic behavior, the federation would bungle what should have been its greatest moment as a national governing body. Its leaders would criticize DiCicco instead of congratulating him, they would threaten to sue the women over an indoor victory tour and they would wait an unacceptably long period before entering into contract negotiations with the team. Then, at the end of the year, the federation would offer a deal that the women found insulting. Unwilling to trust that the federation was bargaining in good faith, the women would boycott a trip to a tournament in Australia. They would become champions of the world, embraced by the president, by the largest crowd ever to watch women play and by the largest television audience for soccer in this country, embraced by everyone, it seemed, but the officials who ran the sport with the vision of a student council. Increasingly, it appeared, the only amateurs left in sports were the people running the federations that governed them.”
― Jere Longman, The Girls of Summer: The U.S. Women's Soccer Team and How It Changed the World

“You should want to win. I still remember when I was little. Girls would score a goal, and we would walk together, high-five, and walk back to our positions. Boys are running around, going "I'm Number One." It wasn't like that for young girls. With girls, if you miss the ball on a tackle and hit the other player, it's like, "Oh my God, I'm so sorry.”
― Jere Longman, The Girls of Summer: The U.S. Women's Soccer Team and How It Changed the World

“Baseball may be called the national pastime, but it survives on the sentimentality of middle-age men who wistfully dream of playing catch with their fathers and sons. Football, with its dull stoppages, lost its military-industrial relevance with the end of the Cold War, and has become as tired and predictable in performance as it is in political metaphor. The professional game floats on an ocean of gambling, the players' steroid-laced bodies having outgrown their muscular and skeletal carriages. Biceps rip from their moorings, ankles break on simple pivots. Achilles' tendons shrivel like slugs doused with salt. Soccer and basketball are the only mainstream sports that truly plug into the modem-pulse of a dot-com society. Soccer is perfectly suited for a country of the hamster-treadmill pace, the remote-control zap and the national attention deficit—two 45-minute halves, the clock never stops, no commercial interruptions, the final whistle blows in less than two hours. It is a fluid game of systemized chaos that, no matter how tightly scripted by coaches, cannot be regulated any more than information can be truly controlled on the Internet.”
― Jere Longman, The Girls of Summer: The U.S. Women's Soccer Team and How It Changed the World

“Like representative government, soccer has been imported from England and democratized in the United States. It has become the great social and athletic equalizer for suburban America. From kindergarten, girls are placed on equal footing with boys. In the fall, weekend soccer games are a prevalent in suburbia as yard sales. Girls have their own leagues, or they play with boys, and they suffer from no tradition that says that women will grow up professionally to be less successful than men.

'In the United States, not only are girls on equal footing, but the perception now is that American women can be better than American men,' said Donna Shalala, the Secretary of Health and Human Services. 'That's a turning point, a huge breakthrough in perception.”
― Jere Longman, The Girls of Summer: The U.S. Women's Soccer Team and How It Changed the World

“It is often said in soccer that a country's particular style of play bears the fingerprints of its social and political nature. Thus the Germans are unfailingly characterized as resourceful and organized, while Brazilians are said to dance with the ball to the free-form, samba rhythms of Carnival. In the husk of cliche lies a kernel of truth. The Communist system of China had produced a collectivist style of women's soccer from the early 1980s to the mid-1990s.”
― Jere Longman, The Girls of Summer: The U.S. Women's Soccer Team and How It Changed the World

“When they looked in the mirror, the American and Chinese women had begun to see each other's reflection. To reach the World Cup final, the Americans had become tightly connected by the ligaments of teamwork, while the Chinese had realized the necessary freedom of individual expression.”
― Jere Longman, The Girls of Summer: The U.S. Women's Soccer Team and How It Changed the World

“I hope things get better, but it's a difficult process,' Foudy said. 'You're dealing with governments that don't care about children working. And it's hard to put our Western ideals on their situations. If you don't pay people enough so they can survive with only the father or mother working, how can they expect the kids not to work?”
― Jere Longman, The Girls of Summer: The U.S. Women's Soccer Team and How It Changed the World

“The culture that trains women to be acquiescent is fundamentally at odds with the culture of athletics.”
― Jere Longman, The Girls of Summer: The U.S. Women's Soccer Team and How It Changed the World

“If you look at anybody who's been marketed, it's been somebody who has been drop-dead hot and gorgeous,' Milbrett said. 'For men, you just have to be good. It doesn't matter what the hell you look like. For women, you have to be good and you have to be gorgeous. Maybe you're not even the best one on your team. Just as long as you look good, you're marketed. People's opinions are that this team is gorgeous. That doesn't bother me. What bothers me is the double standard in society and athletics.”
― Jere Longman, The Girls of Summer: The U.S. Women's Soccer Team and How It Changed the World

“I firmly believe in my heart that the U.S. must lead women's soccer and create change on the field and socially.' But, referring to American coaches, he said, 'The whole men's side doesn't respect the women's game,' believing it to be on a level of teenage boys. 'There may be some jealousy,' he said, adding that the men's national team was competing against 200 other countries, most with superior soccer cultures, while the American women were competing 'against five other countries.'

This was a frequently made, but entirely specious, argument against the American women. First of all, only seven countries have ever won a men's World Cup, and only 11 have ever reached the finals in 70 years of competition. The power in the men's game is just as concentrated as it is in the women's game. A lack of competition was used to diminish the achievements of the American women, but of course it was a double standard. No one complained about the weak tournament fields when UCLA began its basketball dynasty or when the San Francisco 49ers won a handful of Super Bowls after playing against execrable regular-season competition in the NFC West division.”
― Jere Longman, The Girls of Summer: The U.S. Women's Soccer Team and How It Changed the World

“Tom King, the chief operating officer of U.S. Soccer, said that the federation invested $4.4 million on the women's team in 1999 and lost $2.7 million. The federation receives about $3 million from FIFA, soccer's world governing body, for qualifying for the men's World Cup, and $700,000 to $1 million per game, American officials said. The federation receives no money from FIFA for qualifying for the Women's World Cup. The men's team also receives guarantees from other countries when it travels of up to $140,000, King said, compared with zero for the women.

'I don't see the WNBA players asking for the same salaries as the NBA players,' Contiguglia said.

In the case of soccer, however, the women are the NBA.

It is the women's team that is more popular and higher achieving. And to suggest the men's team is a cash cow is incorrect. The men's team didn't pay for itself either in 1999, King said, losing $700,000 on a budget of $5.9 million. An argument could be made that the American women deserve more money than the men, not just equal pay. They have won two world championships and an Olympic gold medal, while the men have won nothing. The biggest men's home crowds often come at matches where the ethnic population is cheering for the other team.”
― Jere Longman, The Girls of Summer: The U.S. Women's Soccer Team and How It Changed the World

“[A]s often happens to assertive women, the men in the federation considered her abrasive, overbearing. They whispered privately that she was 'emotionally volatile' and did not have a 'second gear' in her public manner. Strong men are considered fiery, strong women are volatile.”
― Jere Longman, The Girls of Summer: The U.S. Women's Soccer Team and How It Changed the World

“Funny, how the American team appealed to so many people because it was unsullied by money, and selfishness and corporate fingerprints, and yet when Chastain removed her shirt the old cynicism returned immediately. Surely, many thought and wrote, she had a deal with Nike to flash her bra and to make her body a living, breathing mannequin.”
― Jere Longman, The Girls of Summer: The U.S. Women's Soccer Team and How It Changed the World

“What she revealed was not sexy lingerie, but a supportive piece of athletic equipment. After the consolation match that preceded the championship game, both Brazilian and Norwegian players removed their jerseys and exchanged them on the floor of the Rose Bowl. Chastain had previously removed her jersey after regulation to air it out. While training in Florida, the players frequently doffed their shirts after practice in the smothering heat, and they sometimes gave interviews in their sports bras, which were items of utility, not titillation. Chastain 'has brought instant attention to a piece of clothing that is humble and practical, not a traditional bra of shine and lace and cleavage, but a sturdy compression garment,' wrote Ann Gerhart of the Washington Post. 'The sports bra is the cloth symbol of Title IX's success.”
― Jere Longman, The Girls of Summer: The U.S. Women's Soccer Team and How It Changed the World

“Soccer is best experienced as sport cloaked in spectacle and secular religion, and for the first time, Americans on a large scale felt - if only fleetingly, in a sanitized, hooligan-free, sample-sized container - the rosary clutch, the chest ache, that makes this game the athletic heartbeat of nearly every other country of the world.”
― Jere Longman, The Girls of Summer: The U.S. Women's Soccer Team and How It Changed the World

“This was America's new cable-wired, online nationalism, honey-combed lives intersecting during collective agony, the knee-pad titillation of Oval Office sex, the rubbernecking of celebrity violence. Until the Women's World Cup, the two biggest sports-related stories of the 1990s were the murder trial of O.J. Simpson and the knee-whacking shatter of figure skating's porcelain myth. Fans cheer for professional city teams and alma maters, but there is no grand, cumulative rooting in the United States except for the disposable novelty of the Olympics. With the rare exception of the Super Bowl is background noise, commercials interrupted by a flabby game, the Coca-Cola bears more engaging than the Chicago Bears.”
― Jere Longman, The Girls of Summer: The U.S. Women's Soccer Team and How It Changed the World