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As a girl growing up playing soccer in the early 2000s, I revered only a few things—the iconic film Bend It Like Beckham, Mia Hamm, and the 1999 team that won the World Cup.
In 1999, the first professional women’s soccer league had just formed, and the idea of “being a pro soccer player” when I was older was no longer just a far-fetched dream; I could literally see it on my own TV.
I was 2 years old, and my mother held me up to the television screen. Over 90,000 people packed the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California, and over 15 million tuned into the broadcast for the final of the Women’s World Cup. It all came down to a penalty kick from 30-year-old defender Brandi Chastain. In an instant, Chastain made history and provided one of the most iconic images in women’s sports: She ripped off her jersey, revealing a black sports bra and raw muscle while crying out in victory as she soaked in the fact that she just helped the United States women win their second World Cup.
As far as I could tell, women’s soccer started with the 99ers, and there was no looking back.
But I was wrong.
With celebrities sitting courtside at WNBA and NBA games wearing “Everyone watches women’s sports” shirts and Arsenal’s women’s squad selling out the club’s 60,000-person stadium, and the reigning popularity of players like Megan Rapinoe, it’s easy to forget how new mainstream women’s sports actually are. Women were banned from playing soccer in England until 1971. Title IX didn’t prohibit sex discrimination in US college sports until 1972. But there were countless people—women and men—who worked tirelessly and without any recognition to get the culture to where it is now.
And that can be traced back to the 85ers—the first US women’s national team. Seattle’s first contribution to women’s soccer wasn’t the Reign. Eight of the 17 women that played on that first team were from the Seattle area. And this year, on the 40th anniversary of their international run, they’re taking a victory lap.
On August 18, 1985, in Jesolo, Italy, jet-lagged from their flight that arrived just 48 hours prior, the 17 women made history.
The team faced Italy in their first match. Kathy Ridgewell-Williams, a former forward for the team from Enumclaw, estimates there were probably only a couple of hundred people in the stands, but it felt like more since they had never played in front of a crowd.
During the game, a group of young Italian men started shouting “OO-suh,” every time the team touched the ball. But no one understood what that meant.
“We came off at halftime, and we had an interpreter that was traveling, moving around with us on the buses, into the hotel, into the fields and stuff, and we were like, ‘What are they yelling at us?’” Ridgewell-Williams said. “She goes, ‘They’re saying U-S-A,’” pronouncing it as one word in Italian. “They’re cheering for you.”
They loved it, so they adopted it as their cheer before taking the field again. Forty years later, the national team still uses it in their pre-game huddle.
The US lost that game 0-1, which to this day, winger Denise Boyer is adamant was a great feat. The team had only met each other a few weeks before. And when you consider that the team had been put together so quickly, they were still jet-lagged, and Italy was one of the top teams in the world at the time, they were proud that they held their own.
“We were damn good,” Boyer said.
The team ultimately went 0-3 with one tie.
Most of the women on the team either were in college or had just graduated, like Boyer, who attended the University of Puget Sound. She had a fiancé at that point when she was chosen as one of the 17 who’d fly to Italy to be a part of the first national team.
“It was Sunday and [I was] starting a new job on Monday morning,” Boyer said. “So I called my fiancé and told him, and he said, ‘Well, you’re not going, are you? Because girls don’t do things like that.’ So of course, I said yes.”
Title IX, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in educational institutions receiving money from the federal government, only passed in 1972. The idea that women could play elite sports and the subsequent infrastructure to support them were still relatively new.
Cindy Gordon was 9 years old when Title IX passed, which allowed her to play on an elementary school team. Before that, she would watch her younger brothers play soccer. “I remember standing on the sidelines watching them play and hoping somebody would get hurt and the coach would look around and say, ‘You girl, you look like you might be good,’” she said.
Gordon loved everything about the game. When it came to college, she knew she wanted to play, but there still weren’t many colleges that had women’s soccer as a varsity sport—at least on the West Coast. The University of North Carolina was building their legendary program led by Anson Dorrance at the time, but that was across the county.
“Western [Washington University] in Bellingham was the only four-year public college that had a varsity women’s soccer team [in Washington state], so that’s why I went there,” Gordon said.
It’s also where her future 1985 teammate, Kathy Ridgewell-Williams, went to college after spending a year at Green River College in Auburn. There, she practiced with the men’s team, but they wouldn’t let her compete. She remembers how even going to college was seen as strange.
“My dad was like, ‘I don’t know why you’re going to college, just get married and have babies.’”
The 17 women on that 1985 team didn’t have any female soccer players to look up to, no women’s professional league or World Cup to aspire to, yet they all still chose to play the game that brought them so much joy without knowing where it’d take them.
“I was watching [the] Men’s World Cup in 1974,” Ridgewell-Williams said. “It’s like a core memory for me, sitting there watching them and going, ‘God, it would be so cool if it was all the best girls.’”
“The first ever US Women’s National Team who started this whole unprecedented dynasty and culture changer… that first team isn’t even in the timeline of US Soccer,” Michelle Akers said.
Akers was the only player from the 1985 roster who was also on the much more recognized and celebrated 1999 team.
That year, the team won its second World Cup in front of over 90,000 fans in Pasadena, California. It’s where the iconic image of Brandi Chastain ripping off her jersey in celebration comes from, and is largely considered the catalyst for the boom of women’s soccer in the country.
In the 40 years since that first game in Jesolo, Italy, the USWNT has gone on to win four World Cups and five gold medals at the Olympics.
But none of that would’ve happened without the 85ers.
In August, the team known as the 85ers wore shirts that said “Reign with Legacy,” and were welcomed onto the field and presented with flowers and scarves. Lesle Gallimore, the team’s general manager, addressed the crowd. “The 1985ers didn’t just play soccer, they pioneered it,” Gallimore said. “They blazed the trail for the rest of us.”
The game was the culmination of a weekend packed with events. The team helped open a new mini field built by Sounder and Reign’s charitable arm, the RAVE Foundation, participated in an event at Ballard’s Rough & Tumble, and were treated to a dinner at The Ballard Cut.
“It meant so much to so many people,” Ridgewell-Williams said. “I think that’s been one of the most sort of heartfelt and surprising things.”
The weekend was also a kickoff of Hall of Famer, World Cup Champion, ‘85er, and Shorecrest High School grad Michelle Akers’s larger effort to preserve the history of that team, the players, and the people who helped them get to that first game in Jesolo, Italy.
Akers’s teammate Cindy Gordon, from Des Moines, WA, was brought back to that match when she heard the national anthem play before the Reign game.
“It really brought back to me when we were on the field in Italy playing and how kind of overwhelming it is to hear your national anthem, knowing you’re playing for your national team,” Gordon said. “It just has a different kind of meaning.”
Before the team left the stage at half-time, Akers led them in their cheer: “Oossa-oossaa-oosaa-ah,” Akers cried.
The recent reunion for the team and efforts to recognize them has the women reflecting on those who came before them. “I would like people to learn history, not just ours, but before ours,” Gordon said. “The women like Bernadette Noonan and Janet Slauson and Peggy Cowen, who were women that were trying to get the WSWSA [Washington State Women’s Soccer Association] off the ground.”
Bernadette Noonan is a name that most of the 85ers bring up when reminiscing about those early days of women’s soccer. Her close friend Janet Slauson passed away a few years ago. The two women dedicated their lives to championing women’s soccer.
“I cannot think about soccer without Bernadette and Janet,” Boyer said.
Noonan was a charter member of the Washington State Women’s Soccer Association, which was founded in 1974. The Irish-born mother of four was 44 years old when she answered an ad in the paper looking for women interested in playing soccer.
“I loved it, and I saw the change it made in women’s lives,” Noonan said. “These women went to school, got married, had kids, they’d never been in a sport because there weren’t sports in school.”
That first year of the WSWSA, there were about nine teams. A decade later, they had over 100 teams. While Noonan was playing in a recreational setting within the WSWSA, young players like Boyer were on competitive travel teams. And Noonan was pivotal in ensuring that opportunities like that remained open.
Noonan worked with Slauson to fundraise to send travel teams to tournaments,and when they could, they’d spend the money to cheer them on. She was there for the 1999 World Cup and she was there in 2019 when they won in Vancouver.
“They’re my girls,” Noonan said.
Boyer invited the 95-year-old Noonan to be her special guest at the weekend’s celebrations for the 85ers team. Noonan hadn’t met Akers before, nor most of the women on the team. But she was the reason why they were able to play.
“I reaped the benefits of what Bernadette fought for; her mission was to provide opportunity and to help fund these women so they could just play,” Akers said.
Despite the huge step forward, after that 1985 tournament, there was nowhere for the players to go unless they could fight to keep their spot on the national team, which was getting younger and younger. Many of the women on that roster would earn a few more caps with the national team, continue to play for their colleges, and compete at the club level.
Michelle Akers was built different.
“I remember watching Michelle and thinking, ‘Oh, my goodness, Miche, what are you enduring?’” Denise Boyer said.
Akers was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome in 1991. But that didn’t stop her from competing at the highest level.
“I mean, I love her so much that for her to have given as much as she did on behalf of the US Women’s National Team is amazing, because people just think, ‘Oh, Michelle, you know, she’s great.’ But it’s amazing how easily discarded things can be because Michelle did it all,” Boyer said. “She was in it in the very beginning and stayed in it.”
The reverence with which Akers’s teammates talk about the 5-foot-10-inch striker turned midfielder is apparent. Her nickname was “Mufasa,” in part for her mane-like hair, but especially for the fearlessness displayed on the field.
Denise Bender was one of the older players on the 1985 team and also the team’s captain. It was obvious to her and her teammates that while they were all talented, Akers was on a different level.
“She’s like the FIFA soccer player of the century, and if there’s a way that we could promote her and give her due recognition, that’s a mission for me,” Bender said.
Akers has undergone over 20 knee surgeries, numerous shoulder surgeries, and facial reconstruction, and sustained a number of concussions while playing for the national team.
“I had to sue to get those surgeries paid for, which was super disappointing,” Akers said. “And then the more I talked about it amongst teammates and learned about other people’s stories, similar things were happening to them.”
It was this realization that helped lead Akers to launch “The 85ers,” an LLC owned by all 17 members of the original team. Akers points out that while there are now players’ associations, there is no organization for retired players. She hopes this business can serve as an example for other groups and how they can capitalize once they hang up their cleats.
“This legacy-to-livelihood thing is so important because of the health care that’s needed after being a professional athlete,” Akers said.
With the business, Akers hopes that she and her teammates from 1985 can highlight the past while continuing to inspire the next generation and support them.
“If there’s anything, my goal is that nobody is unable to have the opportunities that we had,” Boyer said. “I didn’t come from money, and look at what I was able to do. And now we’ve got to get it back like that, because there are so many amazing young girls that if they can see it, they can be it.”
Spurred on by their own memories of playing the game they loved when there weren’t many paths forward, the women of 85 are determined to make sure the opportunities afforded to them—and the ones they helped create—don’t disappear.