April Heinrichs captained the US Women's National Team to win the first ever FIFA Women's World Cup in 1991, and in 1998 became the first ever female player inducted into the National Soccer Hall of Fame. She went on to be the head coach of the USWNT and led the team to a silver medal at the 2000 Olympics, 3rd place in the 2003 FIFA World Cup, and a gold medal at the 2004 Olympics. Here, she sits down with SportsEdTV to discuss her life, story, and learnings.
SportsEdTV: What was your experience playing professional soccer in Italy like?
April: Just two or three days after I landed in Italy to join Juventus we were already playing in a game. I remember one training running up stairs in the old Juve stadium that filled something like 70,000 people. It was quite a change to go to another country with a different culture to play soccer, and the adaptation was challenging. Nobody spoke English. The club let me down as well. I was promised a car, an apartment and English classes, none of which ever happened. I was asked to sign a contract in Italian, and I had taken one semester of Italian so there was no chance I could read a contract in Italian. After about two months of that, I was out. I told them, ‘You guys have not come up with everything you said you would provide me with.’ Then next winter I was approached by another Italian team, Prato, which was based in Florence, and thankfully they did everything they said they were going to do. So I was there in total for about a year and a half, and that went much better.
We lived a little bit north of the city. My Italian was slowly improving, and our coach was a little bit old school but I had a lot of respect for him because he really tried hard to make me fit in culturally. He would speak in Italian, and then he would say “Hey, somebody translate.” And then he would check with me, “Do you understand, April?” And most of the time, you know, I got like 10 percent of it, but that was enough. The quality of the games were outstanding. The Italians play a different game of soccer. In the end, I'm very empathetic to players that go abroad. It’s a big challenge to be away from home and adapt to a new culture.
The food is different. Transportation is an issue. The luxuries that we're used to having are not the same. That was one lesson I took away from Italy. Another lesson that I really learned in Italy is that there's not just one way to play or coach soccer. I graduated from the University of North Carolina, where I played for the legendary Anson Dorrance, that was even a little bit before he was probably considered legendary but we thought of him as a legend at that time already. He was coaching men's and women's soccer at North Carolina. He was the national team coach. He was a genius. He was brilliant at motivating us. But I graduated from North Carolina and I left thinking that there's only one way to play. There's only one way to train. And going to Italy, I learned that there were many different ways to approach training and the game that also worked. I didn't agree with the style of play in Italy, we played in a really conservative 4-5-1, and it was lonely up top as that nine, but I saw its effectiveness. The training methods were also not nearly as rigorous as our training methods had been in the USA. I came to both appreciate the different ways to approach the game, and also to value the way we had approached the game in the states. It gave me a better understanding of why we train the way we train.
