Aspire in the World Fellows Book - 2022

75 74 Star Chat You’re the second person in history to win two consecutive World Cups, it also happened with Italy and Vittorio Pozzo in 1934 and 1938. It’s an incredible achievement. That’s just a pinnacle of an extraordinary coaching career over 30 years, it’s almost like you have an inbuilt mechanism to win. Is that something that you were able to learn or was it within you because your winning record is just extraordinary? First of all, it’s lovely to be here, I’m delighted to be a guest, this is incredible! I always say when you bring people together you get smarter, surround yourself with smart people and you’ll get better, so I’m grateful to be here. I could probably stem it all the way back to childhood. I have an older brother and we fought like cat and dog, and I was always trying to best him. Having an older brother, my father was in a military, I think I just grew up in a household where competing was part of my daily routine, whether it was for attention or whether it was to win something. When I grew up, I realized that it’s probably less about competing and more about trying to be better every day in whatever I do. Sometimes even failure helps me grow and be better, so I like to say my Mantra is “live one day better” and I think if you constantly are happy or status quo you are not evolving as a person and as a coach. One of things that I used to say is if I was the same leader today that I was a year ago, then I’m failing. I think that needs to be transferred to when you’re building a team. When you have success, you want to figure out how can I be better, how can I continue to push the needle. I think I attribute a lot of that to having a big brother that just tried to push me around quite a bit and I had to fight. My father was away a lot, so I had to fight a lot in my house for attention and to be seen and to be heard and it was just this constant desire to evolve. 87.5% is your winning ratio as a national team coach which is incredible, but people don’t see the downsides. You won the FIFA Women’s World Cup in 2015 but then you went to the Olympics in 2016 and got knocked out in the quarter finals. How important was that for you to build and to move on and get even more success? When you’re a coach, it’s always about the game ahead of you and when we won in 2015, the message to my players was ‘’Congratulations guys, you’re on a summit,” but the reality is a summit is small and the air is thin for a reason. You don’t climb to the summit and sit there and enjoy the view. Nobody goes up Mount Everest for two weeks and hangs out there. It’s about getting up, enjoying briefly and then you climb again. What happened in 2016 was the catalyst for success in 2019, because what it forced me to do was to recalibrate failure. I have a young daughter and I said failure is two things. Failure provides you feedback, and it provides you opportunity; you get instant feedback and then it’s about how can I take that, apply it and be better. So, coming out of 2016 was to say that I don’t want to build a team for next year, but I want to build a team that’s going to go out and win in 2019. What that is going to look like, what do we need and ultimately, I felt that we needed to diversify the profiles of the players we had. The reality is in 2016 we were very good in the quarterfinals against Sweden, but they sat in a very low block which limited our space, we are very athletic and suddenly I realized that we can’t just go harder or faster. We had to go smarter, and we need different profiles of players that can play between lines, and that can problem solve low blocks against very good teams. Coming out of 2016 my journey was to identify players that I think could help us solve the game in 2019 and it was hard. We came out of that period, and we were experimenting and Jill Ellis