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  My mom took it completely in stride. While Rachael kept her hair long and went on wearing skirts, I ran along beside her like her boy twin, while strangers addressed me as “Hey, buddy! Hey, little guy!” I found this hilarious. “Hi!” I would respond beaming, without correcting them. My mom, meanwhile, who is the precise opposite of those mothers who put headbands on bald babies in case strangers think their little girl is a boy, merely said, “I love that she’s a tomboy, doesn’t she look cute?” One day in first grade, I came in from the playground, stood in the doorway of the classroom with my hands on my hips, and bellowed in Mrs. Walmart’s general direction, “Brian Rapinoe is my brother, and I’m just like him!” No wonder she couldn’t stand me.

  2

  STRONG WOMEN

  We’re an athletic family, and all of us are athletically built. My dad is compact, stocky. My mom is slender and strong. (She likes to joke that I have her legs, and at some point could she please have them back?) But even compared to the rest of our family, Rachael and I were physically gifted. We figured out how to crawl out of our cribs really young. At age four, after only a few attempts, we rode our bikes without training wheels. When Brian did a trick with a soccer ball, all we needed was to watch him once to have it down pat. Our older siblings regarded us as freaks. As a child, says my sister Jenny, she remembers looking at us running around the yard and thinking, “My sisters are going to get gold medals one day.”

  At that age, all Rachael and I wanted to do was have fun, and given our family’s interests, it’s not surprising that sports were a big outlet. There was a huge oak tree in our yard, and from the time we could first walk, we would chase soccer balls around and around it. We spent hours playing one-on-one basketball in the yard, and “doing drills”—running back and forth between cones—set up by Brian on the lawn. When we weren’t playing sports we were watching them. Football, baseball, basketball, hockey, it didn’t matter what, we were fans. My dad, who spent his early childhood in Chicago, was a big Cubs fan, and Rachael and I quickly got into the Bulls. Basketball was our first love, and long before we put up posters of the 1999 World Cup champion US Women’s National Team, the walls of our bedroom were covered in life-size posters of Michael Jordan.

  Of all the sports, soccer was probably the one with which my parents were least familiar. My brother Michael had been into baseball and snowboarding, Jenny was a dancer and cheerleader, and CeCé was into volleyball. Only Brian took up soccer, and by the time we were five and he was ten, he was playing with a local team called the Mavericks. Rachael and I tagged along to his practices and watched the boys like hawks. Every time they did something cool, we ran up and down the sidelines trying to imitate them, until eventually our antics were noticed. When we were six, we were invited to play with the Under-8 boys’ team, since there wasn’t a girls’ team available. We jumped at the chance.

  From the beginning, I just loved it. We were so hyped to play. I loved basketball, track, and, eventually—although it took a while—swimming, but there was something about the ritual of soccer that was special. Every Saturday morning before practice, I got up super early to put on my uniform, so that by the time my mom and sister were ready, I’d be by the door, cleats on, shin guards in, impatient to get in the car. I loved the clicking sound my cleats made on the floor and I loved my team uniform. We played in white T-shirts with black piping at the collar, which through overwear soon faded to brown. Rachael and I were finicky about our gear, and you could hear us hollering down the street: “Mom, fix our shirts!”

  In my entire history of playing, I have probably never dominated a team like I did that team of small boys in the early 1990s. Rachael and I were unbeatable. When we got older and hit our teens, the playing pool got bigger and the kids got better. But at ages six, seven, eight, nine, we performed at a level so far and away above everyone else that Fritz, our coach, could only stand on the sidelines and remark to my parents, “They’re going to be in the World Cup one day.”

  A large part of this was natural ability. We moved fluidly, with instinctive hand-eye coordination and physical fearlessness. But our ferocity also had a lot to do with the fact that we played against each other all the time. This is where having a twin comes in handy. Rachael and I learned a lot by playing against Brian and our older cousins, but our toughest competitors were each other. Every day after school, we played in our yard or across the street at Cow Creek Community Church, which had a soccer field out back. After riding our bikes over there, we’d dump them on the grass and play for as long as the light held, neither of us giving an inch, perfectly matched in ability and drive.

  The sheer pitch of our ambition was probably stoked by twin rivalry, which in our case didn’t mean wanting to outdo each other, but wanting for the other what we wanted for ourselves: to perform up to our absolute limits. This was evident especially on the field during games. When one of us messed up or gave less than 100 percent, the other would swoop down on her and scream insults while the rest of the team looked on in horror. (I think the rage dump came, in part, from the fact that we knew each other so well; each of us could instantly spot when the other was underperforming. But it’s also true that we simply couldn’t hear how we sounded. To us, yelling at top volume at each other was completely normal.) It’s a big advantage when you’re trying to get better at something to spend all your time with someone who can be completely honest with you without fear of losing your love.

  We knew we were good. But as a sport, soccer is a relatively slow burn and the team structure means you don’t shine all the time. There are no child prodigies in soccer the way there are in, say, gymnastics. In fact, after those first few years in our tiny team in Palo Cedro, we lost a lot. When we were ten, we were invited to try out for the Mavericks’ competitive Under-12 boys’ team, and we played with them for one season and basically got shellacked every game. After that, my dad decided to set up a girls’ team. He and my mom scouted preteen athletes from Red Bluff all the way out to Mount Shasta, getting together a group of fourteen or fifteen girls who my dad coached and managed. We did that for a few years before being scouted by Elk Grove, a much bigger competitive girls’ team based down in Sacramento. At that point things started to take off.

  All of this happened organically. We loved soccer, and our parents encouraged us, but they did so with no particular end goal in mind. They loved sports, but I think if we’d been into acting, or singing, or violin, or chess, they would still have done everything they could to enable us. It’s interesting to consider the difference between the gifted child athlete who goes on to play at the highest level and the one who drops out or remains a recreational player. Obviously the involvement of the parents is a big issue, but probably less so than the temperament of the child. If our parents had ever had to nag us to practice, or drag us out of bed at 4:00 a.m. for the two-hour drive south to Sacramento, we wouldn’t have gone the distance. As it was, from age six onward, Rachael and I were completely obsessed, entirely dedicated, and, bizarrely for that age, fanatically self-motivated about playing.

  I don’t know where this compulsion came from. There were no professional sportswomen in my background. There were, however, a lot of badass women doing things that were considered slightly controversial for their time. One of these was Anna, my maternal great-grandmother—my mom’s mom’s mom—whose name I have as my middle name. Her family came to the US from Germany at the turn of the twentieth century, settling with a lot of other German immigrants in Rhineland, Texas, where they became farmers. After Anna married Aloysius, my mom’s grandfather, in the early 1930s, she gave birth to seven kids, raised her own chickens and pigs, and helped manage the farm. Ten years into the marriage, her husband died of tuberculosis, leaving Anna to run the entire 640 acres alone.

  It’s a very American story. Anna was really smart, my mom said, and unusually for that time, her husband had insisted she go out on the farm with him and learn the business. She learned how
to buy and sell cattle, raise wheat and cotton, and handle herself as the only woman among men. She was very tough, very kind, and very capable. When my mom was a child, Anna would travel from Texas to visit them in San Bernardino, and the house—chaotic with my mom’s seven siblings and her alcoholic dad—would brighten up while she was there. Bread would be baked; surfaces would be cleaned. Even my mom’s dad would cheer up momentarily. Her motto, said my mom, was “Let’s get this done.”

  * * *

  —

  When Rachael and I were eighteen months old, our mom realized that the only way for her to work and still see her kids was to work at night—her own mom had done the same thing—and after asking around, she applied for a job at Jack’s Grill. Word on the street was that it was such a great place to work that no one ever left, and sure enough, thirty-two years later, my mom still works four shifts a week there.

  I love Jack’s. It’s my second home. My mom’s fellow waitresses and their kids, all of whom I’ve known my whole life, are my second family. When I go back to Redding these days, I’m as excited to visit Jack’s as anywhere in town. The restaurant is a legend in the area, established in 1938 and consisting of one cozily lit room with an old-fashioned bar, a tin ceiling, and the best New York strip steak in the world. If it were in an East Coast city, there’d be a line round the block, and as kids, we thought it was the most glamorous place in the world. After school, Rach and I would go sit on the bar stools, eat crackers, and feel the thrill of being part of the scene.

  Because my mom didn’t get back from her shift until after 11:00 p.m., our only chance to talk to her about stuff was first thing in the morning. Every day before school, she’d be in the kitchen or her chair in the living room, glasses on, hair wild, in her jammies, jacking up on coffee and talking to us. We’d give her a kiss and a hug, sit on her lap, and tell her what we had going on. We’d ask what she was making to put in the fridge for my dad to heat up for dinner. This routine went on all our lives, and even in high school we’d still sit on her lap. My mom remembers being at a soccer tournament in Baltimore, hanging out in a hotel lobby with Rach and I, gangly teenagers, one on each knee, while the other mothers looked on in amazement. But to us it was natural. Mammers is a gem.

  It was during one of those morning sessions that we told our mom about the bully in fifth grade. She wasn’t picking on us, but she was targeting a weaker kid and we both hated it. My sister and I have this in common: nothing riles us up more than bullying, cheating, or unfairness. It’s an almost physical sensation of not being able to stand it or to shut up about it after the event. We told our mom about the girl and about how, after we’d stepped in, her eighth-grade sister had threatened to bring her friends to the playground for a fight. Rachael was more assertive than I was at that age, but I was right behind her. You don’t get to do this, we told the kid. Bring it.

  Obviously these instincts came from somewhere. Both my parents insisted that you don’t let people intimidate you and that you take care of your siblings and family. There was a flip side to this lesson, however: No one is better than you, they said, but equally, you shouldn’t think that because you’re good at sports, popular, and cute, you’re better than anyone else. They taught Rachael and me to recognize how lucky we were—pointed out that things came easily for us, not just in sports, but socially, too—and told us not to take it for granted. Look and see what other people have, they said, because they have something special, too.

  To my mom, these lessons were rooted in the Church, although by the time Rachael and I were born, she had walked away from the Catholics—mainly because they’d given her such a hard time for divorcing her first husband, Bill. All us kids were baptized Catholics, but growing up we were taken to a nondenominational church, and while my mom wanted to expose us to faith, she also felt it was our journey, our choice. And anyway, it wasn’t about religion. It was about empathy. My mom told the story of being a teenager in Southern California, and how after her dad had been yelling at the kids one day, she turned to her grandmother, Anna, and said, “I can’t stand him. I wish he’d just leave.” Anna’s reply always stayed with my mom: “Oh, Neesy, he’s sick, honey. He’s just sick.” Her dad had been a tyrant, but even so, some compassion was called for.

  Still, nothing spins my wheels like an unfair fight, and the same goes for Rachael. We’re not looking for an altercation, but we’re not going to back down from what’s right. It’s always been part of our spirit, so much so that there’s no decision to make. When we told our mom a pack of eighth-grade girls was coming to fight us, she was alarmed and wanted to go talk to the principal. But we persuaded her not to. We’ve got this, we said. It seemed important to work it out for ourselves, and after standing our ground, the big kids left, as bullies tend to when they’re confronted. That wasn’t even the most important thing that happened that day, which was that our friends came to our aid. The best way to beat bullies is to fight them together.

  3

  PRACTICE

  The term “soccer mom” has become a kind of joke, a sexist label for suburban moms that implies a life of indolence and ease. The truth is that being a soccer mom or dad, at least one with a kid who travels for games, is a massive commitment and a ton of hard work. It’s exhausting, expensive, and time-consuming, and it means you miss out on a lot of other things. For six years, from the age of eleven through seventeen, every weekend morning began at 4:00 a.m. for my family, when my parents, my sister, and I would pile into the minivan for the long drive to Sacramento, for practice or an 8:00 a.m. game.

  A word about minivans: ugh. My family was so big we always had to have one, and as kids we didn’t consider them cool. (As adults, it’s the one car none of us will drive; my sister Jenny stretched to an Expedition once, but that’s as far as she’d go.) Back then, however, they were the only practical choice, and those weekend journeys were wild. My mom, who’d had about four hours sleep after getting in from the restaurant the night before, would roll into the van with her coffee and doze all the way there. My dad, equally exhausted after a hard week, would take the wheel while my sister and I sat in the back. We didn’t have time or money for vacations, so those journeys—not just to Sacramento, but as we got older, all over the state, and eventually the country—turned into mini road trips. My mom would look up awesome places to eat on the road, directing us off the highway in search of an out-of-the-way restaurant, until my dad—ravenous, less committed to the search for the perfect chicken parm than the rest of us—would explode, “Can we PLEASE. JUST. STOP. HERE,” and be shouted down from the back of the van.

  In soccer, finding your own style on the field is as much about self-discovery as it is about practicing and strengthening your skills. As a young kid, you chase after the ball along with everyone else, kicking it more or less haphazardly toward the goal. It’s only as you get older and more proficient that, while understanding you have to work as a team, you start to develop your own personality and flair. The girls’ soccer league in Sacramento was tougher than anything we were used to in Redding, and it was obvious to me even then that I was never going to be the strongest or fastest player on the field. To succeed, I would need to develop a style rooted in something other than beating people through physical force.

  In 1996, the year we started traveling for games and playing competitively for the Mavericks, I had no idea what that style might turn out to be. At eleven, I was still very much a little kid. I ran around making fart noises. I was a goofball, always doing impressions. (My one of Jim Carrey in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective brought the house down for years.) I loved making my family laugh, especially CeCé, who I’d wait for in the kitchen, and when she walked in, I’d stick out my butt and do a funny voice like it was talking. (You had to be there, I guess.) Being a mimic means interspersing periods of performance with periods of watchfulness, and even as a child I’d enjoyed standing off to one side, observing people and situations that interested me. My mom t
ells the story of how she’d watched me at one of Brian’s soccer games once, when I was around five. I have no memory of it, but she recalls how, after spending ten minutes or so studying a teenager on the sidelines whose pose—elbow on knee, one knee over the other—I was clearly fascinated by, I crept up behind him and got myself into the exact same position.

  Imitating people like this came naturally to me and was just something I did for fun. It wasn’t defensive; I’d never felt the need to camouflage myself by copying others. Of the two of us, I was still more assertive than Rachael, and every day at recess I hit the playground hard, still wearing “boys’ clothes,” as I’d been doing since kindergarten. The one time my mom managed to get me out of shorts and sneakers was when I was ten years old and we’d gone to a wedding in Texas, and even then she’d had to trick me. My mom’s aunt’s son was getting married at a fancy country club, and when I told my mom there was no way I was wearing a dress, she’d sneakily said, “OK, well, we’re staying at a great hotel in Dallas where you can swim and play games, but you’ll probably be happier staying at home.” I ended up in a moderately acceptable sundress, alongside Rachael in a big frilly pink one.

  That year we turned eleven, the one significant change was that Rachael had a growth spurt and now was taller than me—five foot four to my four foot eleven, at the end of fifth grade. If it was a sign of things to come, it seemed, along with everything else going on, like no big deal at the time. My sister Jenny moved out, but still lived in Redding. CeCé went away to college, but came home all the time. (On her arrival, Rach and I would always run down the driveway yelling, “Cissy! Cissy!” before throwing ourselves into her arms.) The trouble with Brian hadn’t really registered yet, and even by my family’s standards, it was a quiet period. And then I turned up for the first day of sixth grade.