Carolina's Marcia McDermott's rebuilds last year's stragglers into Founders Cup champions with an attacking attitude embodied by their newest import.
It was a simple enough declaration, made by the Carolina Courage's newest foreign star to Danielle Fotopoulos a few weeks into the WUSA's second season.
''My name is Birgit,'' the new striker – Fotopoulos' new strike partner – proclaimed. ''And I do not lose.''
She was going to love America, and her new team. The Courage, who had made losing a tradition right from the start of the inaugural campaign, was all but unbeatable by the time Birgit Prinz, the great (we were told), big (we could see) German forward arrived in Cary, N.C., at the end of May. It was, they might say, a match made somewhere in the heavens.
Its harvest arrived on a sweltering August afternoon in Georgia, where Prinz and Fotopoulos each found the net – both taking advantage of their opponent's defensive miscues – as Carolina completed its worst-to-first turnaround in the Founders Cup II championship.
The triumph, a 3-2 decision at Morris Brown College's Herndon Stadium that ended the Washington Freedom's twin worst-to-first dreams, might have seemed ridiculous a year earlier, but its foundation dates to before then.
''Last season was two different stories,'' says Courage head coach Marcia McDermott. ''The first thing that happened was I didn't have enough familiarity with the players in the draft and with professional soccer. In putting the team together, we pursued talent and had ideas, but we didn't have a cohesive enough plan, and the talent we organized wasn't cohesive enough. That was my mistake. That was a problem. I assumed too much about the professionalism. No one knew enough about professionalism.
''But the other half of the story is that halfway through last season, we really began the momentum that took us into this [season]. We started to deal with those other issues. One of the things I tell people is that coming in last place and struggling so much forces you to take a deeper look than if you just were mediocre the first year.''
Carolina's 2-8-2 start – and its 6-12-3 finish, matched only by Washington – gave McDermott plenty of reason to peer deeply at her club. By season's end, she knew she wanted Prinz, the top player not in the WUSA in Year 1, and was looking closely at Danielle Slaton, then a three-(soon-to-be-four-)time All-American defender at Santa Clara University.
McDermott needed to shore up defensive shortcomings that had resulted in a league-worse 40 goals surrendered, and she wanted to reduce the pressure on Norwegian playmaker Hege Riise, the Courage's one true standout and, says her coach, ''the finest player I've ever seen.'' That search led to Unni Lehn, another Norwegian midfielder.
''Our intention was to get better with [Riise] and less dependent [upon her],'' McDermott says. ''It's hard to get less dependent on her because as the team level rises, so does her level. As we've gotten more talent, everyone's level rose, and so did her responsibility. Now, instead of being responsible for making us a credible team, as she did last year, she was responsible for making us the first-place team. It's hard to take responsibility off Hege because she always recognizes what needs to be done.''
Slaton, after leading Santa Clara to the NCAA Division I title, was one of four players to arrive in a productive draft, and undrafted rookie Brooke O'Hanley earned a roster spot during preseason and a starting job, in midfield or the back line, as the season progressed. Then New York did the unthinkable, tossing out midfielder Nel Fettig; McDermott, with first dibs in the waiver process, grabbed her. Another waiver claim brought in speedy winger Venus James from San Jose.
PUZZLE PIECE. In all, 13 players from the first Courage squad departed – two retired; the rest were waived – and a dozen joined up. The final piece of the puzzle was Prinz. By the time she debuted, on June 1, Carolina was 3-1-2 (after a 3-0-0 start) and solidly in second place.
Riise, again, had been the pivotal player, but the renaissance was borne of many factors:
Fotopoulos, a tad soft in the first season, came into preseason physically and mentally ready to compete. ''I didn't know what to expect [in the first season], and this year is was [about] competition. We didn't know going into the first season, but this season we knew.''
Midfielder Tiffany Roberts was awarded the captaincy and given a broader role in McDermott's scheme. ''She's gotten so much better this year,'' the coach says. ''TR has a special dimension: I think she's the best at marking players out of a game. This year the rest got better. Her possession's better, her leadership.''
Unsung goalkeeper Kristin Luckenbill started the season with commanding performances to earn victories at San Diego and San Jose – games in which the Courage was outplayed. The wins, the latter on a beautiful Riise free kick late in the game, bolstered confidence that losses – following last season – might have damaged.
Slaton, a 2000 Olympian with leadership skills that have her pegged as a future national team captain, made it clear immediately to her teammates that losing was unacceptable. ''What we emerged with from that very first game that I thinks critical is the character of the team,'' McDermott says. ''It was very clear right away that we had a winning mentality. I can still picture Dee Slaton from left back, just see her deciding, 'I'm going to figure out a way win this.' … She walks into the organization and exudes such confidence that it's contagious.''
Injuries on the back line, where the initial plan had Erin Baxter and Staci Wilson teaming in the middle with Slaton on the left and iron woman Staci Burt on the right, forced McDermott to juggle things in front of Luckenbill, trying different combinations. On June 22, after only two Courage wins in seven matches, Fettig got her chance. Carolina surrendered five goals over the next five games, all victories.
''She turns out to be the anchor of our defense,'' McDermott says. ''We moved Nel back there, and it made a tremendous difference. … She's a great organizer, a great communicator, she feels the game, she sees the game, she's very tactical.''
Prinz's addition turned a very good side into a great one.
''The No. 1 thing it did was make us a more dangerous team,'' McDermott says. ''It took a lot of pressure off Fotop, who was scoring goals up to that point, but we were more predictable. And then what happened is Fotop and Birgit really found each other on the field very well.''
Trial and error led McDermott to abandon her 4-3-3 alignment, with Lehn pushed up on one wing, to a 4-4-2 that aided midfield possession while giving Fotopoulos and Prinz, two of the WUSA's bigger forwards, more space to operate. The change came in the June 22 game at Washington, the start of the five-game winning streak. Fotopoulos and Prinz combine for 15 goals in the following 14 matches, concluding with their strikes in the Founders Cup victory Aug. 24 over the Freedom.
How do they complement each other so well?
''The simple version is that Fotop is good in the air and Birgit's a good possession player – that's the simple version,'' McDermott says. ''Fotop's possession has gotten so much better this year. Her runs are a lot more dynamic, and the two of them are always looking for each other. Birgit is trying to read those balls Fotop plays behind her, off the flicks and in the air – that's something new for her. They're both making very good runs in the box, and when the other gets in, they're absolutely looking for each other.''
MESSAGE TO PRINZ. The relationship began, Fotopoulos says, before Prinz arrived, while she was still in Germany leading FFC Frankfurt to three titles last spring – the first European women's club championship and the German league-cup double.
''We sent a videotape over,'' Fotopoulos says. ''I said, 'I know you're a goalscorer, and I'm so happy you're coming here because that's what I love to do, too.' I love to play with people who have that mentality.''
Prinz scored 12 goals, with eight assists, in 15 matches. She tied for second on the WUSA scoring chart with Fotopoulos, just three points behind San Jose forward Katia.
Prinz was surprised how easily things came together.
''I wasn't having the thought that it was so easy to play with a new team,'' she says, ''but my teammates made it so easy for me, and the coach took away the pressure at the beginning. I had nothing to lose, and to play with Hege Riise and Danielle Fotopoulos and Unni Lehn and Tiffany Roberts – it's fun because these players are great soccer players.''
The season hit a short skid near the end, a three-game losing streak – shutout defeats at first-place Philadelphia and Atlanta followed by an embarrassing 5-2 loss at home to Washington – that threatened to derail the Courage, as a similar slip cost the frontrunning Charge at season's end.
Carolina bounced back, winning two and tying one of its final three games to capture the regular-season crown, then edged Atlanta – on an overtime goal from Carla Overbeck after Fotop saved the Courage with a penalty kick in the 89th minute – and then Washington to win the Founders Cup trophy.
''I think it was maybe a good thing that we went through that [losing streak],'' Roberts declares. ''We had been playing so well and winning games, but maybe we needed a little but of adversity so we could learn from our mistakes, so we don't learn from our mistakes in a championship game.''
Washington was the favorite. The Freedom had enjoyed a spectacular second half of the season, behind Mia Hamm's second-half pyrotechnics and Siri Mullinix's heroics in the nets, and Carrie Moore's and Jen Grubb's performances in the back, behind the possession game of Steffi Jones (Prinz's Frankfurt teammate) and Abby Wambach's tenacity up front, behind Bai Jie's individual skills and Ann Cook's hearty midfield play. Washington entered the final riding five-game winning and 10-game unbeaten streaks, but it was the Courage that dictated most of the terms.
The outcome was determined in a five-minute span of the second half – when Fotopoulos knocked home a rebound of a Prinz strike that Mullinix fumbled, then Prinz stripped Grubb and beat the keeper 1-on-1, turning a 1-1 game into a 3-1 Carolina lead – and at the end of the game, when the Courage held off a furious Freedom onslaught.
They, like Prinz, refused to lose.
by Soccer America Senior Editor Scott French in Atlanta