Without question, sports have an outsized impact on our culture as a whole. In the world of women athletes, it could be argued that no single sport has had the impact of women’s soccer, and no single team within that sport has improved the world for female athletes as the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team, a.k.a. “the National Team.” Their iconic victory in the 1999 Women’s World Cup gave rise to generations of girls aspiring one day to play on the big stage.
By the end of 2020 last year, just 241 women had had that opportunity. One of them was Joanna Lohman, whose sixteen-year professional career includes nine caps with the National Team after serving as captain for and winning MVP honors from the U-21 US national team from 2003-2004. While it doesn’t seem possible knowing what we now know about the national women’s teams of the 1990’s and 2000’s, Joanna was the first openly gay professional soccer player. Combined with her trademark bleached blond Mohawk hairdo (the “Jo-Hawk”), that earned her the moniker, “The Rainbow Warrior.”
After her last season with our hometown Washington Spirit, it was this legacy of boldness and activism for gender equality that led the team to retire her number. She’s now written an extraordinary book, “Raising Tomorrow’s Champions: What the Women’s National Soccer Team Teaches Us about Grit, Authenticity and Winning,” that imparts vital life lessons from the lives of those fortunate, talented and committed enough to make the National Team. Yes, it is a book about winning, and soccer moms and dads should hang on every word – most especially the parts about keeping the game fun – but it is also an extraordinary, collective memoir heralding Joanna’s two core tenants: “Adversity builds character” and “Doing what you love requires sacrifice.”
As she puts it in the book, “My character was equally if not more important than my game. I wasn’t known for unbridled success but rather the opposite: resilience, strength, compassion and re-invention. My legacy was about humanity and who a person can become if they use failure, rejection and change as fuel to rise from the ashes.” Along with journalist and soccer dad/grandpa Paul Tukey, she wrote the book to explain that there are “many ways to define greatness and that we all struggle – and that it is within the strife that we discover true beauty.”
“Warriors fall. We get up. And we do it again and again. Now that is #winning.”
Reflecting on why the Women’s National Team had such a powerful impact on women’s expectations, for themselves and for society as a whole, Joanna said, “All the way back to 1985 and the first iteration of the National Team you had women who were pushing boundaries. These were women who were highly competitive, extremely athletic and just really good at what they do.... Plus, they were so incredibly dominant. In the U.S. we love winners. I think the country just kind of fell in love with them.”
Through the more than 150 interviews of National Team players, coaches and parents Joanna and Paul spoke with for the book, what Joanna came to see was the extent to which they were on the “cutting edge of culture.” Leading by example through the diversity of the team –backgrounds, cultures, races, and sexual orientation, demonstrates, “what the world should be,” she added.
To discover those qualities and activities that most effectively groom champions, Joanna says she and Paul went into the project very open-minded and discovered, “there's no one way to greatness, and if anyone believes that, then they're quite foolish.” There are some themes and consistent aspects of players who do make it to the top, but that is still a tiny fraction of those who play. Rather than raise unrealistic expectations, Joanna says, “I want to help parents raise happy, healthy children, and that may or may not include them making the national team, but it's the journey is what really matters. It's the opportunity to play sports in a healthy way with a healthy perspective is what is going to allow these kids to succeed, both on and off the field.”
When it comes to youth soccer, “there's a lot of pressure to play with the best clubs, train with the best trainers, practice seven times a week and never rest, and only play soccer and be this elite athlete. With all of that emphasis we're losing focus on what's really important, which is all of the lessons that sport teaches you,” she explains.
Neither author is a big fan of the “pay-to-play” club system because of all the exceptional players that it may exclude. Both encourage club teams to offer generous scholarships to afford their member players exposure to excellent players who couldn’t otherwise afford to join. “We love hearing the stories of players getting scholarships, of groups around the country that we support and that are in our book that really work to get soccer into the inner cities, into the lower income families, because those are the players that can benefit the most from playing the sport.” Proceeds from the book’s sales benefit many such organizations.
In addition to private coaching, Joanna now serves as a sport diplomat for the U.S. Department of State, leading programs that promote sports, gender equality, conflict resolution and cultural understanding in sub-Saharan African nations like Botswana, Côte d’Ivoire, Niger, and Nigeria. “I honestly cannot believe that I'm able to travel the world and go to these incredible places and use soccer as a vehicle for social change,” she says.
“Imagine a white woman, who's pretty much gender-neutral with a mohawk that walks out of the plane in some of these countries, and it's like an alien has just arrived from outer space,” she adds. “It gives me a lot of perspective of how lucky I am to be a woman in America, and I think it provides them a lot of perspective on the definition of what a woman can be.”
You can buy the book online at https://rtcsoccer.com/, and will have a chance to meet Joanna at a book signing at Eyetopia on May 22nd. Look for details on our Facebook page. You can reach Joanna at lohman.joanna@gmail.com.