"After the '96 Olympics, we all started believing that this is bigger than we thought, and we were willing to do the work. We knew that it was up to us, the players, to make soccer successful"
About this Quote
Chastain’s line isn’t triumphal; it’s managerial. The spark is the ’96 Olympics, but the real subject is what comes after the medal ceremony: the moment women’s soccer in the U.S. stops being a feel-good novelty and starts behaving like a project with deadlines. “Bigger than we thought” signals a sudden shift in scale, not just in audience size but in responsibility. Success here isn’t framed as fate or “growth of the game.” It’s labor.
The subtext is blunt: institutions weren’t going to do this for them. When she says “we were willing to do the work,” she’s talking about training, sure, but also the unglamorous grind of becoming ambassadors, marketers, and proof-of-concept all at once. Women athletes in that era were routinely asked to justify their own existence in public; Chastain flips the burden into a strategy. If the league, the sponsors, and the media won’t build the platform first, the players will build demand so the platform becomes unavoidable.
There’s a quiet edge in “up to us.” It’s empowerment with a shadow: a recognition that the safety net is thin, that failure will be pinned on the athletes rather than the ecosystem. The quote captures a specific American sports mythology - bootstrap confidence - but it also exposes its cost. The “work” includes emotional labor: performing belief so loudly that everyone else has to catch up. In that sense, it’s less a victory lap than a mission statement for the years that followed.
The subtext is blunt: institutions weren’t going to do this for them. When she says “we were willing to do the work,” she’s talking about training, sure, but also the unglamorous grind of becoming ambassadors, marketers, and proof-of-concept all at once. Women athletes in that era were routinely asked to justify their own existence in public; Chastain flips the burden into a strategy. If the league, the sponsors, and the media won’t build the platform first, the players will build demand so the platform becomes unavoidable.
There’s a quiet edge in “up to us.” It’s empowerment with a shadow: a recognition that the safety net is thin, that failure will be pinned on the athletes rather than the ecosystem. The quote captures a specific American sports mythology - bootstrap confidence - but it also exposes its cost. The “work” includes emotional labor: performing belief so loudly that everyone else has to catch up. In that sense, it’s less a victory lap than a mission statement for the years that followed.
Quote Details
| Topic | Teamwork |
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