The panicked voices crackled through Zoom well past 10 p.m. on the night the girls soccer pipeline crumbled.
They’d been primed by swirling questions about the future of the Development Academy, a national league that U.S. Soccer had championed as the primary pathway to its national teams. But still, some were blindsided by the tweet. It struck on April 15, 2020, to announce the DA’s termination. Coaches at its member clubs felt “stabbed in the back.” Thousands of aspiring teens wondered: “Where are we gonna play?”
They’d been “dropped and kicked to the curb,” says David Robertson, a director at Michigan club Nationals.