As soon as Becky Sauerbrunn became captain of the U.S. women’s national team, she began preparing the squad to one day be without her.
It wasn’t that she felt retirement was imminent when she landed the captaincy in January 2021. (Hardly.) But she had been around long enough to know the value of planning ahead. Sauerbrunn was first called up to the national team in ’08. The center back had played through coaching changes and strategy shifts. She had been on the fringes of the roster and on the pitch for every minute of a triumphant World Cup. And she knew how important it was for the team to have more than one pillar of leadership.
Coach Vlatko Andonovski had asked Sauerbrunn to hold the captaincy on her own—no regular co-captain. She was honored. But she was also committed to bringing other people into the fold. Sauerbrunn wanted everyone on the roster to feel empowered, an environment where the youngest players were comfortable speaking up and those slightly older were ready for their own budding leadership roles. Sauerbrunn hoped the team would not depend too heavily on her and her fellow veterans. “We need to pass this torch on,” she says. “And we need to do it in a way that’s as smooth and seamless as possible.” Eventually, Sauerbrunn knew, they would not be on the roster, and she wanted a foundation for success after her generation was gone.
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Even with all that planning, however, Sauerbrunn never imagined the team would be without her as soon as July 2023.
The news that a foot injury would sideline her this summer was shattering. Weeks before the World Cup, preparing to vie for an unprecedented third straight title, the team learned it would be missing its captain.
The injury was devastating for 38-year-old Sauerbrunn. “Heartbroken isn’t even the half of it,” she wrote in a statement. But it was nearly as difficult for her team. Sauerbrunn’s absence meant the loss of a calm, cerebral presence on the back line, an essential piece of the defense. It also threatened to destabilize the leadership model. Sauerbrunn had guided the team through a series of difficult moments in her two and a half years as captain. She was its voice through challenges as varied as a dicey losing streak, injuries to multiple key contributors, reports of abuse in the National Women’s Soccer League and the settlement of the equal-pay lawsuit players filed against U.S. Soccer. The players embraced her as Captain America.
Now, as they are set to kick off their quest for a three-peat Friday against Vietnam, they face a World Cup without her.
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Sauerbrunn is perhaps as irreplaceable as any individual player can be. “Becky will always be our captain,” Andonovski said at a press conference. “That’s how everybody feels.” Yet she’d worked diligently to ensure the team could function without her. She didn’t think it would happen quite like this. But since becoming captain—guided by past trials and disappointments of her own—Sauerbrunn tried to fortify the team for a moment like this one.
She was tasked from the start with leading the team through a time of transition. With injuries, tweaks and other recent movements, that’s become even more striking: 14 of the 23 names on this roster are at their first World Cup. (Two of the nine returning players, Alex Morgan and Lindsay Horan, will share the captaincy in Sauerbrunn’s place.) It’s a level of turnover that asks for strong leadership. But for Sauerbrunn, leading in transition always meant developing power throughout the squad, rather than consolidating it for herself. And that laid the groundwork for the team to navigate this summer without her.
“What’s great about the national team is that there are so many leaders, and they’re all very different in how they lead,” Sauerbrunn says. “And hopefully, I’ve empowered others to feel like their leadership styles are very valued and needed.”
This was not Sauerbrunn’s first run as captain of the USWNT. It was her second. And the first—in which she co-captained the squad alongside Carli Lloyd from 2016 to ’18—was disastrous. In her own estimation, it was “a failure,” she says.
But she learned from it. And that gave her the experience to nail the job the second time around.
Sauerbrunn had never thought of herself as a natural leader. She’d long been considered a model teammate, generous and thoughtful, always a good listener. (“Such a quality teammate, player, person from the first time I ever met her,” says Kelley O’Hara, now at her fourth World Cup with the USWNT.) But Sauerbrunn wasn’t naturally vocal or outgoing. In some ways, her character reflected her role on the field, a dependable, brainy defender who stayed out of the spotlight. The most oft-recited statistic about Sauerbrunn is that she holds the record for most national team appearances without a goal. If it seems reductive to project that onto her personality—well, it might be, if it didn’t fit so well.
She knew that a formal leadership role would be a challenge when she became co-captain in 2016. “I felt that I could grow into it,” Sauerbrunn says. But she was stung by just how difficult that process was.
She was struck by the fact that it seemed as if she had to become an entirely different person to be a leader. “When I first got named captain, I felt like I needed to be that extrovert on a team of extroverts … the one who stands up, gives the speeches, does all the rah-rah,” Sauerbrunn says. “That just isn’t me.” But it was more than all the speeches. As co-captain, Sauerbrunn was tasked with being a conduit between players and staff, and she soon found herself trying to be everything to everyone. She felt less connected to her team rather than more. The experience was overwhelming.
“I was feeling very alone in the job,” she says. “I got spread a little bit too thin—trying to do maybe a little too much—without asking for help when I needed help. It was just a really lonesome time.”
After months of quiet struggle, in 2017, a friend proposed someone who might be able to help. They set up a dinner with former USWNT captain Carla Overbeck, who led the squad at the pivotal 1999 World Cup and who, like Sauerbrunn, built her reputation as a conscientious workhorse of a defender. She had been Sauerbrunn’s first role model as a player. (“My childhood idol,” she says. “I mean, not even childhood, my idol.”) But their mutual friend suspected Overbeck could be a role model for her as a leader, too.
They met at an Italian restaurant in Durham, N.C., where Overbeck is an assistant coach at Duke, not far from where Sauerbrunn, who plays for the Portland Thorns, was in town for an NWSL game against the Carolina Courage.
There, Overbeck told her: You cannot do this by yourself.
Overbeck would never describe her own captaincy as easy. “But it’s much easier when you’re not alone in your leadership,” she says. She told Sauerbrunn that she needed to feel comfortable opening up to teammates, to find people in whom she could confide, to trust herself more. She did not have to fill every need for every player. She had to lean into her strengths and understand she had been chosen for a reason. That “changed the game for me,” Sauerbrunn says.
She left dinner feeling more secure in herself and her ability to lead the team.
And Overbeck left feeling sure that Sauerbrunn was the right woman for the job.
“I remember just driving home thinking, She gets it,” Overbeck says. “She was in it for the right reasons, and her concerns were valid, but she was really invested in the team and wanting to be a good leader.”
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Sauerbrunn began to open up more. (A key confidant was Megan Rapinoe: “She’s such a great leader in her own right, but we’re so different as people,” Sauerbrunn says of the outspoken forward. “We complement each other.”) She began to feel steadier in the role. But her early struggles still hounded her. In 2018, then-coach Jill Ellis announced she was reassigning the co-captaincy, and Lloyd would share the role with Rapinoe and Morgan, not Sauerbrunn.
The news was demoralizing.
Yet Sauerbrunn couldn’t exactly shrink away. She was still a critical part of the team. And so she rededicated herself to serving however possible. Typically a fiction reader—Sauerbrunn loves fantasy—she picked up Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain. She began to consider how what she had come to see as deficits might actually be strengths.
If Sauerbrunn wanted to be at her best—if she wanted to make her team as strong as it could possibly be—she had to believe in herself more. She came to realize her teammates had always valued her voice. That wasn’t in spite of the fact that she used it so judiciously. It was because of it. And that had been true from the beginning.
Sauerbrunn emerged from this period more self-assured. She hadn’t expected that when she lost the captaincy. But the experience had been clarifying. She no longer felt the pressure to be a conventionally outgoing leader. Instead, she’d learned to be comfortable simply being who she was.
“She evolved, but she also stayed so true to herself,” O’Hara says. “Regardless of being given the armband or not, Becky’s always been a leader in my mind. I’ve always looked up to her… I trust her. She’s somebody that embodies all the characteristics you want in a captain.”
Which eventually led to Andonovski—who replaced Ellis in October 2019—calling Sauerbrunn into his office at a team camp in January ’21. He’d previously coached her in the NWSL and he’d seen her growth as a person and leader. He knew he wanted to give her another chance at being captain. But he wasn’t sure she’d want to take it.
“He knew how hard it was for me,” Sauerbrunn says. “Having that and then having it taken away and kind of working through that process… I really learned from that.”
She hadn’t known if the armband would ever come back to her. And while Sauerbrunn was initially surprised by Andonovski’s offer—“I wasn’t even sure why he was bringing me in for a conversation,” she says—she knew her answer as soon as she heard the question.
Sauerbrunn wanted another shot. And she had far more perspective now on how to shape the team and its culture.
That began with Sauerbrunn and her fellow veterans embarking on what she calls a “cultural revamp.”
A new wave of talent was here. Lloyd would retire after the Olympics in 2021. Sauerbrunn, Rapinoe, Morgan and O’Hara formed the core of a small veteran group who had to start yielding to a new generation. Change was coming. And Sauerbrunn wanted to make sure the team was not overwhelmed by it.
It was an entirely different approach than she had in her first captaincy.
“Because of the failures that I had that first go, I realized that I would need other people,” Sauerbrunn says. “And so my mind shift was—let’s get the best out of everybody’s leadership. Let’s start creating leaders. It’s a lot more collaborative.”
That began with how they welcomed new players. Acclimating to the USWNT can be difficult. The demands are markedly different than what players face in college or the NWSL, and if it can be hard to adjust on the pitch, it can be harder to adjust off it. The team has long been a force in cultural and political conversations: “It’s an environment that can be very much on a razor’s edge,” Sauerbrunn says. “And I think what makes our national team so great is that we’re always riding that knife’s blade, but if we fall off the side of it, we do get cut.” It can be a lot to handle for players who aren’t old enough to rent a car.
“She made the environment feel really welcoming,” says 23-year-old defender Naomi Girma, who’d long idolized Sauerbrunn. “It was this crazy moment, and then you realize how down to earth she is.”
It wasn’t just that Sauerbrunn came up to introduce herself when Girma was called into her first camp. It was that she showed her where to sign up for physical treatments, gave her book recommendations when she mentioned she liked fiction, told her she could ask about anything, soccer-related or not—“all these things, no limits, laying it out for you,” Girma says. That’s always been Sauerbrunn’s style. But it became a team principle. Sauerbrunn wanted every player comfortable, regardless of her spot on the roster, both because it raised the bar for the whole group and simply because it was the right thing to do.
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“It’s really hard to get on the national team, and it’s exceedingly hard to stay on the national team,” Sauerbrunn says. “Why would we make it any bit more stressful by being assholes and not being welcoming?”
The next part of the shift was encouraging more experienced players to take on bigger roles. Sauerbrunn and the other veterans were open with teammates like 28-year-old Rose Lavelle and 29-year-old Horan: This is what we do behind the scenes that you might not see. Here’s how we check in with players and staff. You should try leading the conversation for this game debrief. Sauerbrunn, more than anyone, understood that not everyone took naturally to this. But that was precisely why she wanted these players to practice those skills while the veterans were still around to help.
“Don’t feel like you’re stepping on our toes,” Sauerbrunn describes her message to that middle generation. “We’re backing up so that you guys can step into the light a little bit more. We’re very, very conscious about that effort. … It’s going to be their team soon. They’ve got to own it.”
Sauerbrunn thought this approach could guide the team through this period of transition. But there was something else, too. She hoped it ensured no future leader would feel as lost and isolated as she once did.
“I think a catalyst for her wanting to be really intentional about a culture revamp—if you want to call it that, empowering some of the younger players who now truly are veterans on this team, who need to be stepping into leadership roles—is because maybe she didn’t feel that way when she had the responsibility put on her to be captain,” O’Hara says. “She kind of had to do it on the fly and learn and didn’t really have as much of that intentional preparation and inclusion. … She’s such a selfless leader.”
Of course, Sauerbrunn hoped all this groundwork for a team without her would come into play further down the line. Not for the 2023 World Cup.
“But that’s sports for you,” she wrote in her statement about her injury, “and that’s life, really.”
She’d originally sustained the foot injury in club play in April, and even with dedicated rest and rehab, it became clear she wouldn’t be at full strength by July.
Andonovski announced the players to replace her as captain would be Morgan, one of the veterans who has done this before, and Horan, one of the budding leaders encouraged by Sauerbrunn. That the honor went to a pair of players in different situations was, in a sense, a reflection of the leadership-by-committee environment cultivated by Sauerbrunn.
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But she’ll also have to be replaced on the back line. Sauerbrunn is renowned for her ability to read an offense and anticipate the action. It’s one of her favorite aspects of her position. “What’s great about being a center back is that everything’s happening in front of you,” she says. “I can see the formation, I can see areas of space that are dangerous… I see everything, so I can start moving things around, like puzzle pieces.” She has a philosophy that every goal can be prevented—sometimes on the shot, sometimes on the assist, sometimes an action or three or five before, but every goal all the same. Her knowledge of the game makes that feel true. It’s a tremendous amount of wisdom and composure to replace.
Now, it seems, that role will generally belong to Girma. Much like Sauerbrunn, she’s been lauded for her vision and poise from a young age. After giving her idol all her questions and taking her book recommendations and soaking up what she can, Girma will try to fill her shoes.
“Oh,” says Girma, and the young professional briefly sounds like the awestruck Sauerbrunn fan she was not so long ago. “I feel like getting compared to Becky in anything is the highest compliment. … I just think she’s a top person. That’s a massive honor.”
Perhaps the biggest lesson for Sauerbrunn as a leader was that she could not do it on her own: She needed everyone around her. There was no glory in expecting herself to be everything as just one person. Now, she hopes her teammates will take a version of the same lesson. She wants them to know they can do this without her.
“Please, take a minute to enjoy the moment,” she wrote in her statement about her injury, “to appreciate everything that brought you here—every second of hard work and every bit of good luck—and then get back to work and go win the whole f---ing thing!”
