Coach Ratcliffe setting big goals
There’s a team of mostly 13-year-olds in the Mountain View-Los Altos Club called the Barcelona White that’s currently riding atop its league with a 6-0-1 record.
The coach, whose boyish looks belie his age, 48, does not get angry with his players. Tactics and other lessons are taught in calm, measured tones.
Paul Ratcliffe is not bad at his day job, either. He’s in his 15th year as head coach of Stanford’s women’s national powerhouse.
The Cardinal have been so good for so long, their fans almost take it for granted that they’re headed toward their seventh College Cup — soccer’s Final Four — in the past decade.
To get there, the No. 1 team in the country (21-1) and Pac-12 champion (11-0) will have to get past No. 10 Penn State (15-4-4)
at 2 p.m. Friday in the quarterfinals at Stanford’s Cagan Stadium.
The Cardinal’s one loss came on a sweltering August day in Gainesville, Fla., a 3-2 setback to then-No. 8 Florida. Since then, they’ve won 19 in a row, outscoring teams 71-4. All season, they’ve trailed for a total of just less than nine minutes.
Can they match Ratcliffe’s 2011 team and win the school’s second national title?
“My money’s on Stanford,” Washington coach Lesle Gallimore said. “This is one of his better teams. They’re going to be very hard to beat.”
Midfielder Andi Sullivan, a frequent member of the U.S. national team, leads a team with plenty of firepower. There’s forward Catarina Macario, the Pac-12 leader in goals (15) and assists (12), along with forward Kyra Carusa (12-4) and midfielder Jordan DiBiasi (710). Keepers Alison Jahansouz and Lauren Rood have allowed just seven goals between them. Except for Sullivan, all those players will be back next year.
At the helm is a three-time national coach of the year. When he arrived in 2003, Ratcliffe had been West Coast Conference Coach of the Year three times at St. Mary’s. Stanford had won five conference titles over the previous 18 years of the program, but was not really a national player.
That started to change when Ratcliffe recruited Kelley O’Hara in 2005.
“She was a difficult sell,” he said. “It was hard to get her to come here.” A visit to her home in the Atlanta area turned the tide. “She was the tipping point to make us one of the top teams in the country,” he said.
The national championship came in 2011, two years after O’Hara left — she and Stanford alum Christen Press were on the U.S. team that won the 2015 World Cup.
The 2009 and ’10 teams had lost in the national final. “You need a little bit of luck in the College Cup, and we just didn’t get it,” Ratcliffe said. “The third year was probably the lesser of those three in talent, but they had more determination because they had been the runner-up twice. They had the hunger that third time to make the difference.”
Ratcliffe’s overall record on the Farm is 272-50-27, including 40-11-4 in the NCAA tournament. Behind the numbers is a style of play that impresses even the opposition.
“They play with a brand of soccer that’s not only beautiful to watch but very effective,” Cal head coach Neil McGuire said. “I think it speaks volumes for the way he handles himself as a professional. Paul has set the bar for what we as coaches aspire to.”
“Being an opponent of his is no fun because they dominate our conference, for the most part,” UW’s Gallimore said. “You’re happy for Paul’s success because he does it the right way.”
Ratcliffe, born in England, was 4 when his father, a sales rep in the textiles industry, moved the family to Southern California. The young Ratcliffe spent a year in his native country after high school, training with Leeds United. He played midfield on an NCAA championship team at UCLA with eventual national-team members Cobi Jones and Brad Friedel.
Ratcliffe played in the Continental Indoor Soccer League before turning to coach, first as an assistant women’s coach at UCLA and then as a head coach with St. Mary’s and Stanford.
“He is what you see,” said his wife, Amy, a nonpracticing lawyer to whom he was introduced at UCLA by a waterpolo player at a birthday party. “He’s so calm and mellow and soft-spoken on the field. And he’s that way he is all the time.”
They have two daughters, Elena, 15, and Chloe, 13, who’s on the youth team that he also coaches. In his spare time, he watches TV — soccer games mainly — and reads books — mainly on soccer. “I’m kind of consumed by the game,” he said.
Upbraiding players is not his style. “I feel I’m really lucky because all of the studentathletes that I coach work so hard, and there’s always a high level of intensity. … Because I don’t raise my voice very often, I think I can gain their attention. You have to hold people accountable.”
His pregame speeches, on occasion, have surprised his players, Sullivan said. An example was when Stanford was playing a big game against a particularly physical team a few years ago.
“He basically said if we didn’t win this game, soccer was going to turn into their style and not ours,” she said. “So if we wanted our daughters to be able to play beautiful soccer, we needed to play beautiful soccer and win this soccer game.”
It’s that beauty that he’s after, along with victory. He finds and nurtures players who generally can achieve both.