Emma Hayes: The Stateside Story
Emma Hayes: The Stateside Story
Beginning in 2001, soon-to-be USWNT head coach Emma Hayes set out to start her coaching career across the pond, remaining there until joining Chelsea in 2012. Those who knew her best offer an insight.
After what will be 12 years in charge come next summer, Emma Hayes is leaving Chelsea after an unprecedented decade of personal and team success, for arguably the number one job in the world, but also one of the most daunting, head coach of the USA.
For Hayes to walk away from all she’s known since replacing Matt Beard in 2012, it was going to have be something special, and the lure of trying to take the USWNT back to the top after a shock second-round exit at the summer’s World Cup appears to have done the trick.
It will be no easy task. When Hayes finishes with Chelsea in May, she will have just two months before trying to lead her new side to Olympic gold in Paris next summer, but it’s no doubt a challenge Hayes will hit head on.
But this is about more than just a new challenge, Hayes has a genuine affinity with football in the USA, as was evident in the press release from US Soccer on Wednesday which confirmed the new worst kept secret in the sport.
“The feelings and connection I have for this team and for this country run deep,” were Hayes’s words.
Because when Hayes was just 24 and her playing career had been all too prematurely ended by a freak injury on a ski trip while part of Arsenal’s academy at just 17 years old, the London-born wannabee coach packed her bags and headed across the pond to the country leading the way in the women’s game, with England at that time still lagging far behind.
The details of her time in the USA are scarce given the lack of coverage of the game at the time and Hayes’ largely unknown name in either country at the time, but those who worked with her tell a story of a truly dedicated coach who was determined to reach the top.
This is the story of the decade-long association Hayes found with a country which wasn’t hers, but from next year will become exactly that, for the second time.
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“Well, you found them!” laughs Julie Susskind, when I say I’d be searching for one of the first coaches to work with Hayes in the USA.
Known as Julie Gick back then, she formed a trio with Hayes and Diane St. John at the Long Island Lady Riders in the state of New York which would be home for Hayes until she returned to England with Arsenal.
Partaking in the USL W-League in 2002, Hayes would lead the team to a successful season and still in her early twenties, and in her first coaching role, she would be named W-League Coach of the Year, and even two decades on leaves a lasting impression.
“I don’t really feel like I’m qualified to have this conversation,” says Susskind. “I was 22, I think she was 24? I don’t even remember how I got involved, why and how did I get involved?! That was her first coaching position in the USA, we kind of came in and I just followed her lead – what a tremendous person, even at that point.
“She was always confident, consistently confident, always had a plan. She just knew what she wanted and demanded that from day one, that’s what I remember. I had just come out of college and what an experience for me to watch her coach. We were babies, relatively. Kim Wyant took over and brought Emma in. It’s hard to remember the details 20 years on, but I was somewhere along the line asked if I wanted to coach with her. I learned just a tremendous amount of tactical and technical information, how to work every facet of a team. I was coaching high school soccer too and I took everything she taught me into that.”
“I just remember people responding to that. She came in and said ‘it’s not going to be all over the place’, she wanted to make us competitive…”
Both in their first years of senior coaching, Susskind admits there was a certain amount of trial and error which went into their first year of coaching together, but got results, with an 11-3-0 record across the 2002 season.
“It was raw. It was ‘I’m going to try this and if it doesn’t work ‘fuck it’, we’ll try something else’. We were so young, we were finding our way, a lot of the players on our team were older than us. Nobody knew Emma, she’d arrived from England, they didn’t have a clue.”
Susskind says before Hayes came in the Lady Riders “was a bit all over the place”, but the arrival of the Englishwoman changed all that, and she prioritised moving things forward off the pitch as much as she did on it, demanding a change in approach from her players in a country which at the time was world champion.
“She was demanding, she wanted specific things done and done the right way,” she recalls. “I just remember people responding to that. She came in and said ‘it’s not going to be all over the place’, she wanted to make us competitive. It wasn’t for fun anymore, we would be competitive, and that changed everything about that team. It changed the players’ views, it changed everyone’s views.
“I could tell you that 98% of the conversations we would have were football. She was so dedicated, it’s all we talked about, that was the relationship. It was ‘where do we go next? How do we make it better?’
“We spent a lot of time together, she was living out in Bayside, I was in Long Island and I’d drive out and we’d just sit and talk. She was so driven, I learned so much in those two years, there are no words. It was just by talking, how do you fix something? It was constant.
After just over a year with the Lady Riders, Hayes tread the waters of the college game, joining Iona University’s women’s team, Iona Gaels, as their head coach at the start of 2003, keeping her in New York, specifically the city of New Rochelle.
Hayes was joined by two assistants, a former Gael in Mary O’Rourke, and a prospective young American coach by the name of Nathan Kipp, sparking a partnership between the two which would span as far as Hayes’s time as head coach of Chicago Red Stars down the line.
“I was living in New York City and Emma had taken a job at Iona, which is a Division 1 school here in the USA but a very small school with a not very high achieving programme in women’s soccer,” says Kipp.
“I got referred to Emma by a colleague. I was looking for some coaching work and I went to meet up with her, I didn’t know her at all except for this person saying ‘go and speak to this woman’. Iona was a very low-tier school, not a big well-funded programme, fielding a team it felt like just to field a team.”
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But Kipp describes Hayes as “seeming interesting” after their first meet and he became her assistant for two of her three seasons at Iona, before he moved back to the Carolinas at the end of 2004.
“It was funny, because I don’t know how she got referred to Iona and why she took a collegiate job at the time, but she was the most knowledgeable soccer person I’d ever met,” he says with a smile. “She knew so much about the game and clearly deeply loved soccer, but knew very little about college soccer which is its own unique beast.
“It’s a very short season, a balance between football and academics and on top of that the NCAA puts restrictions on the hours you can train and she knew nothing about that, she had all these ideas she couldn’t implement. Her idea though for her vision and what she wanted to do was amazing. That team went from pretty lacklustre to winning eight or nine games in a short season and she was able to guide them to success, as it were, beyond just the individual capabilities of the players.”
Hayes guided the Gaels to back-to-back MAAC (Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference) Championships in 2004 and 2005, securing MAAC Coach of the Year accolades in 2004.
“The season previous they might have won two or three games,” says Kipp. It wasn’t all plane-sailing though, as Hayes adapted to the college system but also the US culture and language, as Kipp recalls with amusement.
“There were some amazing moments,” he laughs. “In pre-season there’s always a tournament where four teams come together and you play a couple of games. We were sat in this banquet hall, I’d been a few times as a player and I told her ‘Emma, you need to go up and talk’ and she had no idea about it.
“The woman before her was talking about the Hatters and Emma follows her and starts talking about the history of Luton Town I think it was? Who are nicknamed the Hatters in the UK, but this was the Stetson Hatters [a men’s Basketball team in Florida].
“She was talking about Luton being the first team to play on a turf field and I was like ‘I need to take this woman to a soccer trivia night!’ She had an encyclopaedic knowledge, and of course the Hatters here isn’t the same thing as the UK, but she just wanted to talk soccer, coach soccer and she was awesome to work with. Being able to spend that time with someone so passionate was amazing.”
During this period, Hayes also had a brief spell coaching women’s soccer at Columbia University in New York, but at the end of 2005 returned home where she became an assistant coach and academy director at the all-conquering Arsenal side, where she remained until 2008, when the new Women’s Professional Soccer league back across the pond was preparing for lift off in 2009.
Pushed back from its original start date of 2007 due to the World Cup and then the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, seven cities had been awarded franchises for the new league, one of them being in Chicago.
Peter Wilt, who had for seven years been the General Manager of successful MLS side Chicago Fire, had left for Milwaukee to try and get an MLS team off the ground there, but in his own words it “didn’t work”.
Wilt soon returned to Chicago to get to work on the city’s new WPS side, the Red Stars, a franchise which still exists to this day in the NWSL, and would eventually settle on bringing Hayes back across to the USA to be the team’s first head coach.
“I was approached by the head coach of a top amateur women’s team in Indiana, by the name of Shek Borkowski,” recalls Wilt.
“He had put together arguably the best women’s soccer team in the world, probably between them and Turbine Potsdam in Germany.
“He asked me if I would help him put together this new women’s team in Chicago for a new women’s league which was taking the place of WUSA [Women’s United Soccer Organisation, which folded in 2003]. He was in northern Indiana, I knew Chicago, so it worked. He had a money guy, I helped them raise a bit more, but WPS took two more years to get off the ground, so I was working on it for quite a while.”
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