YOUNG GUNS
Women’s soccer coach says Rio will be the place to shine for some of his team’s new stars.
In the wake of Canada’s disappointing exit in the quarter-finals of last summer’s home-soil women’s World Cup, head coach John Herdman said he needed time to think and someone to talk to.
Among his sounding boards was Pete Carroll, a guru of that other kind of football and coach of the NFL’s Seattle Seahawks. A mutual friend teed up the meeting and Herdman made the two-hour drive from his Vancouver home to the Seahawks’ home base.
“The two of us both had big events. It doesn’t get any bigger than a home World Cup. And he’d (lost on the last play in) the Super Bowl. And when we compared ourselves, both of us hadn’t hit the height that we’d hoped for our teams,” Herdman said in a recent interview.
“We talked about some things, like our failings and what led to those things, and looking ahead to the future. . . . He was an excellent listener and he provoked my thinking.”
Herdman’s main take-away from his time with Carroll?
“Probably the biggest thing he said that stuck with me was, ‘Give those rookies their shot,’ ” Herdman said. “I’ve been harbouring and developing a group of rookies over a four-year period, bringing them in at different times, trying to almost really manicure them into the national team. Pete just gave us the courage to really thrust them in, as opposed to carefully — and too carefully — manicuring them in.”
Witness the birth a youth movement for an Olympic-bound team attempting to build upon its bronzemedal performance at London 2012. Topping that watershed work won’t be easy. All Herdman’s team did four years ago was deliver some of the greatest moments of the Games, especially a controversial 4-3 semifinal loss to the U.S. at Old Trafford that might have been a breakthrough victory if not for the abysmal officiating of Norwegian referee Christina Pedersen.
Canada’s best player, Christine Sinclair, won the Lou Marsh Award as Canada’s best athlete. The bar for future success was set awfully high.
So after failing to reach it a year ago, Herdman has made changes that he insists have resulted in a superior unit than represented Canada a quadrennial ago.
“And the reason they’re better — the last team, I had nine months to work with them. This group, we’ve been working for four years to get to this point,” Herdman said. “It’s always hard to say, ‘Is it better?’ But in my mind, to be able to have four years of preparation, it’s a better team.”
Better and younger, thanks in part to Carroll’s urgings. While Sinclair remains the centrepiece up front, at age 33 she has spent the past few years fighting off a succession of injuries that has rendered her less dominant.
Program veterans still remain at the core of the squad, among them Melissa Tancredi, Diana Matheson, Kadeisha Buchanan, Desiree Scott and Sophie Schmidt. But the injection of new blood — the likes of 21-year-olds Ashley Lawrence and Janine Beckie, 18-year-old Jessie Fleming and 17-year-old Deanne Rose — only makes sense for these Games and the next.
“When is the right time (for youth)? Is it now? Is it tomorrow? Is it in three years’ time? I think after the World Cup we realized we needed to add more faces to the team,” Herdman said. “We needed to add more craft and guile to our possession and attacking play. And these young players were showing they had that in them. . . . It’s been a great journey. Four years of work. We’re well-positioned for these Olympics.”