With just over a week to go until the start of the NCAA regular season, Anson Dorrance has announced his immediate retirement from the North Carolina Tar Heels benchleaving his role in the hands of assistant Damon Nahas, curiously the brother of Sean who already led the state’s professional team, the North Carolina Courage. The timing of his farewell, as mentioned a few days before the start of what would have been his forty-eighth season at the helm of a university football team, has left many doubts, also because the ACC season about to begin would have made history, given the arrival, as a consequence of the conference realignment forced by men’s football, of absolute sports powers like Stanford inside of the historic East Coast league, but in the end the question seems very simple: at seventy-three years old, Dorrance has simply realized that he wants to enjoy his retirement.
The timing is explained by the fact that the off-season, for an NCAA coach, is the most active part of the year: new players are recruited and the image of a solid program must be projected. Leaving at this time represented the strongest guarantee that Dorrance could give to the program that he had – literally – built and of which he was the sole controlling body. When Anson Dorrance, in 1971, began playing soccer for the Tar Heels university team, a women’s program did not exist. It did not exist a few years later, in 1977, when Dorrance was promoted to head coach of the men’s soccer team. Two years later, he would be the one to found a women’s soccer section, still three years before the NCAA established a division for the discipline, and until 1988 he would coach both teams, before then focusing exclusively on women’s sports.
In his forty-four seasons at the helm of the Tar Heels, Anson Dorrance won twenty-one NCAA titles, with a record nine straight from 1986 to 1994; he appeared in the Final Four in the first twenty-two seasons of the tournament, missing the finals only twice; he won over eight hundred regular-season games while maintaining a winning percentage close to ninety percent – .887 to be precise; and he completed ten seasons in which his team was able to remain undefeated, doing so five times without even conceding a tie, three of which were in a legendary streak between 1991 and 1993 in which the Tar Heels totaled seventy-two consecutive victories – side note: that’s ten more wins, and in this case in all competitions, than the equally legendary Barcelona’s streak of sixty-two consecutive victoriesthe team unanimously recognized as the strongest in the world. It is no coincidence that Dean Smith, the basketball luminary who coached the North Carolina men’s team from 1961 to 1997, had the opportunity to say towards the end of his adventure that the one in which he coached “It was a school founded on women’s soccer, they were just trying to keep up”.
To build this legendary team, or rather these legendary teams – the last NCAA title dates back to 2012, but the university is always a constant presence in the crucial stages of the NCAA tournament, reaching the final, for example, also in 2023 – Dorrance obviously was able to count on some extraordinary players, all of them recruited by him, creating a virtuous circle for which previous success made the prospect of wearing the tar heel blue to equally as many players with enormous potential. Some of the names associated with the program led by Anson Dorrance are those of Alessia Russo, Lotte Wubben-Moy and Lucy Bronze – European champions in 2022 with England coached by Sarina Wiegman, who had also been a player under Dorrance over twenty-five years earlier – Crystal Dunn, Tobin Heath, Emily Fox, Meghan Klingenberg, Heather O’Reilly and many others.
Of all of them, the team from the early 90s is the one with the most legendary names and perhaps, still today, one of the strongest teams ever in the history of soccer, and it is no coincidence that those names are associated with another historic feat, in addition to the three undefeated years with three NCAA titles. From 1986 to 1994, in fact, Anson Dorrance was also the coach of the US national soccer team, with which he participated – and won – the first women’s world cup organized by FIFA, held in China.
In that team’s roster, made up entirely of college players, North Carolina had ten of the eighteen players – no other program had more than two – and among them were legendary names such as the captain – and future coach of the national team – April Heinrichs, Mia Hamm, Julie Foudy, Kristine Lilly and Carla Werden. In an even more particular detail: that World Cup took place in November, while the United States was playing the final stages of the NCAA season, which means that the aforementioned streak of victories remained so despite not being able to count on their coach and almost the entire starting eleven in the crucial phase of the season.
The story of how Anson Dorrance got into football is extremely particular. The son of an extremely wealthy family, Albert Anson Dorrance IV was born in Bombay, India, in 1951, because his father worked in the city as an oil entrepreneur. His father’s career would lead him to grow up around Europe and Africa, in the most varied contexts. In Addis Ababa he would meet his future wife, in Kenya he would become passionate about football and in Switzerland, more precisely in the team of the Villa St. Jean college in Fribourg, he would kick the ball in an organized way, before finally moving permanently to his parents’ country, first for the St. Mary’s Rattlers, representatives of the homonymous university in San Antonio, Texas, and then arriving in Chapel Hill, a place he would call home and never abandon, unlike a youth spent traveling around the world, for over fifty years.
In fact, in his early years at North Carolina, when he was building the women’s soccer program, Dorrance asked the NCAA to organize a championship, but it refused. As a result, he and Colorado coach Chris Lidstone approached the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women, which organized the first women’s college championships. The team founded by Dorrance would also win the last edition of that tournament, in 1981, in what was effectively the beginning of a positive streak that would then continue, and become such, with the landing in the NCAA.
Many years before the 2021 lawsuits that led to a revolution in US women’s soccer, Anson Dorrance had already been the subject of a lawsuit filed against him by one of his players, a lawsuit for which, despite obtaining some favorable rulings in court, he ended up settling a settlement with the victim. The lawsuit, filed by former Tar Heel Melissa Jennings in 1998, alleged that Dorrance had made sexually explicit jokes to her, classifiable as harassment, asking the athletes about their sexual relationships. In 2008, Dorrance allegedly paid Jennings three hundred and eighty-five thousand dollars in damages, plus a letter of apology, resolving the matter without a judge’s decision.
The University of North Carolina, after this lawsuit, hired a law professor to build a more tolerant and less toxic work environment, but Dorrance, perhaps because there had not come, as it would more than a decade later, a moment of collective review of the standards of behavior of the entire movement, or perhaps because even compared to today’s standards the violation was less serious than those for which other colleagues have been fired, managed to keep his job, but certainly with a large stain that would never be removed from his image, beyond his continued successes, at the very least fragmenting his legacy as a decisive figure in the growth of the American women’s movement.