Anson Dorrance owned his sport in a way no college coach ever has
The legendary North Carolina women's soccer coach retired abruptly last weekend after a legendary, record-setting 45-year run
In front of a crowd of 1,127 in the shadow of Interstate 25 in Colorado, the North Carolina women’s soccer team kicked off its 2024 season Thursday with a 2-1 victory against the University of Denver, putting home the game-winning goal in the 62nd minute.
In a vacuum, the win only means so much, particularly for a Tar Heels program with historical expectations that go far beyond a random mid-August night halfway across the country.
This particular game, however, carried a different, more visceral kind of significance. North Carolina’s players came together to pull out the win just four days after their coach, Anson Dorrance, informed them that he would be retiring effective immediately.
For even those with a passing knowledge of American soccer, Dorrance is more than just a coach. For 45 seasons, going all the way back to 1979, he was the Tar Heels’ coach, carefully and brilliantly molding the program into as dominant a force as any college team has been in any sport at any level.
Over that nearly half-century tenure, Dorrance went 934-88-53, won 147 NCAA Tournament games and captured 21 NCAA titles. His career wins and NCAA Tournament victories are the most of any coach in women’s college soccer history while his 21 NCAA championships are the most of any head coach in any Division I team sport ever.
If Thursday’s game against Denver felt a bit jarring, there’s a good reason for that. It was the first game in the history of the North Carolina women’s soccer program that Dorrance wasn’t the coach. A coach’s overwhelming success and the adulation that earns them can often lead people to say that person was the program. In Dorrance’s case, it’s quite literal.
Then, with a single press release on a Sunday afternoon while much of the country was preoccupied with the Olympics closing ceremony, it was over.
Anson Dorrance dominated women’s college soccer
Though Dorrance has received no shortage of praise in the days since his retirement, it’s nearly impossible to overstate his power and influence in the world of women’s soccer.
His North Carolina teams have played in 31 of the 42 College Cups – the women’s soccer Final Four – that have ever been staged, 17 more than the next-closest program. His official championship count with the Tar Heels is actually 22, as they won the national title in the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW), the forerunner to the NCAA, in 1981. Under Dorrance, they never missed the NCAA Tournament – the only school to have ever done so – and entering this season, they have been ranked for 513 consecutive weeks.
He guided North Carolina to five perfect seasons (no losses or ties) and six other seasons with no losses and three or fewer ties. During his time in Chapel Hill, 19 of his pupils won national player of the year honors.
His path to those accomplishments was hard-earned, particularly in a sport like soccer that didn’t have nearly the interest or respect 50 years ago that it does now.
Shortly after graduating from North Carolina in 1974, Dorrance actually began as the Tar Heels’ men’s coach, a role he held from 1977-88 while winning 172 games during that time. When the university established a women’s program, it tasked him with that job, as well, leading to a decade-long balance between the two, one he pulled off far more successfully than not. As he saw it, they were not only two different titles, but it forced him to be two different people.
"Women are more sensitive and more demanding of each other, and that combination is horrible," Dorrance said to Sports Illustrated in a 1998 profile of him. "Men are not sensitive and not demanding of each other, and that's a wonderful combination for building team chemistry. We can play with guys who are absolute jackasses. We have no standards for their behavior as long as they can play: Just get me the ball. But if a girl's a jerk, even though she gets me the ball, there's going to be a huge chemistry issue: I don't want to play with her. But she serves you the best ball on the team! I would much rather play with So-and-so. But you're terrible together! I would rather play with her. Why? The other girl's a bitch. It's unfathomable to me, but for them this is major."
(It’s not the most tactful or thoughtful way of putting it, but, hey, it obviously worked for him.)
While the history of the men’s program could be traced all the way back to 1947, Dorrance had no such luxury with the women. He was starting from scratch.
His first year on the job, his total operating budget was $4,655, a sum that covered everything for the program beyond his paltry salary and office supplies. His team’s first game in its first year wasn’t against some national power or a familiar regional rival, but rather the club team at UNC Wilmington. It wasn’t as though the area was teeming with willing and available competition. When the Tar Heels began play in 1979, they were just one of five colleges east of the Mississippi River to field a varsity women’s soccer program.
Dorrance’s major concern heading into that maiden season wasn’t winning a championship, but simply finding enough teams to play. He described that squad to The Daily Tar Heel, the North Carolina student newspaper, as a “missionary team.”
“We’re very confident about playing anyone,” he said to the paper. “We look forward to playing a match we’ll lose or barely win because our greatest fear is that we won’t have competition. Our concern is not so much win or lose as it is developing the game. Our function is encouraging other schools to establish varsity teams.”
His goals and desires quickly expanded in scope and prestige.
After the 1981 AIAW championship, women’s soccer was adopted as an NCAA sport for the following season. In its first chance to win an NCAA title, North Carolina capitalized, defeating Central Florida in the finals in 1982. For Dorrance, it was a moment of validation.
“It’s a much better feeling,” he said after the game to The Chapel Hill News. “The competition is getting better.”
Even as that happened, those back-to-back AIAW and NCAA championships marked a run of dominance that has never been seen by any other Division I program in any other sport.
From 1982-94, the Tar Heels won the NCAA title in 12 of 13 seasons. The one year they didn’t, in 1985, they made it all the way to the championship game before losing to George Mason. From 1981-2006, they went 598-21-18. At no point in that run was the program’s dominance more evident than from 1986-93, when North Carolina lost just once in 189 games, going 181-1-7 and winning the NCAA title each year. The following season, they slipped considerably, going 25-1-1 and winning another national championship. Slackers.
Dorrance wasn’t just some soccer tyrant running roughshod over overmatched college opponents, either.
He was the head coach of the United States women’s national team from 1986-94 and did with USWNT what he did with the Tar Heels – took an entity in its infancy and wasted little time shaping it into a powerhouse. He led the Americans to the championship at the inaugural Women’s World Cup in China in 1991 while coaching a team featuring nine of his former North Carolina players. Six days after that, he was back stateside leading the Tar Heels to their sixth-consecutive NCAA championship.
"It's that aggressiveness," Santa Clara coach Jerry Smith, who presided over a juggernaut of his own, said to Sports Illustrated for that 1998 story. "When you watch them play, you can see the edge they have. I'll go beyond aggressiveness: It's meanness. Anson has found a way to bring that out of his players. They don't care how many fouls they have, they don't care how they're perceived. They're going to be nasty."
He meant that as a compliment.
Perhaps most interestingly, Dorrance’s success wasn’t attributable to some secret sauce or a magical, mysterious trait that he and only he possessed. In fact, the way he went about winning all those championships was quite methodical.
While John Wooden had his “Pyramid of Success,” Dorrance had what became known as the “Competitive Cauldron.” What sounds like it could pass as the title of a Harry Potter book was basically an elaborate point system that was an omnipresent barometer for everyone within the program. Every action by North Carolina players at the team’s practices was tracked and measured, from a goal or assist during a scrimmage to who fared the best in various drills. Every week, Dorrance and his staff would post a complete ranking of the team, from one all the way down to 23.
“If they are fragile creatures, they are not gonna be comfortable to find out in this particular shooting drill, on a 23-player roster, they were 23rd,” Dorrance said at his retirement press conference earlier this week while explaining the system.
For whatever valid qualms there might be with the approach, its results were unimpeachable.
Beyond the nearly two dozen championships and the nearly 1,000 wins, North Carolina routinely churned out the best, most productive players in the world, a number of whom became household names at a time when such a feat was unimaginable for a female soccer player.
Among the former Tar Heels he coached were Mia Hamm, Kristine Lilly, Tobin Heath, Heather O’Reilly, Crystal Dunn, Emily Fox, Lorrie Fair, Meghan Klingenberg, Carla Overbeck and Cindy Parlow Cone, the last of whom is the current president of the United States Soccer Federation. Fifty-nine former North Carolina players have played for the USWNT. The 2024 Paris Olympics marked the fifth time the USWNT earned a gold medal with at least two former Tar Heels on the roster. The Americans’ victorious team in the 1999 Women’s World Cup, still one of the most consequential squads in the history of women’s sports, featured eight players Dorrance coached at North Carolina.
One day after two of his former players, Dunn and Fox, were a part of that most recent USWNT Olympic medal – playing starring roles for a defense that conceded just two goals in six matches – Dorrance called it a career.
Why now for Dorrance?
Like any coach in college athletics who had been as successful as Dorrance was for as long as he had been, his career wasn’t without some blemishes, if not outright scandal.
In 1998, two of his former players, Melissa Jennings and Debbie Keller, the latter of whom was a national player of the year, filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against Dorrance. Keller specifically alleged that Dorrance twice made an "uninvited sexual advance" toward her, made "inappropriate and uninvited physical contact" by placing "his hands and arms on her body,” and would "constantly interrogate" members of his team about their personal lives and sexual activities.
The university backed Dorrance and many of his former players publicly supported him. The case was settled in 2008, with the plaintiffs receiving $385,000 – which North Carolina stated wasn’t an admission of guilt – and Dorrance issuing an apology letter in which he acknowledged participating in banter of a "jesting or teasing nature" with groups of players while denying outright harassment.
Even his coaching philosophy, including his famed Competitive Cauldron, drew increased ire and skepticism as the years progressed.
In a lengthy story published in May, The Assembly, a North Carolina-based media outlet, talked to eight former players, some of whom spoke of a ruthless, unforgiving environment around the Tar Heels program.
Several former players from multiple different teams said Dorrance makes clear which athletes are stars and which are not. One former player said roles include starters, reserves, and deep reserves. Some players are meant to raise the academic standards; some boost team morale.
Former players said those who aren’t stars can endure frustrating slights, such as their names being mispronounced. They said athletes who didn’t play often were frequently forgotten when the team ordered gear like cleats and hoodies and had to harangue staff to get basic supplies.
Dorrance said he is forthright with players about his expectations.
“I hope none of them said that I promised them they were going to start out of high school, because I’ve never said that to anyone, ever,” he explained. “Heck, Mia Hamm her freshman year didn’t start the whole time, and she was already on the US full national team.”
Some of those same players singled out the cauldron in their criticism, believing it to be more arbitrary than Dorrance let on and, in other instances, unnecessarily personal. Dorrance wasn’t particularly shy about hiding certain aspects of his coaching practices to his players. According to Tim Crothers’ 2006 biography of Dorrance, “The Man Watching,” the North Carolina coach “sincerely tells his players he considers being ill a sign of weakness.”
Flaunting both his success and longevity, Dorrance largely ignored external and internal critiques. As a parent of one recent player told The Assembly, they had heard Dorrance dismiss a criticism of his approach by noting that “I can do whatever I want because they named the stadium after me.”
The story from The Assembly came during a tumultuous offseason for the Tar Heels, one in which they turned over nearly half their roster, with nine players transferring out and another five leaving early for the professional ranks.
It offered at least one explanation for the puzzling timing of Dorrance’s exit. He’s 73 years old – the point at which many coaches at least mull retirement, if they’re even still pacing down a sideline at all – but his decision coming less than a week before the start of the next season was, to put it mildly, odd.
Though still one of the country’s best programs and while still women’s college soccer’s preeminent brand, North Carolina had faded from its extraordinary highs under Dorrance.
The Tar Heels haven’t won a national championship since 2012, though they were still in the hunt, losing in the title game in three of the past six seasons. Last season, they went 13-2-8, tied for their second-fewest wins in a season since 1980, and finished fourth in the ACC, a league they once dominated, but have won only twice since 2009.
Elite players still came through the program – North Carolina had the top top picks in last year’s NWSL Draft and had two of the top three selections in 2021 – but even that became a source of second-guessing, with some who followed the program believing it had prioritized making stars rather than putting out cohesive teams that could meet the Tar Heels’ championship expectations.
While addressing those questions about his retirement at a press conference last Monday, Dorrance pointed to, of all things, an Aug. 4 exhibition in which North Carolina beat the DC Power, a women’s professional team in the USL Super League, by a resounding 5-1 margin. In each of the past two years, the Tar Heels’ season had ended in heartbreak. In 2022, they squandered a 2-0 lead to UCLA in the final 10 minutes of the national title game before losing in overtime and one year later, they took a 3-0 lead on BYU before allowing four second-half goals to fall one game shy of yet another College Cup.
This way, at least, Dorrance knew he was leaving the program in good hands to his associate head coach, Damon Nahas, who will be North Carolina’s interim coach this year. By doing so, Dorrance followed in the footsteps of many of his fellow coaching legends that had passed through his alma mater, from Roy Williams to Karen Shelton to his mentor, Dean Smith, the last of whom retired a month before the 1997-98 season. Each of those coached stepped down and passed the reins to their top lieutenant (or, in Shelton’s case, her star player) to help them keep some fraction of a presence around a program with which they had become synonymous.
“One thing [North Carolina athletic director Bubba Cunningham] said to me that resonated in January was, ‘Anson you’ve got to protect your legacy,’” Dorrance said Monday. “The more I thought about it, he was absolutely right.”
His legacy, however, will be separate from whatever Nahas or his permanent replacement manages to do in the years to come.
Women’s soccer has flourished and changed in the way Dorrance hoped it would 45 years ago, with more programs in more corners of the country fielding consistently strong teams with valid national title aspirations, making it more of a true competitive endeavor than the afterthought it once was. There’s perhaps nobody more responsible for that than him.
(Photos: USA Today, University of North Carolina)