Jill Ellis never thought of herself as a role model. Through years of coaching university soccer teams to Pac-10 Conference titles and Big Ten Tournament berths, it didn’t occur to her that she was inspiring anyone other than players until she became the U.S. Women’s National Team’s head coach.
“I started having younger coaches come up and tell me, ‘It’s been great to see a female coach reach the National Team level. I just want to do what you’re doing,’” says Ellis. “Now I’m very aware of the responsibility this position has to others. I see how important it is for people who aspire to a career in coaching to have someone who represents what they want to do professionally.”
In a career that spans four decades, Ellis has seen both evolution and regression as the world’s most popular sport is slowly being transformed from within. Having coached club and college teams as well as Youth National Team squads for U.S. Soccer, she has a unique perspective on the changing landscape of the women’s game and what it takes for individual players, teams and the game itself to thrive.
Growing up in England, she was surrounded by soccer. Her father, John Ellis, was an ambassador for the sport. He helped to create programs worldwide and she credits him with instilling a passion for the road less traveled. “He always saw life as an adventure,” she says. “The guy’s an eternal optimist. His innate confidence inspired me to do things that were riskier. Looking back over the course of my life now, I’ve made decisions that were the least comfortable and my father’s influence was fairly strong.”
From the beginning, soccer was her game. “I just loved it,” she says. “I loved watching it and loved playing it.” But opportunities to do so in the U.K. were limited to backyard scrimmages with her brothers or schoolyard pickup games with boys. It wasn’t until the family moved to the U.S. that she was able to join an official girls’ team. “I remember the first time I got a jersey for a team I played with in the States,” she recalls. “I thought it was the coolest thing. I don’t think I would have had that opportunity until a lot later in England, and I probably wouldn’t have pursued a career.”
Another formative moment: seeing April Heinrich as an assistant coach at the College of William and Mary. Heinrich went on to become the head coach at a time when 99% of the industry was male. She eventually hired Ellis for her first professional job as an assistant at the University of Maryland. “At that point, I didn’t even think it was viable,” she admits. “Seeing her pursue a career in coaching was an influence on me. I was fortunate to have a role model blazing the trail.”
Along the way, she’s discovered what distinguishes top players from those who have all the right ingredients but never make it to elite levels. When she took over the U.S. Under-21 team in 2000, Ellis felt it was important for younger players to be connected with veterans and asked her senior players to share what qualities had helped them get to where they were. To her surprise, all of their answers came down to one thing: confidence and self-belief.
“It made me pause,” she explains. “There are a lot of players who are incredibly technically proficient, are great athletes or have a really good understanding of the game. But they have to have that ‘X factor’, which I think is self-belief. If you’re into this, you have to know that there are going to be roadblocks, so you need the persistence to work through them coupled with the confidence that you can do it.”
Ellis came to believe that having a support mechanism in place is also critical, for both players and coaches. “It’s a hard journey to go alone. A lot of these athletes would not be where they are if they didn’t have some support around them.”
Unlike former USWNT head coach Tony DiCicco, Ellis has never coached men so she can’t compare it to coaching women. But she does have a perspective on one of his well-known quotes. In Catch Them Being Good: Everything You Need to Know to Successfully Coach Girls, DiCicco famously explained the difference between how male and female athletes would respond to a coaching statement like, “I’m concerned with your fitness.”
Boys would tend to externalize the comment, assuming it referred to other team members, DiCicco asserted, but girls would internalize it and believe it applied to them. “My experience is in dealing with elite athletes,” says Ellis. “I can’t speak to coaching men, but what I do know about women is that they are incredibly introspective. For female athletes, introspection and the push to be better the next time around is a very common theme.”
Part of that has to do with constantly having to prove themselves, Ellis contends, particularly in the arena of professional sports. While male athletes have clearly arrived as a staple of mainstream society, women are still pushing for acceptance. That struggle tends to keep female athletes more grounded and humbler, something the men’s game could learn from. “It’s good to have a reminder of the process and the journey it took to get to that point of being a major part of the culture,” she maintains.
Moving forward, Ellis sees several keys to achieving equity on the field and off, starting with more representation in administrative positions of the sport’s governing bodies. “We’ve got to have females, not in token positions or minor positions, but in major ones,” she says. “We need advocates for our sport who are pushing for its advancement.”
Quality media coverage is another critical factor. Particularly when calling women’s games, sportscasters have historically tended to focus on backstories rather than substance. Ellis praises Fox Sports commentator and former USWNT player Aly Wagner for her no-frills coverage. “She’s excellent at commenting on the strategies, tactics and athletic performances. It’s not about the backstory, it’s what’s happening then and there,” she says. “As much as everyone is so connected to social media and the internet, I think there’s a real responsibility on broadcasters and advertisers to portray our athletes and our sport as a sport, not as women playing a sport.”
Changing that perception requires broadcasters investing the same resources they do in men’s sports. Prior to the 2015 World Cup, representatives from Fox Sports announced their intent to spend more money on the event than they had on the Super Bowl. The tournament became the most-watched women’s sporting event in history with 753 million viewers tuning in for at least some portion of it.
“It’s no surprise that their ratings were the highest they’ve ever been because they were willing to take that risk and create that precedent, and it paid off,” says Ellis. “You’ve got to have people who have that vision to see, with more than 50% of the population, how powerful women can be in sport.”
Increasingly, the traditionally male international soccer audience is catching on. The 2017 UEFA Women’s Championship broke all previous viewing and attendance records and global audiences are gearing up for France. “I think it’s just reflective of where our sport has come,” says Ellis. “The level of quality of players and coaching staff and resources now is different than it was even five years ago. I would love to see that continue, and for soccer to become the showcase for women’s sports around the world. It’s such an amazing game.”