Next week Lilly—dubbed “Grandma” by her teammates, some of whom were in diapers when she debuted—will lead another American team into the 2007 World Cup in China. It will be Lilly’s fifth Cup competition and is a testament to her remarkable career. Soccer is a running game that makes exceptional physical demands, and Lilly is a decade older than most of the players running alongside her. But she has always been the best-conditioned athlete on the team, and her relentless running creates much of the pressure in the U.S. attack. “Fitness is the one thing you have total control of,” she says, noting that it’s a simpler matter today with coaches, trainers and state-of-the-art facilities at her disposal. “I make sure the younger kids know what we used to go through,” Lilly says. “We’d have as much as five months at a time off totally on our own, and I’d spend it just running and kicking the ball against a wall.”
To U.S. coach Greg Ryan, who took over the team in 2005, Lilly embodies commitment. She has appeared in 331 games for her national team, more than any man or woman in history, and she has started every World Cup and Olympic game the American team has ever played. But Ryan always believed Lilly could be far more than just a bridge to bygone glories, that she was a singular talent who could be the cornerstone of the team. “We built around her in every way we could think of,” he says. Lilly says her new and larger role is no big deal. “Soccer is a simple game that doesn’t ever change,” she says. She keeps it simple by eschewing fancy footwork and gratuitous flash that leads to mistakes and miscommunication. “Lil awes me in practice,” says Abby Wambach, 27, the team’s leading scorer. “She does everything right and makes it look so easy. At the end of the day, where would you want the ball except at her feet?”
The transition from the Hamm era to Lilly’s has proceeded smoothly, with few bumps along the road to China. While most of the soccniscenti predicted that the team would slump without the veterans, Lilly and U.S. soccer’s Generation Next have a 37-1-6 mark—the only blemish a loss in a penalty-kick shootout to Germany in early 2006—and have regained the No. 1 ranking in the world. Lilly has shed any reticence and emerged as a vocal captain who wants her teammates to understand the karmic connections that once helped America win two World Cups and two Olympic golds. “That team had so many leaders that they didn’t need my voice to be loud,” she says. “Now I think the players would just like me to shut up sometimes.” Publicly, however, she doesn’t dwell on the past, focusing only on what lies ahead in China, where the U.S. team is the Cup favorite ahead of defending champ Germany. “We don’t want to talk about who’s no longer here,” she says. “This group is pretty amazing, too.”
When Hamm and the rest of the thirtysomethings retired after one final gold medal at the Athens Olympics, Lilly thrilled to the “fairy-tale ending,” but says, “I just knew I wasn’t done.” She was also the unmarried one in the group, without “another stage of my life to move onto.” She subsequently met and, last fall, married a Boston-area fireman, and so that next stage now awaits her. “Everyone wants to make sure Kristine leaves her last World Cup as champion,” says Wambach. Lilly would love to reprise her gang of old’s gold-medal send-off. If she gets it, she promises that teammates, both old and new, will see another of the once shy Lilly’s heretofore hidden sides. “Everyone says I don’t have a good celebration,” she says. “I’ll have a great one if we win.”
