The 22-Time National Champion Coach Who Always Kept Score

The seeds of one of the most successful coaching careers in college sports history weren’t planted on the fields of the Atlantic Coast Conference or in the locker room of the soccer stadium that would eventually bear his name.

Anson Dorrance’s training really began in a public park in Chapel Hill, N.C., when he coached in Rainbow Soccer, a co-ed rec league founded by a “hippy idealist” pal who didn’t believe in keeping score.

“An abysmally low level of the game,” Dorrance said. “It was pretty much, ‘If your check doesn’t bounce, you’re on the team.’”

Dorrance would go on to lead the University of North Carolina women’s soccer program to 22 national championships — nine consecutive beginning in 1986 — while coaching many of the biggest stars the sport has ever seen.

But nearly five decades later, he still credits Rainbow Soccer for giving him a critical foundation for how to motivate, how to discipline and, ultimately, how to coach.

“This was a laboratory of the human spirit, the study of human beings, the huge extraordinary variety in the human race. It shocked me how hard it was to convince someone of the right way to play,” he said

Best of 7 spoke to Dorrance about being early to take a data-driven approach to player evaluations, the importance of persistent feedback, and what he looked for in recruits beyond simply talent.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Best of 7: Coach, why is gaining experience — even at an extremely low level like Rainbow Soccer — so important when you’re young?

As my kids finish up at UNC and head off with the ambition to play professionally, the mistake almost every one of them makes is they all want to jump into the best team in the best league. What they don’t understand is that’s not that important immediately. What’s important is you get on the field. Obviously, the higher level, the better, but I’d rather have the guarantee you can get on the field.

All of these environments will try to convince you you’ll get very, very good if you’re just in our training — that will take you to the next level. It’s not that that doesn’t contribute to your evolution as a player, but the most important thing is to develop a body of work.

Some of the kids won’t jump on the field as starters in their first year in the pro league. It’s a bigger jump than they think. They think with hard work and commitment, they’re going to end up on the field. No, sometimes the barrier is the talent level, and they can’t eclipse the fact they’re not that fast, and they don’t like to head, and tackling isn’t a part of their personality, and they don’t take physical risks.

My recommendation for every girl who graduates who has pro ambitions is to make sure the team she’s signing for isn’t the team that has the most prestige but the team where she can get on the field and play.

Can you tell me a little about the “competitive cauldron” and what it did for your program?

We all coach through our own personalities. When we enter the profession at whatever level, we want it to reflect whatever we value. I wanted to design a program that I would like to play in.

I loved everything (Hall-of-Fame UNC Basketball Coach Dean Smith) was doing. I just liked the fact that everything was a competition. We eventually organized 28 different competitions. You’d have a fitness score in five different categories. I would know who was the fittest person, who was the fastest, who had the best acceleration, who had the best vertical jump, who was the most agile. We’d do technical testing, dribbling mazes, heading balls over distance, driving a ball with power using both feet. We would do these three times per year.

We would have all of this data on everything, and almost every practice, there would be some type of competition. What’s extraordinary is this idea I stole from a great man (Coach Smith). Why don’t we try to test everything? Why don’t we try to evaluate everything? Why don’t we try to make every practice competitive and have winners and losers?

You were far ahead of most in utilizing analytics. Why did you feel the need to have so much data on your own players?

One thing that I think is very overlooked by coaches is you have to get everyone’s personal narrative to the truth as fast as possible. But a part of getting everyone’s personal narrative to the truth is to get them a personal narrative. They’re so packed with B.S., they have extraordinary delusions of grandeur. Why? Because they’ve never had to go through the gauntlet of data analytics I will drag them through, to look at these numbers and go, “Oh my gosh.”

Average players want to be left alone, good players want to be coached, great players want the truth. If you’re a great player, you want to know exactly where you stand in everything. If you’ve always considered yourself a fast player and you come into the University of North Carolina and look at the first posting of your speed ladder, and on a 30-player roster you’re 12th, you sort of get a comeuppance. Data by itself has no value. It’s what you do with it that has incredible value.

You can’t improve what you can’t measure. What the data does is it tells you who you are. You get to decide where you want to be. My job is to coach you in the process.

It sounds like routine feedback was such a key part of your culture. Why is it so important for coaches, and leaders in general, to constantly evaluate?

If you want someone to evolve, you have to give them feedback as often as possible. We had seven or eight analytics people who attended every practice. Their responsibility is to turn the practice into data. That night, they have the results of that day’s practice. If we have a 1 v 1 tournament, then a 12-man exercise, then a 7 v 7 tournament.

That night, every kid gets ranked in all five of these different competitions and an overall ranking of that day’s practice based on the value of each session. What’s critical isn’t just creating competition for the players where you’re training their psychological dimension, but you’re also giving them immediate feedback. If they have a disastrous practice, they look at it that night, and now they get to decide how they’re going to be the next day. If you’re not a competitive athlete, don’t have any self-belief at all, you’re going to roll over, go to sleep and not worry about it. But if you’re competitive, you’re not going to let that happen again. You’re going to fight to get higher by the next day. The feedback loop is critical.

Then, they’d get these player-conference letters three times a year. We type it all out, give them their data in all these categories. They have so much information. Then, we talk about their three superpowers. We want everyone to leave these player conferences with the idea that I believe in what they can do.

Great players want the truth. I want to give these players the truth as fast as possible. Once you get the truth, you can decide to change your place in the world. But if everyone is just feeding you garbage about who you are, you’re not in a position to make any positive changes.

You mentioned self-belief before. Did you ever coach a very talented player who lacked self-belief?

In the player conferences, when a kid is evaluating herself in the 12 different categories, a 5 means she’s a national team or Olympic-caliber player, 4.5 is she thinks she’s a professional-level player in this category, 4 means she thinks she’s a starter at UNC, 3.5 means she think she’ll play in every half, 3 means she think she’ll make the travel team…

Constructing self-belief is one of the hardest things to do, which is why in the 12 different categories we’d discuss with these kids, I would never interfere with a kid who tells me her self-belief is 5. If a kid believes she can play on the national team, even if in my opinion there’s no friggin’ way, I’m not going to debate her on it. It’s extraordinary what you can achieve with confidence, and the hardest thing to construct is confidence. The hardest thing to construct is self-belief.

What’s really interesting is one of the nicest text messages I’ve ever gotten in my life was from a kid… named Avery Patterson. She got into the U.S. full National Team, and the note she sent me was something to the effect of, “I just want you to know how much this means to me. I’m going in seeing if I can make it. You’ve been manifesting this for me for the entire relationship with you.” I liked the phrase she used. “Manifesting.” Was I manifesting it for her? Well, in a way. But in a way, she was manifesting it for herself.

Whenever we’d have conversations about the 12 different categories, we would have an average of the 12, and she wanted to be as close to a 5 as possible by the time she graduated. Every single year, she kept climbing. By the time she went pro, she was over a 4.5 on average. What I kept telling her was what she also had to do before she graduated was tell me she was over a 4.5 in self-belief, because earlier in her career, she didn’t say that she was. I told her that had to be a piece of why she was going to make the full national team.

It's the old cliché. “If you think you can and you think you can’t, you’re right.” You are trying to manifest to them that all 12 of these categories make a difference, especially the one I’m not going to monitor.

Really interesting thoughts there, Coach. What were the 12 categories?

1. Self-discipline: That’s basically the beep test.

2. Competitive fire: The competitive cauldron.

3. Self-belief: This is the one I don’t interfere with. The last thing you ever want to do is undermine someone’s self-belief.

4. Love of the ball: We evaluate that through technical testing.

5. Love of playing the game: There are the soccer junkies — always trying to play pick up.

6. Love of watching the game: We call that an EPL (English Premier League) test. If they’re an Arsenal fan, tell me the Arsenal starting lineup. I can determine quickly whether they watched the game. The most tactically-sophisticated players watch.

7. Athleticism: Beep test, meters per second, acceleration, vertical jump, agility.

8. Grit test: We used Angela Duckworth’s 12-question “Grit” test. The kids had to take that every year.

9. Energizing: That’s a peer vote. When you come to practice, are you full of joy, energy, positive vibrations? Do you work your rear end off?

10. Connection: This is also a peer vote. Do you love your teammates and do they love you?

11. Coachability: This is the one area where it’s not a conversation. I’m going to tell them what I think their coachability is based on whether or not they’re living on a never-ending ascension. If they improve every year in everything, then they’re coachable. If they’re not improving, they’re not coachable.

12. Process: It’s everything slapped together and how they fill out the “Champion’s Almanac,” which is the book we send every kid just before exams end in May. Your process is the ultimate evaluation of whether or not you’re going to improve every year.

I know you were on some hiring committees at UNC for different coaches. What were you looking for in those interviews?

(Athletic Director) Bubba Cunningham asked me to serve on a committee to hire our new field hockey coach. One of the candidates was Erin Matson, the Michael Jordan-Mia Hamm of field hockey. She won four national championships as a player.

I asked her, “What are you going to do in a typical practice?” So much of what she talked about was mastering this field hockey thing called a “pull.” I don’t really know what a pull is, but if you want to be incredible at field hockey, apparently you have to be able to do pulls in your sleep. Clearly, this is a young lady who was a master at this who also understood how many endless hours she had spent developing it. As I was chatting with all of these different field hockey coaches, the one who spent the most time in the process to become extraordinary was this player who was extraordinary.

We had some wonderful candidates who came in. These women were absolutely brilliant, and there was a brilliant male coach we looked at. But the thing I loved about the way Erin answered the most critical question made the most difference for me. I knew in all of her practices, every one of her players was going to be trained in fundamentals.

She gave me so much detail on what she was going to do in practice that all involved ball mastery, I had no problem recommending her to Bubba Cunningham. If you want to become a great coach, you have to be a master of coaching process to your players. For me, the most important thing is process. Erin Matson convinced me she was going to be a master of the process.

Extra time (Bonus Question):

What’s one piece of advice you’d give a young Anson Dorrance?

I wouldn’t tell him a thing. I want him to fall on his face as often as he did. I don’t want to make it any easier on him. I want him to slowly starve to death in his earlier marriage because no one would pay him any money to do anything. I want him to struggle.

I really love where I am, and the only reason I am where I am is built with failure and struggle. I’m not going to make anything easier for him.

What I learned…

Lots of coaches lament “delusional players” whose views of their own skillsets don’t match their actual abilities. So, it was intriguing to me that Coach Dorrance said he never wanted to interfere with a player’s confidence, even if her self-belief wasn’t rooted in reality.

“If they want to believe they’re God’s gift, they can believe that,” he said. “It will actually help them become better.”

What struck me was how Coach Dorrance seemed to recognize the significance of self-confidence, while simultaneously emphasizing that he wanted to get players’ “personal narratives’ to the truth” as quickly as possible, largely through the competitive cauldron.

It reminded me that true self-belief is rarely linear, and you don’t cultivate it merely through words. It often begins with a slightly-skewed opinion of our own abilities, a humbling and epiphany of sorts that can bring us to a low point, then tireless, methodical work leading to specific improvement. Ideally, this ultimately creates an undeniable body of proof that we’re actually capable of achieving what’s in front of us.

“Trust the process” is a popular cliche, but what seemed to separate Coach Dorrance from so many was just how specific and measurable his actually was.

“You can’t improve what you can’t measure,” he said.