Thirty Years Ago Carolina Women’s Soccer Conquered The Impossible

Anson Dorrance was looking to challenge his team in a way that had never been done before.

Thirty years ago, the 1992 UNC women's soccer team, quite possibly the greatest college soccer team ever, embraced Dorrance's vision to take on all comers and, in doing so, set a standard that may never be matched again.

Over the course of four days 3,000 miles from home, the No. 1-ranked and six-time defending national champions defeated four opponents, two of which themselves were ranked in the top four in the country playing on their own turf in front of packed crowds, and out-scored those four teams, 22-2.

Four days, four games, four lopsided wins.

Longtime sportswriter and ACC historian Bill Brill of the Roanoke (Va.) Times called it the greatest team accomplishment in Atlantic Coast Conference history.

Carolina had beaten Wisconsin in the 1991 NCAA title game while Dorrance and the team's top two superstars, Mia Hamm and Kristine Lilly, were in China leading the United States Women's National Team to a world championship in the first-ever Women's World Cup. Hamm redshirted the entire '91 season, while Lilly played through the ACC Tournament championship game and won National Player-of-the Year honors for the second consecutive season.
1992 women's soccer team photo

The '92 team returned Hamm and Lilly, six other starters, and several dynamic scoring threats who had missed the previous season due to injury. In short, UNC was loaded –physical, fast, experienced, deep and talented, oh, so very talented.

Since losing to George Mason in the 1985 national championship game, Dorrance had led the Tar Heels to a 133-1-7 record. A 1990 overtime loss at Connecticut snapped a historic 101-game unbeaten streak; the 1992 team would go on to a perfect 25-0 record, part of another record-shattering streak of 103 games without a loss.

So Dorrance and chief assistant coach Bill Palladino set up a schedule that was almost daring in its design to build in a loss, something they would occasionally do to create additional adversity for the players to overcome.

In the season preview Dorrance said, "the team could be tremendously exciting to watch and because of that we have set up an almost impossible schedule for them, one that will really challenge the kids."

Looking back on it 30 years later Dorrance beams with pride reflecting on what the players accomplished on that road trip and throughout the entire season.

"I thought this would be a special team," he says from his office that overlooks the state-of-the-art stadium whose field now bears his name. "When you have a special team, you should try to do extraordinary things with it. 'Dino' and I wanted to figure out something no one had ever done, but also something no one would ever do until the end of recorded time. This was our plan."

The four-game road trip to the west coast came in the middle of the regular season. Carolina was already 11-0 and had outscored the opposition 60-3 with the closest games being three straight 3-1 wins over NC State, Santa Clara and George Mason, all perennial NCAA Tournament-caliber teams.

The trip began with a pair of games in the Umbro Invitational in Portland, Ore. First up was UC Santa Barbara.

"At the time I don't think we ever thought twice about playing four games in four days," says Tisha Venturini (Hoch), an eventual four-time first-team All-America, the 1994 National Player of the Year and a mainstay in the central midfield on the USWNT. "We were a team that our opponents circled on their schedule, but we were like, 'Hell, yeah. Let's go.' Looking back now, we laugh about it and think 'My God, that's insane.'"

Lilly says the confidence Dorrance had in the team was always key when it came to playing big games.

"He was sort of matter of fact, you know this is something we can do, you guys are going to win and it's going to be great," says Lilly. "I didn't think much about it. We were just going out there to play soccer. I was 21 and I don't even remember being tired."

Lilly, who went on to play more games with the USWNT than any other player ever, added with a laugh – "I couldn't do that now, it'd be too painful."

Junior midfielder Angela Kelly, one of the most underrated standout players in the country, got the trip off to a flying start with a goal in the seventh minute, and junior forward Rita Tower made it 2-0 less than three minutes later. Tower missed the entire 1991 season with a knee injury but was the strongest player on the team and could run like the wind.

"Our frontline with Kristine on the left, Mia on the right and Rita in the middle was one of the greatest in history," says Dorrance. "Rita was a bodybuilder, had no issue with contact and could score in a myriad of ways."

Tower would add another goal and an assist and Danielle Egan, Keri Sanchez and Lilly would contribute goals as Carolina beat UCSB, 5-1, to open the four-game set.

Day two would be a more daunting challenge as the Tar Heels played Portland for the first time, in front of a capacity crowd of 4,000 against a team which featured two U.S. megastars of its own in Tiffeny Milbrett and Shannon MacMillan.

"Anson wanted to test us because he thought we could be one of the best teams he ever coached and he wanted to see how we handled adversity," says Hamm-Garciaparra, a five-time FIFA World Player of the Year and the USWNT's all-time leading scorer. "That was a trip where we tried to lean on our depth and raise our level, and playing in Portland, where their fans are amazing, was one of those challenges."

"Playing before a packed house in Portland was supercool," says Venturini-Hoch. "That field is tight; the fans are right there and they weren't rooting for us. They were yelling and screaming and I friggin' love that. It really amped us up."

Remember this was 1992, a four-year cycle shy of the '96 Olympics where Hamm, Lilly and Venturini were among eight Tar Heels who won gold medals, and seven years ahead of the USWNT's famous and landscape-changing win over China in the Rose Bowl in the 1999 World Cup.

"Part of our mission back then, and that still continues today, was to grow the game," says Dorrance. "We sort of had rock star status in the sport when we traveled, the stands were usually packed and their fans were there to watch us lose, but that is one of the reasons we scheduled games like this."

Only the Tar Heels refused to lose, in fact, they drubbed the fourth-ranked and previously 10-0 Pilots, 6-1 (Portland had come into the match with a goal differential of 53-10). Kelly, who made a habit throughout her career scoring goals unusually early in big matches, opened the floodgates just 30 seconds into the game.

Hamm scored two goals and had two assists, part of her NCAA single-season records for assists and points (she finished the season with an astounding 32 goals and 33 assists for 97 points and won the first of two National Player-of-the-Year awards). Venturini, Sanchez and Tower also scored and sophomore center back Dawn Crow was named the Defensive MVP of the Umbro Invitational.

First two days, two wins, UNC 11, Opponents 1. Now it was on to California, where Venturini (Modesto) and Sanchez (San Jose) were heading home.

"The west coast trip was first an opportunity for the players that came east to Chapel Hill to play in front of their families," says Hamm-Garciaparra. "And to play against some of the best competition out on the west coast."

Venturini-Hoch acknowledges the trips to California, something UNC scheduled in all four of her seasons, provided additional pressure and incentive to win for Sanchez and her.

"I was determined never to lose any game we played back home. It was the only time I felt the pressure a little extra. I never felt that with the winning streaks, but when we got to California, Keri and I were like, 'Dude, let's go!"

Sanchez was a track star in soccer cleats, a player who could run fast and play at that speed throughout the game. She made a career of deep runs from the back, taking the most precise corner kicks and was annually one of the most overlooked great players in the country.

"Keri was a 400-meter champion in California so whenever she made a run, she was impossible to catch," says Dorrance. "And that trip she ran all four games, never stopped. She was making a statement that she could run all day. She didn't care we were playing four games in four days. She got it in her head this is just another challenge we haven't met before."

Game three was a 6-0 win over St. Mary's in Palo Alto with Hamm scoring twice more.

That set up the final game of the trip at second-ranked Stanford, yet another intentional part of Dorrance's plan.

"We've never been afraid of losing," says Dorrance, whose Tar Heel teams have won 22 national championships, making him the winningest coach in the history of NCAA women's athletics. "I read a quote once that said, 'You can't be afraid of failure because then you will be afraid of success.'

"So, we believe the player development part of challenges like this cannot be measured. We always want to play the best teams possible on their home fields. And we sometimes put our teams in the worst circumstances possible and playing a great Stanford team with Julie Foudy on their home field on the fourth day of a four-game road trip, well, that wasn't an accident."

Foudy not only was Stanford's exceptional center midfielder, but one of the best players in the world, a longtime teammate with many of the Tar Heels on the USWNT that had played together since 1985 who would go on to international acclaim.

Four years earlier, Dorrance was recruiting three players – Hamm, Lilly and Foudy. He said if he got one to play for the Tar Heels, UNC would win four national championships in her career; if he got two, UNC would go undefeated for those four years; and if all three came to Chapel Hill, no opponent would come within three goals of beating UNC.

Fortunately, Dorrance was able to sign two of the three. He would prove correct the team would win the national championship in each season and he narrowly missed on the second prediction as UNC would lose just one time in Lilly's and Hamm's five-years in Carolina Blue.

Stanford turned out to be toughest test, not only on the road trip, but all season as the Cardinal battled the Tar Heels to a scoreless draw through the first 45 minutes in front of another standing-room only and partisan crowd of 5,000.

**Left to right: Tisha Venturini, Kristine Lilly, Mia Hamm**

"The Stanford game was difficult and their student section was pretty vocal and not in a positive way," says Hamm-Garciaparra. "But that just made us angry. We got together at halftime and said enough. The best way to shut that down was to put the ball in the back of the net, so we did."

Five times in fact. Carolina blitzed the Cardinal with five second-half goals in a shutout victory. Hamm netted a hat trick, Lilly scored a goal and two assists and set up the other two goals in what Dorrance said was the most brilliant performance he'd ever seen, and Tower added one for a personal total of four goals in four games.

Kelly was tasked with marking Foudy and responded with a signature performance.

"Angela had an awesome game," Dorrance told the Stanford Daily. "Foudy is the premier center midfielder in the world and for Angela to stay on her like that was outstanding."

Dorrance initially told the team during the pregame scout Venturini would be assigned to mark Foudy, but the normally reserved sophomore told Dorrance she thought Kelly would be better suited for the job.

Kelly remembers, "Anson was talking about how Foudy was Stanford's engine and we were going to need to shut her down and said, 'Tish, that's a perfect job for you.' Tisha is a person of few words, but she looked up and said 'Anson, I don't agree. I think that's a better job for Angie,' and I'm like, what? So, because Tisha barely ever said anything Anson goes, 'Okay, Tish, that's a great idea. Angie, you're going to mark Foudy. Don't let her touch the ball. If you can do anything offensive at all that's just icing on the cake. Just do not let Julie Foudy touch the ball.'

"I remember taking that so seriously I was face guarding her, like all my basketball playing days came back to me."

Kelly's shutdown performance was no surprise to Venturini-Hoch, who went head-to-head in training with the Canadian all-star every day in practice.

"Foudy runs all over the place, she never stops," says Venturini-Hoch. "Our sole mission was to shut her down. So, Angie's running around chasing one of the best players in the world and there weren't too many players who could do that. It also meant I didn't have to sweat that. It was a huge reason we won the game."

Another was Lilly's masterful performance, the details of which Dorrance didn't recall 30 years later, but the essence of the captain's play remain ever clear.

"Here's what I know about 'Lil' – she never had a bad game. She was either good or great. I loved coaching her and loved watching her play. She was a running machine, she absolutely never stopped."

What did stand out to Dorrance these many years later was the team played its best soccer in the final 45 minutes against the best opponent on the trip in a hostile environment.

"What I love most about that trip was we blew Stanford out of the water in the second half," Dorrance says. "It was the eighth half on the fourth day against a quality opponent and that was an incredible statement about our mentality and competitive fire. It showed we were talented, but also mentally very hard."

Four games, four days, four wins: 22 goals for, two goals allowed.

The team would still need to keep its road blue uniforms ready as it traveled back across the continent, where five days later the Tar Heels beat UConn, 5-1, in Storrs, and two days after that defeated Brown, 5-2, in Providence, R.I.

Carolina would go on to finish the regular season 20-0, then beat Virginia and Duke (in Durham, of course) for the ACC Tournament title and roll through the NCAA Tournament, defeating William & Mary, 7-0, in the quarterfinals; Santa Clara, 3-0, in the semifinals; and the Blue Devils again, this time 9-1 in the national championship game.

Ironically, the final three games of the season in the NCAA Tournament were all played at Fetzer Field.

"We had so many great players and everyone did their job," says Lilly, another four-time, first-team All-America who would go on to become one of the most recognizable and accomplished players in USWNT history. Her back save that prevented a sure goal was one of the defining plays in the '99 World Cup final.

Carolina would outscore its opponents, 132-11, in the 25 games in 1992. Amazingly, four Tar Heels scored more goals for the season than did the opponents – Hamm (32), Lilly (23), Venturini (14) and Kelly (13). Goalies Shelley Finger and Tracy Noonan helped pitch 15 shutouts, while their teammates never scored fewer than three goals in a game.

When you look at Carolina's 22 national championships, Dorrance says the 1992 and 2003 teams were the most dominant, but the personalities on the '92 team are among the greatest of all time.

"There are a lot of things I'm incredibly proud of," says Dorrance. "Everyone thinks the obvious thing is the 22 national championships. Obviously, I am proud of every one of those championships. But that's not what makes me the proudest. What I like are human elements. What I like is consistency of performance. My favorite statistic of UNC women's soccer is we played 603 games in a row where we either won the game, tied or lost by one goal. That meant we were in games until the last second 603 games in a row. That's mentality.

"There's nothing more powerful than the indefatigable human spirit. That's the quality I admire in human beings. The fact we have this capacity to just not give up, not give up on ourselves, not give up on our mission, not give up on our friends, not give up on our relationships, not give up at all, we just have this incredible power. And we weren't afraid to put stuff like that on the line with a crazy road trip like playing four teams in four days."

Dorrance says the 1992 team's frontline and midfield were among the sport's best ever, it had defenders who could join the attack as easily as shutting down the other team and the goalkeeping was phenomenal.

Having Hamm, Lilly and Venturini on the field at the same time for UNC was like Mickey Mantle-Roger Maris-Yogi Berra with the '61 Yankees or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar-Magic Johnson-James Worthy running Showtime with the '80s Lakers.

But those three National Players of the Year are quick to point out just how good their teammates were. Players like Danielle Egan, Angela Kelly, Rita Tower, Zola Springer, Dawn Crow, Paige Coley and Roz Santana who all would have been stars on any team in the country. It was the way the team shared experiences on and off the field that allowed a group with so many talented performers to thrive the way it did.

"We just wanted to get after it and we had the best of times," says Venturini-Hoch. "We always talk now about how much fun we had. It was always hard, showing up at Finley when it's 100 degrees and we're running fitness. We always go back to how much fun it was. It was hard, we were competitive and we went after people and people came after us. But we enjoyed ourselves."

"My memories of Carolina were so wonderful," says Lilly. "I was very homesick as a freshman but Chapel Hill became my second home. I always just wanted to help our team win. We had a really fun group and to hear Anson say how much he could trust me to solve any problem on the field is very special."

Dorrance says one of things that led to such incredible success was the way the players cared for each other, particularly how even the highest-profile players looked out for one another.

"Here's what I love about Mia," says Dorrance. "She had some incredibly special qualities that put her in a position to score goal after goal after goal and she had an incredible hunger to score. She had absolutely world-class acceleration and could score with both feet. There was a stretch where she certainly was the best player in the world. And whenever a reporter asked her what it was like to be the best player in the world she would literally cringe. She reacted that way because Kristine, her best friend, was in Mia's opinion the best player in the world."

Dorrance and the players universally agree battling each other in practice, going against other world-class caliber athletes couldn't help but make themselves better.

"Competing in college or the National Team, we were always there to push each other, trying to beat each other no matter the drill," says Lilly. "But always playing to win. We were trying to beat the best of the best and were trying to be the best and that was the only mentality we ever had."

"We had a genuine love, care and concern for one another as human beings and wanted each of us to achieve our dreams of winning national championships and playing on the international level," says Kelly, who finished her career playing in an NCAA-record 99 games in which UNC went 97-1-1. She was a three-time All-ACC, All-America as a senior and longtime member of the Canadian National Team.

Competition and Connection. It was true 30 years when the 1992 Tar Heels did (many) things no team had ever done, but Competition and Connection remain pillars of the foundation of Dorrance's program even today.

"When people recruit against us, they say everything we do is recorded so we are all competing against each other, so we clearly all hate each other," says Dorrance. "No, we have this extraordinary balance between competing like hell in practice, and then connecting as deeply as possible with each other.

"The best example of that was Tisha Venturini and Angela Kelly, because they marked each other in practice every day when we did front six versus back four. So here are two center midfielders who were best friends and Angie would kick the snot out of Venturini all practice and then they would leave the field laughing with their arms around each other. They're showing the scar one just got from the other and they'd be laughing about it. And 30 years later they're still best friends."

"We just had so much joy at training," says Kelly, who has served as head coach at Tennessee and now Texas the past 22 years. "Training was the best part of our day. We knew we were going to have to work incredibly hard or we might get exposed, but we knew our training would be harder than most matches. In our competitive battles I wanted Tish to respect me, but Anson has always taught us, and we all bought in and believed, that the best way to show someone you respect them is by kicking their ass, right? By preparing them to play the best they can play. We would have lost respect for anybody who didn't work hard. It would not have been acceptable for anyone to even come to training who wasn't prepared to work hard."

"We're all great friends to this day," says Hamm-Garciaparra. "Tish, Kristine, Angela and I run a camp together that's in our 11th year called Team First. We are great friends; we truly care about one another. That was one of the things about that team. Roz and Paige, Danielle, Zola
are all still incredibly close. We see them occasionally and we just pick up right where we left off.

"That that kind of friendship and closeness was even greater off the field," adds Hamm-Garciaparra. "Nothing was ever personal in training; it was about caring for one another and wanting to see each other succeed. Pushing each other in practice was a large part of showing that kind of love and friendship for one another. Once we were able to get on the field for game day, that was just about celebrating all the hard work we did during the week, where we could just go out and have fun."

Dorrance says there are 10 cornerstones upon which Carolina women's soccer is built:

• self-discipline
• competitive fire
• self-belief
• love of the ball
• love of playing in the game
• love of watching the game
• grit
• coachability
• an energizing force
• and connection.

"Connection to your teammates is a piece we've added in recent years, which formalized and made intentional something our players have always done which is playing for each other in the right way," says Dorrance. "Connection is about how you answer these questions: Do you love your teammates and do they love you?"

"Mia, Kristine and Tish are huge pillars in my life," says Kelly. "I teach our players today if they can have an ounce of the joy and happiness I found through my college experience, that's what I want to give them. I want them to surround themselves with people that share their dreams and enable each other to achieve their dreams. People who almost want it more than you want it for yourself – then you're in a safe spot. For the past 35 years we've been the best of friends because we were able to give everything of ourselves through soccer and the respect we have for one another. You find so much strength when you surround yourself with people you love and care about and that has carried us through the rest of our lives and will continue to do so."

The current generation of Tar Heels wanted to celebrate an award that honors connection, so Dorrance named it for Ashley Riggs, a member of the 1992 team from Raleigh who passed away last year due to cancer.

"Ashley was an extraordinary woman and part of the '92 team that had those incredible achievements," Dorrance says. "In the last year and a half, we lost Ashley and also my younger sister, Maggie, died of cancer and I wanted to honor both. We named the connection award for Ashley and the competitive cauldron winner is named for Maggie. I learned a lot about how competitive women could be from Maggie and I certainly coach women that way because of her."

**Left to right: Keri Sanchez, Danielle Egan, Angela Kelly**

Aleigh Gambone, a senior from Clifton, Va., and Avery Patterson, a junior from Jacksonville, Fla., were the awards initial recipients – Gambone the Ashley Riggs Award and Patterson the Maggie Dorrance Award.

The 1992 Carolina women's soccer team set a standard on the field that has been hard to match for 30 years, but its legacy truly goes far beyond wins, awards and records. The Tar Heels who played that season continue to make an impact on their sport, girls and women in athletics, business, families and life.

Much credit has been rightfully given to the growth of women's team sports in soccer, lacrosse, basketball, softball and hockey to the USWNT winning the World Cup in 1999. Who can forget the indelible image of Brandi Chastain driving home the decisive penalty and the national celebration that followed?

But the roots of that world championship and the gold medal in Atlanta that preceded it three years earlier stem largely from the success of the Carolina Dynasty that produced nine consecutive national championships from 1986-94, two insane unbeaten streaks of more than 100 games, world-class players and, yes, a ridiculous scheduling notion of playing at peak level and winning four games in four days.

The media coverage from ESPN, Fortune magazine (which named Carolina women's soccer one of the world's greatest teams along with the surgical team at Johns Hopkins, the firefighters that capped the Kuwaiti oil fires and the offensive line of the three-time Super Bowl champion Dallas Cowboys), newspapers from Boston to Seattle and even People magazine, elevated the profile of the sport and made it possible for a player like Hamm to have a building at Nike's headquarters named after her.

The details of those four days in Oregon and Northern California may grow dusty with time, but the impact of the 1992 UNC women's soccer team is as alive today as it was three decades ago.

Thirty Years Ago Carolina Women’s Soccer Conquered The Impossible

Players Mentioned

Aleigh Gambone

Avery Patterson

Related Videos