The current team has grown up in a world in which media attention and live coverage for women's soccer in events like the World Cup and the Olympics are taken for granted. The previous groups that built the team's legacy had a different frame of reference. The 1991 players were given a $10 per diem on the road and were happy to get it.
"The team I played for, we won two World Cups and an Olympics, and we got a good start for this team," former striker Michelle Akers said last week in a television interview. "So, they're standing on our shoulders, and now they're continuing that legacy with, hopefully, another world championship."
The first generation of the women's team really stretched from its inaugural game in 1985 to the crescendo of the 1999 World Cup win in the Rose Bowl before 90,000 fans, the largest crowd to attend a women's sporting event. Many players came and went during that time, but the core became a recognizable unit that went from total anonymity to being the best in the world.
Along the way, what the U.S. team did was drag women's soccer into the spotlight, with the real glare beginning during the Atlanta Olympics of 1996 and then going full wattage in 1999. The current team knows the history. The players want their own identity, but they lived the history, too, in front of their living room televisions.
"[This] generation is the changeover from that 1999 generation and that 1999 World Cup team," said forward Abby Wambach. "Nothing to take away from them, because what they did was special. What they did gave us the opportunities that we all have here, and even players from different countries, by putting women's soccer on the world map and the world stage."
