Category: Opinion

Champagne Problems: How the USWNT Having Too Much Talent Creates Odd Issues

Posted on by RJ Allen

In no sane world should Crystal Dunn be an outside back on the national team. In no world that makes sense should Sam Mewis sit healthy on the bench, or Casey Short and McCall Zerboni sit at home.

And yet this is the world we live in.

The USWNT has the deepest pool in the world. Forwards as far as the eye can see, midfielders that have the power to link play and to dominate, defenders who can make talented players look silly when they try to attack, and goalkeepers who can make jaw dropping saves.

But for all that depth, there are still some problems. In some cases, the problems come from the depth. I want to focus on three. First, the depth isn’t evenly distributed so we end up with some sections a mile deep while others aren’t much more than a puddle. Second, selection decisions aren’t correctly weighting the value players can bring. Third, the current Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) doesn’t incentivize bringing in some of the best talent.

Deep Waters with Shallow Sections

As Charles Olney often points out on Twitter, the USWNT has more options in each position than can really be comprehended. In some positions, like goalkeeper, you could swap out the current bunch for an entirely new set without anything more than a slight – if that – dip in quality.

But those players don’t get called in, and it’s a problem. A champagne problem, sure, but still a problem.

When you have 30 attackers that could be called into camp, there’s no realistic way to actually do it. Fans can all make the case for their favorite, but at some point the coach does have to draw a line in the sand and pick from the group assembled. We might quibble with the choices but we all know there are roster limits and nowhere close to everyone can go.

We can all debate if Ohai or Huerta or Lynn Williams should be moved from the “possible but probably not” pool to the “yeah there is a real chance here” pool. But I don’t think anyone would argue that Alex Morgan or Christen Press or Megan Rapinoe should be downgraded, and that’s what’s really causing the blockage. 

Meanwhile, as we all go round in circles on this point, on the other side of the pitch, real honest to goodness defenders seem to be harder and harder to come by. And so you end up with Crystal Dunn at fullback, because you want to get as much champagne as possible.

The Overvaluation of Attacking Talent

Which leads to the second issue. Jill Ellis favors a system where the outside backs are really wingers and one center back really is a defensive midfielder. In that context, it makes sense to play Crystal Dunn as a left back and wait for her to work some magic, while sacrificing some of the lock down defense a Casey Short would bring.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying Crystal Dunn shouldn’t be on this roster. She should be. But as an attacking player able to bring creativity, pace and a drive to make the best plays possible – hey it sounds like the Crystal Dunn of the North Carolina Courage – without having to give up a certain level of defense.

Ellis wants the best pure talent on the pitch and she will put square pegs into role holes if it means she can get another attacker out there. She’s not the first to make that kind of choice, but it means there is some disjointness of play and a sameness of mindset from players all over the pitch.

A team with outside backs that do move forward but always have one foot firmly planted in the defense would be a significance difference from the USWNT of today. A team that valued developing defenders and not conversions for the sake of putting more attacking minded players on the field would be a shift in the way that the US prepares for the future. Neither is necessarily right or wrong, but it definitely affects how the US plays, and how others teams respond.

Soccer matches are won by players scoring goals and they are lost by the other team doing the same. With their over-reliance on the attack, the US have tipped their hand. They very well may win a World Cup doing it, but it does give a much stronger road map to how top teams can beat them.

Dancing with the Ones that Brought You

The USWNT doesn’t like turn over. Historically. Currently. Maybe forever more.

Stability is important. Having players with 100 caps, 200 caps, shows that those players have found a way to stick around and be useful through different coaches and teams up and downs.

It also shows that the US roster is not turning over. Since 2012, eleven players have hit 100 caps. Since 2015 eight have. Seven of those players are on the current USWNT World Cup roster.

There often looks to be a disconnect between form and player selection. Alex Morgan or Christen Press or Julie Ertz could be downright terrible for their NWSL teams and get call ups roster after roster while the Ohais or the Lynn Williams or the Lauren Barnes of the league barely get a chance when they are called up, and even a tiny dip in form apparently knocks them out forever.

Ellis seems unbothered by the ideas she is comparing players with no international experience to players who have appeared on the field for the team 50, 100 or even 200 times. If they are not up to the same level at first blush they are cast aside. Or if you’re Sofia Huerta you are jerked around – including having your federation changed – and then cut.

With the contract system that the USWNT operates under, bringing in new players while having to pay the players already under contract could be seen by the powers that be as a waste of time and money. Why pay Aubrey Bledsoe and test her out when you already have goalkeepers on the payroll?

The USWNT may have the deepest roster in history. They may have the best collection of 23 players you could ask heading into a major competition.

In 2019 they may be enough. But will the lasting damage of inadequate planning and managing of that pool be a major stumbling block in 2020 or 2023? Only time will tell.

Book Review: The Making of the Women’s World Cup

Posted on by RJ Allen

In The Making of the Women’s World Cup: Defining Stories from a Sport’s Coming of Age, Kieran Theivam and Jeff Kassouf take us on a journey across seven tournaments, spanning almost three decades, and deliver well on the promise of the title. These are indeed some of the defining stories of the event, which collectively come together to construct a broader picture of the women’s game as a whole.

Each chapter focuses on a specific country, and generally centers on the specific tournament that defines that group. That means that each of the winners gets a chapter, but also allows for a few other interesting stories that don’t necessarily result in lifting the trophy at the end. For example, we get to follow the Australian teenagers as they work their way into a team on the margins of the event, and see them build up toward becoming one of the rising superpowers in the game. There is a similar chapter that focuses on England’s transition from a fringe player to a serious contender. 

This decision to tell narrower and more specific stories is very helpful, since it reduces the size and scope of the event, and allows emotion and experience to shine through. As Theivam and Kassouf present things, you get a clear sense of how the tournament progressed through the eyes of those actually participating. That doesn’t necessarily tell us everything we might want to know about the event, but it provides focus and clarity that might get lost in an effort to be more comprehensive. The story of how Silvia Neid or Kelly Smith or Julie Foudy reacted in a particular moment is bolstered if you’ve had a chance to dig into their story in some detail.

This combines with the other nice feature of the book: its ability to balance between straightforward reporting on the action (who scored the goals, who made the saves, how the individual games ebbed and flowed) and broader discussion of the social and cultural experience. The ability to draw on extensive interviews of the subjects themselves helps enormously here. You don’t just get a sense of what happened but also what it meant, and how people felt.

I do have two minor areas where I was left wanting a little more. The first is in the editing. This definitely reads like a book that needed to come out quickly to hit a deadline. It’s by no means a huge problem. The writing is fine; it just could have been tightened up a bit with another round of edits.

The second is more thematic. For completely understandable reasons, this is primarily a book about the big western countries (the US gets four chapters, England two, with just one for Brazil, Germany, Australia, and Japan, and none for any other nation). To be fair, those are generally the countries who have played the biggest role in the tournament, and you couldn’t reasonably tell ‘the defining stories of a sport’s coming of age’ without them. The US, after all, has won three World Cups and has come agonizingly close to another. It’s also the biggest media market and a two-time host of the event. And if you wanted to pick the single moment where the sport ‘came of age,’ the two most compelling answers might be the final matches of 1999 and 2015.

Still, there are plenty of important stories that don’t come from these few nations. It would be wonderful to dig into the experience of the great Chinese team of the 90s, the Norwegian winners from 1995, not to mention countries like Costa Rica, Nigeria, Colombia, etc. The World Cup, after all, isn’t purely an event for the winners. It takes an entire field of competition to produce the final result, and there are fascinating stories all along the way—many from players who had to sacrifice far more to bring themselves to this place.

This isn’t a critique of the book, which understandably had to make choices about where to devote its attention, and presumably was dependent on what kinds of interviews were available to fill in the gaps. It’s more just a recognition that there are still a lot of interesting stories still to be told in this area. All of which might be fertile ground for a follow-up, if the authors were so inclined.

Ultimately, this isn’t an encyclopedic study of every twist and turn, though it does offer a nice bit of that as well. But if you’re excited for this summer’s tournament, and want to get some perspective on what it all means, you won’t find a better resource than this book.

The Game Changers: Week Five

Posted on by RJ Allen

The Game Changers is a weekly series looking at the most important results of each week. Each section will look at one team and how its win, loss, or draw impacts the season.

Week Five marked the second week in the NWSL with no U.S. national team players, and the first week without the Canadians. The Utah Royals were dealt their first loss from the Houston Dash on Saturday, as were the North Carolina Courage. After last week, where a total of only two goals were scored, every team scored at least once this week. Here is a full breakdown of the scores:

Sky Blue vs. Washington Spirit (2-3)

Utah Royals vs. Houston Dash (1-2)

Orlando Pride vs. Portland Thorns (1-3)

Chicago Red Stars vs. North Carolina Courage (3-1)

Utah Royals drop points for the first time in 2019

The Utah Royals won their first three games in 2019, but dropped points at home against the Houston Dash. The Utah Royals haven’t dominated any of the games they have won, and this match against the Houston Dash opens the door for similar struggles to 2018. However, you could argue that the two goals from the Houston Dash– both from Rachel Daly– were spectacular. And they were the first two goals Utah conceded this season.

Does this game say more about the Houston Dash or the Utah Royals? It’s hard to say at this point. The Utah Royals may not be dominating their matches, but they have shown that they will be a good team in 2019. But will they be good enough to claim one of the four playoff spots? That’s the question.

Houston Dash defeats Utah Royals on the road

The Houston Dash earned another win this season, becoming the first team in 2019 to defeat the Utah Royals. They now sit in the No. 1 spot in the standings, with 10 points in 5 games. They have three wins this season, with just one loss and one draw. They haven’t always looked dominate and they will be losing a lot more players in the coming weeks, including their top goal-scorer Rachel Daly. But this game they managed to find success without their Canadian players, and against a team that has been unstoppable.

Like Utah, this game was significant for the Houston Dash when it comes to thinking about their chances at the playoffs. Houston is a strong team, possibly stronger than they were last season when they finished in the No. 6 slot, just five points the last playoff team. And while they are losing their national team players, they are also likely to become more settled as they become more familiar with the playing style of their first year head coach. This win for Houston was a good opportunity to show they have what it takes to go far in 2019. They did not disappoint.

North Carolina loses for the first time since mid-2018.

On Sunday, the North Carolina Courage earned their first loss since their 1-0 defeat against the Utah Royals on June 16th, 2018. In that game, Brittany Ratcliffe scored a screamer of a goal in stoppage time to earn the win for the Royals. But on Sunday, North Carolina was handed a 3-1 loss by the Chicago Red Stars at SeatGeek Stadium, their first multi-goal loss since May 2017. They were on the road, and without some key players. But this feels significant in breaking North Carolina’s armor.

Right now, the Courage sit in the No. 4 spot in the standings. They have a 2-1-2 record. The Courage will be one of the best teams in the league, if not the best, and will almost definitely make the playoffs. But this loss, plus their two draws so far this season, sends a message to other teams in the league that North Carolina might be more vulnerable than we thought.

The Game Changers: Week Four

Posted on by RJ Allen

The Game Changers is a weekly series looking at the most important results of each week. Each section will look at one team and how its win, loss, or draw impacts the season.

It’s officially been four weeks since the NWSL season kicked off. This week was low scoring, with just two goals scored across four games. The Utah Royals now sit at the top of the NWSL table, with nine points across three games. Meanwhile, the Orlando Pride earned another loss this week as they struggle at the bottom of the table with just one point. This is the first week without the U.S national team players, but there weren’t too many surprise results. Here are the score lines from this weekend:

Utah Royals vs. Chicago Red Stars (1-0)

Washington Spirit vs. Seattle Reign (0-0)

North Carolina Courage vs. Sky Blue (0-0)

Houston Dash vs. Orlando Pride (1-0)

Utah Royals undefeated in their first three games

The Utah Royals are off to a hot start, and this weekend, they proved they could succeed without Christen Press, Becky Sauerbrunn, or Kelley O’Hara. The Royals hosted their second home match of the season on Friday night against the Chicago Red Stars. The Red Stars were coming off a hot streak of their own, with seven goals in two games and a dominant win over the Seattle Reign in Week Three. They lost Alyssa Naeher, Morgan Brian, and Tierna Davidson to U.S. national team call-ups. The game was tight, with the 84th minute winner being scored by Amy Rodriguez.

The Utah Royals will lose more internationals in the coming weeks. While not all the names are cemented, the possible absences include Diana Matheson, Desiree Scott, Katie Bowen, Vero Boquete, and Rachel Corsie. Four of those players started for the Royals on Friday night, and it’s not clear how deep their team is. I would never underestimate a Laura Harvey side, but their team will be one of many that will be rocked by the 2019 Women’s World Cup. Good thing they’re racking up points early on.

Sky Blue plays scoreless draw against North Carolina

At the beginning of the season, it looked like Sky Blue was going to be more of the same. They dropped points to Washington in their first match and Houston in their home opener, losing both matches with zero goals scored. Their third match was against the Portland Thorns, and most people thought they would be destroyed. Instead, Carli Lloyd scored two goals in the first 25 minutes and Sky Blue finished the game with a 2-2 draw.

North Carolina is without many U.S. national team members, including Sam Mewis, Abby Dalhkemper, Crystal Dunn, and Jessica McDonald. Sky Blue lost just one player– Carli Lloyd. The game was not even. North Carolina had 28 shots to Sky Blue’s seven. They had fifteen corners to Sky Blue’s five, and they dominated possession at 58%. But this draw still feels important for Sky Blue. They were supposed to be slaughtered in these last two games. Instead, they managed to get two points against two of the best teams in the league. And while it is too early to be worried over the NWSL Standings, Sky Blue sits one point above the Orlando Pride. They’re still looking for their first win, which took them the entire season in 2018. But things feel slightly more hopeful in New Jersey, especially as teams prepare to lose their internationals.

Orlando Drops More Points at Home

Things are starting to look dire for the Orlando Pride. They have played five games so far this season, yet they sit at the bottom of the table with only one point. They have allowed nine goals in those five games, while scoring just one. They’re without Alex Morgan, Ashlyn Harris, and Ali Krieger, and they will likely lose players like Shelina Zadorsky, Alanna Kennedy, Emily van Egmond, Marta, and Camila in the coming weeks. It’s hard to see how things can get better for them, but it’s also hard to see how they can get much worse.

Houston didn’t dominate Orlando, but the match certainly wasn’t even either. Houston had 18 shots to Orlando’s nine, and nine shots on goal while Orlando had none. Haley Kopmeyer stepped with eight saves, while Jane Campbell didn’t have to make any. The lone goal from Kealia Ohai was a beauty, but Orlando’s inability to generate any energy really cemented their problems. If you’re an Orlando fan, it’s probably time to panic.

Women’s Soccer Has A Seriousness Problem

Posted on by RJ Allen

Soccer is a beautiful game.

Eleven people suit up on either side of the ball with about half trying to get the ball into the net and another half trying to keep it out. There are heroes and villains that make themselves known over the course of a few minutes or a match or a career. There is glory and heartbreak that can happen with a single strike of the ball.

A well-played soccer match is like watching Michelangelo working on carving David out of stone as the minutes tick by. It’s masterful.

Sometimes the things that the women’s soccer media world is tasked to cover are not beautiful. That doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile. It’s important to write about a club doing horrible things to their players. Breaking down top tier rosters and trying to figure out who stays and who goes when it comes to major events is the kind of analytic backbone that helps fans learn and grow. Serious pieces to help try and create flesh on a skeleton. But that doesn’t leave a lot of time to write about the joy or the mastery of skill or the fun of it all.

One of the issues for women’s soccer is that there just aren’t that many pieces written about it, aren’t that many media covering it, isn’t that much brain power thinking about it. Which means that oftentimes the people who would be writing pieces about that joy, that mastery, have to break news and write about the big tough problems. They can’t write about the fun stuff because those stories feel a little trivial when there are bigger fish to fry. Sometimes the fish don’t even have to be bigger. They just need some fish, any fish, to be there. Much of the media that is unpaid or under paid does the work that the major media would usually do.

There isn’t wall to wall coverage of the NWSL draft on par with the NFL or NBA draft, not even on par with the MLS draft. Games are not broken down on ESPN week in and week out. Scores aren’t even recapped on most daily sports shows. It’s the job of the small collection of media to handle the basic logistics of covering the league because no one else does it.

Think about how many pieces a typical person who covers the NWSL or USWNT puts out in a year. How much time do they have to devote to just simply covering the basics of the sport? After all, they know if they don’t do it, probably no one else will. So instead writing more fun or experimental or cerebral pieces, this is what they’re stuck with.

With that in mind, I want to give a shoutout to Stephanie Yang, who wrote a wrote a really nice piece, “NWSL teams as Avengers.” It was refreshing not because it was about the Avengers and sports, right before a huge Avengers movie comes out, and because it was just fun. Yang is one of the more prolific people when it comes to covering American women’s soccer. She writes plenty of the basic stuff that just has to get done. But she also writes things with humor, wit and story crafting, and those are the ones that really sing.

Another example: Andrew Sharp at The Maneland had a great piece called Twitter Reacts to NWSL’s Newest Style Icon Marc Skinner that went in to some of the great media content that Orlando Prde has been putting out about their new coach.

Even I’ve gotten in to the act writing a preview of the Utah Royal’s roster by turning them in to a Quidditch team and talking about each player when I wrote Utah Royals QC Roster is Magical for RSL Soapbox.

I really do believe one of the impediments to non-fans becoming casual fans and casual fans becoming devoted fans is that women’s soccer sometimes feels like homework. It isn’t always easy to just engage for the fun of it, when you have to work hard to find sources. If your local site covers the team at all, it’s probably mostly negative stuff, or serious stories. And where’s the fun in that?

It’s a common problem around women’s sports. With less coverage, every word matters more. Things need to be covered and we cover them well. But it also means we’re so worried about putting the shots on frame we’ve lost sight of the beauty of it all.

Men’s soccer, men’s sports, can be fun. They can just be sports and no one raises an eyebrow. Women’s sports are important and serious and necessary and groundbreaking. But they should be fun too.

Sheridan Playing Too Well for Sky Blue

Posted on by RJ Allen

You may not have noticed, because Sky Blue FC is in their unfortunately usual form, but Kailen Sheridan is playing incredibly well. The superhuman goalkeeper for Sky Blue did everything humanly possible last week against the Houston Dash to keep her team in the game, only to have her own defense produce the play that led to their second consecutive loss in 2019.

Sheridan, a Canadian international, joined Sky Blue in 2017 and has made 20-plus appearances in each season she has played. Despite the team not being incredibly competitive over that stretch, she has proven herself to be an asset and finally made her way into the international first team in 2018 following an injury to Erin McLeod.

For an example of the difficulty Sheridan faced this past weekend, the Dash had 19 total shots with 11 of them on goal. She parried all but one, which was a result of a defensive error in the final 10 minutes. Sheridan was able to stop the one-on-one attempt but her own defense deflected a Sofia Huerta shot into the net. Despite showing an ability to stop just about everything else before this, was unprepared to have to stop her own team’s chances as well.

The frustration showed on Sheridan’s face. Sky Blue has mustered little offensively and the team’s best player, Carli Lloyd, missed a penalty earlier in the game that would have at least seen Sky Blue share the points.

Sheridan has played too well to be left in obscurity like this. Continuing to play on a team that has been ravaged both on and off the field may hurt her future chances as a starting keeper for the Canadian National team.

For now she will need to continue as a force for futility and hope that Sky Blue match her intensity in the games to come to dig themselves out of a situation that started some time ago

Welcome to American Soccer: Disability

Posted on by RJ Allen

This is the fourth article in the series “Welcome to American Soccer,” which focuses on equal treatment and access to soccer in the United States. The articles focus on where U.S. Soccer stands on a variety of issues and where they need to improve.

Defining Disability

Before I dive into the details of how U.S. Soccer approaches disabled athletes, I feel it is important to acknowledge the vagueness of disability in sport. We often talk about disabled athletes, as if all disabilities are the same. But there are many disabled players in the NWSL or on the U.S. Women’s National Team. Carson Pickett was born without a left forearm or hand. Kealia Ohai is legally blind in her right eye. Many professional players have learning disabilities, such as dyslexia.

So, what does being disabled mean when it comes to soccer? It’s not really clear. In this article, I will talk about the deaf national team and the Paralympic national team. The Paralympic team lists their qualifications here, but they do not cover the full spectrum of disability. Nor does the deaf national team.

In this article, I explore the narratives surrounding disability. It is interesting to think about why we consider disabled athletes in a category separate from the senior men’s and women’s national teams when there are notable players on both sides who are disabled. An important conversation is needed, beyond this article, to think about the segregation of disabled athletes and the perception of disabled athletes as a uniform group.

I understand the diversity within the category of disability, and I hope that in this article I have not come off as though I am sweeping everyone into one category. It’s a complex conversation, which should be led by the disabled community. Able-bodied people, such as myself, need to listen more than we speak. I just hope that through this article I can shed light on how the existing avenues for disabled athletes fall short and spark a conversation about how we improve the situation.

What do I know?

When I began research for this article, I admittedly knew very little about disabled athletes in U.S. Soccer. I assumed that the U.S. probably had a Paralympic team, although I couldn’t tell you whether there was one team or two or five. I couldn’t tell you what kinds of disabilities those athletes had, nor could I tell you how well they had done in recent competition. I couldn’t even tell you what their most recent competition was; the only time I ever hear about disabled athletes is in the lead-up to the Olympics and the Paralympics. And even then, coverage of the Paralympics is usually minimal, enough for media outlets to give themselves a pat on the back and say they did it.

When I started doing my research, I was surprised at how far I had to go for answers. When you go on the U.S. Soccer Federation’s website, and look at all the teams, you can go the Paralympic National Team page. This is not specified on the team site as being a men’s team, but as far as I could tell, all the players were men. If a women’s Paralympic team exists, I couldn’t find any information about them on U.S. Soccer’s website.

The information I was able to find on disabled athletes in U.S. Soccer remained choppy and unclear. There is a Disability Soccer Committee, presumably to advise U.S. Soccer on the best policies for inclusion of disabled athletes. When I did a general search on disabled athletes and U.S. Soccer, the most common result was the U.S. Soccer annual awards and their choice each year for “Player of the Year with a Disability.” In 2018, the award went to Gracie Fitzgerald, who plays for the U.S. Deaf Women’s National Team. I was able to find information about them on social media and their own website but couldn’t find any info on the U.S. Soccer website. I’m not even sure they are part of the federation.

We know that programs are there for disabled athletes. But we don’t really know anything about them.

Equal Pay, Equal Treatment

When I did my research, I found out that the Paralympic National Team is preparing for their own World Cup this summer in Sevilla, Spain. The team plays 7-a-side, and in their group stage, they will face Iran, Finland, and Ireland. They also have the ParaPan American Games in Lima, Peru two months later. It seems like this would be important information for U.S. Soccer to publicize, yet I hadn’t heard anything about it until now.

When I expanded my search beyond U.S. Soccer, I learned that the Paralympians had their own fight for equal pay with the U.S. Olympic Committee that has been going on for at least a decade. In 2018, Olympians earned $37,500 for winning gold, $22,500 for silver, and $15,000 for bronze. By comparison, Paralympians earned $7,500 for gold, $5,250 for silver, and $3,750 for bronze.

In September, the U.S. Olympic Committee announced that it would give equal medal bonuses for both sets of athletes. This action applied retroactively to the 2018 games, giving Paralympian athletes the money that they deserve and that they need to be successful athletes.

True Equality: One Tournament

Many Paralympic athletes are calling for a merging of the Olympic and Paralympic tournaments. In 2018, NBC aired 250 hours of Paralympic coverage compared to 2,400 hours of Olympic coverage. By the time the Paralympic athletes are ready to take the stage, the international press has largely gone home.

“Other people say they are household names, but they are not,” Ryan Raghoo told VICE Sports. Raghoo is a long-pole jumper from Great Britain. “People can win multiple Paralympic gold medals and not even be known in their own country, let alone be international superstars. I don’t see why there should be any difference because you’ve got a disability; that’s segregation. I get a lot of stick for this, but when I present myself, I present myself as an Olympian. I don’t describe myself as a Paralympian.”

The separation of the Olympic and Paralympic games also causes Paralympians to be framed through familiar caricatures. The stories of their disability often overshadow their performance in the game. Frances Ryan talked about this in a 2012 article prior to the kickoff of the London Olympics.

Athletes can be inspirational. The Olympics has shown this. Yet the inspiration that greeted successful Olympians is not the same as that being attributed to their disabled counterparts. An Olympian is deemed inspirational because of what they have achieved. A Paralympian is an inspiration because, despite it all, they’ve made it this far. It is, in part, a reflection of the unspoken thought that lurks in perceptions of disability: a disabled life is a dire existence that only the most courageous could “overcome”.

A narrative springs from this. The Paralympics gets depicted less as a sporting event and more a feast of courage. Back stories are given pre-eminence. It would be naive to think that broadcasters, striving for an angle that garners interest, would ever resist dissecting how a Paralympian came to be disabled or framing it as a battle against adversity.

Respect

In the previous article of this series, I suggested that transgender and nonbinary athletes may require us to rethink how we design sports. Disabled athletes require us to do the same. As Chef Jose Andres says, “People don’t want your pity. They want your respect.”

It seems outrageous to me that we aren’t talking more about teams like the Paralympic national team and the deaf national team. U.S. Soccer remains entrenched in an ableist mentality that can be seen across all areas of American soccer. But it’s up to them to do better, and it’s up to us to demand they do so.

In a Huffington Post article, professors Eli Wolff and Mary Hums argue that the future of sport brings disabled and non-disabled athletes together.

Embracing this opportunity for athletes with and without disabilities to compete together is the wave of the future. This inclusive mindset will be open to creative thinking and not limited by tradition. It is important to maintain and value the arena and domain of disability-specific competition, yet there is also an untapped platform where athletes with and without disabilities can excel and reach their potential together in integrated sports like wheelchair basketball, sitting volleyball, blind soccer, and sled hockey. These can be sports for all to play whether one has a disability or not. These are sports everyone can play.

Disabled athletes have a lot to offer the U.S. Soccer community. And U.S. Soccer has a lot left to do when it comes to inclusion and respect. U.S. Soccer needs to prove that disabled athletes are not just an opportunity to exploit an “inspiring” story. Disabled athletes are a community that U.S. Soccer has an obligation to treat equally, at the same levels as their able-bodied senior national teams. Anything short of that is a failure.