A Q&A With World Cup Champion Briana Scurry
The goalkeeper joins The Word to talk about her podcast Counterattack
Over a year ago, the Religion of Sports team met with a dozen current and former women’s soccer players, including Sinead Farrelly, who had spoken out alongside her teammate Mana Shim about their coach’s abuse. Their story, first reported in The Athletic, set off a national reckoning that upended the structures of women’s soccer in the U.S.; former deputy Attorney General Sally Yates conducted an investigation, several teams fired coaches, a new commissioner took over the NWSL, and some of the owners who had enabled the abuse were forced out.
Since that first meeting, Sinead and Mana have spent many hours sharing their stories with us, and we’ve built a 6-part narrative podcast around their stories of resiliency and rebirth. The final episode of Counterattack dropped this week.
The podcast is hosted by 1999 World Cup champion goalkeeper Briana Scurry, who lends her own experiences in women’s soccer to the story. And boy, does she have a lot to share. When Briana was part of the iconic team at the Rose Bowl that won the World Cup, there wasn’t a professional league for women. Since then, she’s been involved in all three leagues that have tried to fill that gap, seeing firsthand the ways that women’s soccer has evolved over the last two decades.
Her insight makes the show all that much more layered and fascinating. Counterattack is a comeback story, an underdog tale, and a reckoning all wrapped in one.
Sports, in so many ways, are generational; we might inherit our love of the game from our parents and pass them down ourselves. Athletes have their own way of passing the torch, especially women’s soccer players who fight to make things a little better for the next round of girls who grow up dreaming of making a living in the sport. When US Soccer announced that they were, at long last, granting their men’s and women’s teams equal pay, the celebration wasn’t about the windfall for the players on the team today—it was about the ripple effects the decision might have in the future. "For us this is just a huge win in ensuring that we not only right the wrongs of the past but set the next generation up for something that we could only have dreamed of," said captain Megan Rapinoe.
It's that spirit, that fighting legacy, that is so admirable about Briana Scurry. We were lucky enough to chat with her about the show and the state of women’s soccer. I hope you enjoy the conversation.
Q: What should listeners expect when they listen to Counterattack?
Briana Scurry: They should expect to hear a very powerful journey, a deep dive into what happened to Sinead and Mana. You'll hear about a valiant comeback, how broken Mana was, how broken Sinead was—but how they fought their way back to who they wanted to be and who they wanted to become. It’s just a real inside look behind-the-scenes of what happened to both of these players before, during, and after they came forward to report abuse.
Q: What drew you to telling this story?
BS: When I first read the article in The Athletic about Sinead and Mana, I was affected in a very visceral way. I was ill, I was angry, I was upset. And I felt very offended that this coach had done this to these women, because a) the actual acts were inappropriate by any stretch of the imagination, but also because b) I felt that they had been robbed of their dream. To me, that is one of the most diabolical and ruthless things you could do to someone is rob them of their dream and manipulate them.
Q: What’s one thing that surprised you while working on the podcast?
BS: The most fascinating thing to me is the fact that both women are now using what happened to them in a powerful way. Sinead is back playing again. I think that's fantastic. I feel like she's taken back her power. And Mana is now in a very powerful position of making this right and making sure this does not happen to anyone else. She’s helped to craft and create rules, regulations, and proposals about how soccer will be governed in this country.
In each of their ways, they are doing something to help the game and the legacy. But they're doing it in different ways. And they're both doing it in the way that suits them as a person who came into this sisterhood of soccer and is making their own mark on it.
Q: The NWSL has recently announced expansion teams, has forced out abusive owners and coaches, and has drawn big ratings on TV. This is now the third league that you’ve seen. What do you make of the way the sport is evolving in this country?
BS: Well, one of the major things that's different now is it's a new breed of owner in the game now. You have the ownership for the brand-new team, Bay FC, that paid $53 million for the franchise. That’s the highest it's ever been. Michele Kang, who came in and purchased the Washington Spirit in 2021, she paid $35 million for the team. The Kansas City ownership group, they are creating a stadium for their team, in addition to the training facility that they spent $80 million on. And also Angel City, of course, who is also looking to create their own training ground.
All these owners are looking at it in a whole new way, and they're selling out their games, just like Portland does. So you have a new breed of ownership that is looking at women's soccer as a business with an increasing value proposition, and that's different than how it used to be looked at. It used to be looked at by people who had deep pockets who had daughters that played, and it was almost like a charity. Now, the ownership groups are looking at it as a business. And that's different.
I think that's going to be how it will go moving forward. And so now the price tag for franchises went from, you know, between $2 to $4 million, and now it's $53 million. That's more than a 10-times increase in value. So, that's really encouraging and really fantastic.
🏀 This week, we released Love and Basketball, our project with Red Bull TV about Lethal Shooter, the legendary basketball coach. You can watch it for free now!
🏆 After winning the NBA finals, Nikola Jokic had a beautiful treatise on success at the postgame press conference. It’s a must watch.
🏟️ Last week, we talked about the possibility of Hinchliffe Stadium hosting an MLB Game. The MLB just announced that next season, they’ll be playing a game in Birmingham, at the only other Negro League ballpark still standing. I can’t wait.
🏄♂️ Remember Luke Shephardson, the lifeguard we profiled who won “The Eddie” earlier this year? GQ tracked him down to talk about how that day changed his life. Great read.
