FEATURE - World Cup winner Foudy passes on her experience

By Steve James

HIGHTSTOWN, N.J. (Reuters) - Mia Hamm was the telegenic goal-scorer while team mate Brandi Chastain is remembered for ripping off her shirt to reveal her sports bra after the 1999 women's World Cup win.

Julie Foudy may just have a more enduring influence on a generation of American girls, however.

A driving midfield leader and soul of the American women's soccer team that also won Olympic gold in 1996, Foudy is putting lessons she learned on the pitch into practice teaching girls to take control of their lives.

"When you're born, on your birth certificate, it doesn't say 'check here for your leader'," she said during an inaugural session of the Julie Foudy Sports Leadership Academy.

"Leaders can be made and there's different types of them. You don't need a gold medal around your neck to make a difference in life," she told Reuters in a recent interview.

As she watched a group of teenage girls teaching soccer basics to black and Hispanic children from the inner city, Foudy said that being a role model came with responsibilities.

"This has been a big passion of mine for years. I've always felt with young girls, they're often hesitant to lead, to take that step for whatever reason.

"They think you have to have the captain's armband, or be the anointed one, the superstar, to lead. They have a hard time finding their voice," she said.

MOTIVATIONAL SPEAKER

Foudy, 35, graduated from Stanford University with a degree in biology but she never pursued a medical career as soccer took over her life and she found her own voice as a motivational speaker and activist for several causes, including women's sports.

After the American victories at the Olympic Games in Atlanta and in the World Cup, she was in the forefront of the women's soccer revolution.

She played 271 times for the U.S. team, and captained it from 2000 until she retired in 2004. She played all three seasons for the San Diego Spirit of the WUSA, before the upstart women's league folded in 2003.

She was most recently seen at the World Cup in Germany as a studio analyst for cable television's ESPN.

Before flying to Berlin for the final this month, Foudy was happy to share a dormitory room at the private Peddie School in Hightstown, New Jersey, for a week, overseeing the first session of her leadership academy.

"My husband Ian and I have been doing soccer camps for years," she said. "When I retired we were talking about how we were getting all this tremendous feedback from parents.

"Like, 'It changed the way my kid approaches school when she hears how important school is to all your staff'. I thought, gosh, in 30 minutes we're making this much of a difference? We should be doing more."

Thus was born the concept of week-long camps for teenage girls to not only hone soccer skills with a world-class player, but also learn about taking charge of their own lives and making a difference in the lives of others.

RED CROSS

Girls at Peddie worked on projects for the Red Cross and with old people at a nearby retirement home, as well as with the underprivileged children.

"The idea behind this was I always said sports and life go hand-in-hand," said Foudy. "I really believe I learned all these great things on the field and working with the team that have become completely applicable to life."

As an example, she talked about the coach who told her she would never make the national team. At the age of 16, she proved the coach wrong.

"People said we would never have a women's World Cup and we said 'Why? We're going to change that attitude and perception for women's soccer'. People said we would never have women's soccer in the Olympics and we said as a group: 'Why?' We won the first Women's World Cup and the Olympic gold medal."

Confidence, self-esteem and how to deal with setbacks were lessons learned through sports, Foudy said.

"So we built this curriculum that is half soccer, half leadership. Getting them thinking about, first, how to be a leader themselves, because if you can't lead yourself, you'll have a hard time leading others.

"Then we have them building out to being a leader on a team and taking that to your school and the hallways and resisting some of the negative peer pressure and influences."

The girls do team-building exercises, she said, bringing in a lot of chaos and confusion. "Are you the one who stays calm and composed or are you the one who gets frustrated? What kind of attitude are you taking when you go down 2-1 against a better team?

"If you can emit confidence, then so will your team mates," said Foudy, who recalled the moment when Chastain took the World Cup-winning penalty against China.

"I was next, but I was like: 'Just make it and let's be over with it.' I would have taken it in a heartbeat but I didn't need to be the one. I didn't need the glory, just the win."

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