Coffey Wayne - When Nobody Was Watching My Hard-Fought Journey to the Top of the Soccer World

Copyright 2016 by Carlilloyd.com LLC

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-0-544-81462-2 (hardcover) | ISBN 978-0-544-97680-1 (signed edition)

Cover photograph Andy Mahr

Cover design by Martha Kennedy

e ISBN 978-0-544-81455-4
v2.1016

To Brian, my love and future husband,
and James, my trainer, friend, and mentor

This is the story of my soccer journey. It has had many stops along the way, and enough ups and downs to make a miniseries. Ive recounted my experiences as faithfully and accurately as possible, but I want readers to understand that, in retracing events that go back decades, some of the quotes, while completely true in spirit and context, may not be word for word as originally stated.

Carli Lloyd

Mount Laurel, New Jersey

April 2016

Prologue

I DONT DO FAKE . Thats the first thing you should know about me. Im not one to put on airs or change my demeanor, depending on where I am or who I am talking to. I dont much care about the red carpet or being on the cover of magazines. I dont put on makeup when Im getting ready for a game, because why would I? I am gearing up for battle.

How is mascara or eyeliner going to help me win the battle?

If Im not happy, you can see it on my face from the other end of the Jersey Turnpike. I dont hide it in my body language very well either. My normal way of walking is a borderline strut, shoulders back with a bit of a swaggering defiance in my step, as if I were the new sheriff in town.

If Im ticked off about something, or you cross me, the strut gets that much more pronounced. Im as easy to read as the top line of an eye chart.

You hear a lot these days about brand-building and image-crafting. I have a brand. You know what it is? Soccer player. Its the only brand I have any interest in. Of course, I want to be recognized for being a world-class player, but when I wake up every day its not my goal to figure out how to become a bigger celebrity or have more Twitter followers. If that happens because of what I am doing on the field, great.

Otherwise, I have zero interest.

Ive been approached by ESPN: The Magazine to pose in the body issue. Dancing with the Stars has reached out to me, and so has Maxim magazine, for a photo shoot that Im pretty sure wouldve had much more to do with skin than soccer. Thanks, but no thanks. A number of prominent athletessoccer players among themhave been featured in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue and other publications. It is not a decision that I am judging in any way. To each her own. Im sure they feel proud of their bodies and see no reason not to show them off. Its just not for me. I want to be a role model, not a runway model. I want to be known for the body of work of my career. If that makes me old-fashioned or out of step with the times we live in, so be it.

Im always going to be true to how I feel.

Another thing I have no interest in is drama. To me, it is a massive waste of time and energy, siphoning off your fuel and your focus. Its a lesson Ive learned, along with a million or so others, from James Galanis, my longtime trainer and mentor, an Australian transplant in South Jersey who has had a greater impact on my soccer journey than anyone. Unfortunately, in a dozen years on the U.S. Womens National Team, Ive been around enough drama queens to fill a royal palace. Ive seen new players get frozen out by veterans (I was one of the rookies once, and it wasnt fun), and I have seen coaches forced out. Ive witnessed drama involving lineup changes and strategic formations, heard gossip about alleged favoritism. There were times when I wondered if I was in a reality TV series. Im not kidding, and never more so than at the 2007 World Cup, when Hope Solo, my best friend on the team, spoke her mind and certain team leaders did everything but banish her from the human race. Drama doesnt necessarily make anybody a bad person. Its just the way it is. When you have a bunch of high-achieving, uber-competitive, strong-willed women in close quarters, stuff is going to happen sometimes. And it does.

I just dont want to get sucked into it.

Steer clear of anything that isnt helping you get where you want togothat is another James Galanis lesson, one that has pretty much become my life mantra. If something isnt helping you, it means its hurting you, and the bigger the goals you have, the less you can afford to have anything impede your progress. This may sound trite, but its nothing but the truth: all I want to do is work hard and get better and do everything I can to help my team win. Thats the sum total of my agenda.

Everything else is chatter.

I have a pretty good idea where my aversion to drama comes from. Ive had my fill of it, for a long time, in my own familymy parents and my younger brother and sister. My father threw me out of the house in 2008 in a fit of anger, and I have been on my own island ever since, with only sporadic contact, usually via email or phone calls. When I was honored as the World Player of the Year in January 2016 at a gala in Zurich, Switzerland, I never heard from my parents. When I had arguably the greatest final-game performance in the annals of the Womens World Cup last summer in Canada, I was able to share the joy with Brian Hollins, my fianc, and my aunts and uncles and cousins and friends, and James of course.

I did not share it with my own parents.

When my father had open-heart surgery, nobody told me until well afterwards. When my sister got married, I was not invited. I love my family and would like nothing more than to reconcile with them. Nobody has done more for me in my life than my parents, who devoted untold amounts of time and money over many, many years that allowed me to play the game I love. Its no exaggeration to say that I never wouldve gotten anywhere near a World Cup, an Olympics, or the U.S. Womens National Team without them. I have never forgotten that, and I never will.

The fact is that my parents were too devotedand did too much for me.

Everything they did was well-meaning, but there comes a time when you need to let your kids make their own decisions and get a taste of failure. As I reached my early twenties I started to feel smothered by their attention. They would pepper me with questions about how things were going with the national team and make suggestions about everything from how I should play to how I should conduct myself. Again, it was all out of a desire to help, but it wasnt necessarily what I wanted to hear.

Our differences escalated over time, and as with every family rift, there was plenty of blame to spread around. I am not going to lie. There were times when I was out of line. I absolutely can be stubborn, and I definitely said things I shouldnt have said. I totally own that.

From my perspective, the message I got from my parents, time and again, was that I was doing things all wrong, that they were the victims, and that I needed to listen to them or my career was going to get completely derailed. I believe they wanted the best for me, but somehow, almost every time I talked to them, I felt as if Id been chopped into small pieces. So I pushed back, and sometimes I pushed back hard. We had a lot of blowups.

Sometimes my parents would write emails or cards and I would answer, but every time we tried to work through it things would blow up again.

It hasnt been easy going it alone. I am sure it hasnt been easy for my parents either. I dont take any joy in writing about strains in our family relationships, but the truth is that it has weighed on me for years now and it has been very much a part of my journey. To become the soccer player I am, I had to grow up, become my own person, and make my own decisions about what to do on the field and in life. Those decisions havent always been popular with my family, but they were what was right for me. At some point I came to realize that I was no longer the little girl playing for the Delran Dynamite in our neighborhood park, a kid whose parents would bandage her up and drive her all over the place and make sure she had everything she needed. On the field its just me and the ball and the net, and I knew deep down I had to figure this out for myself. Im so grateful for all the things my family has done for me along the way, and I wish we could have shared every triumphand every tear too. James likes to say, Strength is measured by how far you are willing to push your weaknesses. I want to be strong, work on my weaknesses. I want to believe theres a way to work through this, and that this journey Im on will include my parents again. I refuse to give up hope.