For every expansion team in any sport, an early struggle comes with making it clear what the new franchise is about, at its essence. What defines it, how it will find success, what people who think about the team will think of first.
San Diego, the newest addition to the National Women’s Soccer League, has solved that problem, with the hiring of former USWNT head coach Jill Ellis as the team’s president, as defined a quantity as exists in women’s soccer.
Naturally, this being Ellis, the two-time World Cup championship coach who led the UCLA women’s soccer program to glory in her years prior to taking the USWNT reins, she’s given the matter a great deal of thought about what comes next.
“As we've tried to go through this process of... aside from the business side, building the team, it's been something that's been in the forefront of my mind,” Ellis told reporters on a conference call Tuesday. “And I think that starts by hiring amazing people around me, a GM, a coach that's going to sort of share the vision and create this vision.”
Ellis plans to share liberally in what successes she’s observed around the league, from the early steps from other expansion clubs like Racing Louisville and Angel City FC, to the quick-turnaround of a dormant franchise in what was Sky Blue FC, now Gotham FC.
So being “fiercely competitive, right from the beginning” is part of how Ellis plans to make San Diego her own. But she will do it, too, by honoring a pledge to hire a woman as head coach. To hear her speak freely about why this is important to her — along with a natural outgrowth of the mentoring work she’s undertaken since leaving the USWNT head coaching post — reflects an Ellis unshackled at 54, no longer forced to thread the needle of equality between her national team players and the restraints of the USSF she served under.
What comes next, in the summer months, is the hiring of a general manager, the hiring of a head coach. Ellis wants women in what she’s calling “untraditional positions”, but of course, it is untraditional to have a woman in the pro sports space with absolutely nothing to prove. She talked about a conversation she shared recently with Tony La Russa, another figure whose resume will stand the test of time, and it only reinforced just what a coup it is for San Diego to begin to define itself around who Jill Ellis is and what she’s already accomplished.
This is not someone you can expect to sit back and let her resume speak for her, however. I asked Ellis what kind of timeframe she thought was reasonable to reach consistent, championship contention, and she didn’t put a number of years on it. She did point out that the depth of talent in the league’s teams made rising to the top harder — this isn’t the top-heavy French league, she said, and it isn’t even the NWSL of a few years ago, with a healthy share of have-nots.
“I'm not patient,” Ellis said. “But I definitely understand that it's not going to be an easy path.”
That would be true for any expansion team, though, as Louisville is finding out right now. And having Ellis aboard to chart that course is a guarantee of both past success and a drive that obviously is as potent as ever. She concluded an answer on what she’d be looking for in a coach by adding, in true Ellis fashion, “We’re going to kick some ass.”