The first sighting came at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. John Hendricks, the founder of the Discovery Channel, was seated beside his two young children watching the U.S. team play.
"The kids knew all the players. There was this obvious connection between the kids and the players," Hendricks said. "I knew then that the missing ingredient was television."
Three years later, in the summer of 1999, sitting in a sold-out Rose Bowl for the Women's World Cup final between the United States and China, Jim Moorhouse had a similar epiphany.
"I was looking around at all these suburban soccer-playing kids and their families," said Moorhouse, the U.S. Soccer Federation's director of communications. "I'd been hearing about these people for years. Finally, here they were, right in front of me."
Now, thanks to the hunch of cable-television executives like Hendricks, the U.S. women's electrifying triumph in that '99 World Cup, and the groundbreaking success of the WNBA, soccer moms and all those little girls in shin guards at last have an outlet for their passion, a league of their own.
Yesterday afternoon, on a day as sunny as the big, squealing crowd's disposition, the Washington Freedom beat the Bay Area CyberRays, 1-0, at RFK Stadium in the inaugural of the Women's United Soccer Association (WUSA). The debut attracted 34,148 fans, so many of them lining up for last-minute tickets that an enormous logjam developed at ticket windows.
"This was a wonderful day for soccer," said Tony DiCicco, chief operating officer of the league. "But we don't want to see that [ticket backup] happen again."
Part of the attraction was the marquee matchup of two of the biggest names on that '99 American team, Bay Area's Brandi Chastain and Washington's Mia Hamm.
"MIA vs. BRANDI," blared posters advertising the game, the two players trying their best to glower, face-to-face, at each other as if they were heavyweight boxers at a weigh-in.
