Brad Smith Brad Smith/isiphotos.com
Becky Sauerbrunn
When the U.S. Women’s National soccer team comes to Busch Stadium to play New Zealand on May 16—the penultimate stop in their send-off series before they head to France for the 2019 FIFA Women's World Cup—look for defender Becky Sauerbrunn out on the field. Yes, Sauerbrunn is a St. Louis native who helped Team USA take home the World Cup championship in 2015 (this year, they’re the defending champions). But she’s also an advocate for equal pay for women—on and off the field. She recently appeared in a campaign for women’s visibility in sports sponsored by Adidas and Twitter, and ever since that 2015 win, she’s been fighting for equal pay for the team. That 2015 final match? It was the most-watched soccer match—men’s and women’s—in U.S. history and their third World Cup win...yet the women were paid four times less than the men’s team, which has never won a World Cup. Sauerbrunn is one of the 28 Women’s National Team players who filed a federal gender discrimination lawsuit against the U.S. Soccer Federation seeking equal pay last month on International Women’s Day. Here, she talks to St. Louis Magazine about preparing for the World Cup and why she’s using her platform to fight for women’s rights.
May 16 won’t be the first time you’ve played at Busch Stadium. What’s it like to take the field at a huge sports arena in your hometown?
I feel just very fortunate that St. Louis was picked as a venue for one of our send-off series games. We've played in so many cities—it could have been very easy to play anywhere else in the Midwest. I was lucky enough to be there in 2013, when we played New Zealand at Busch Stadium, and the atmosphere, to this day, is really one of the best that I've ever gotten to play in, and I think a lot of my teammates would say the same.
They’ve already sold 30,000 tickets for the game, I’m told.
And we’re still weeks away, so I'm excited. I'm hoping to get 40,000-plus like we did last time. And it's great to be able to play in front of my hometown, my family, friends, teachers, people who are still in the area, who still reach out and say “Hey, we're supporting you, good luck in France.”
You played J.B. Marine Soccer as a kid in St. Louis. How did playing the sport here shape you?
I had wonderful club experience. I had coaches who really taught me the game early. And I was lucky enough that there was indoor professional soccer there—almost every weekend, I was watching it. It's just a soccer city. And I think I was lucky enough to really experience that when I was younger. I got to play indoor soccer and outdoor soccer, and the teams that I played on, were just good teams. That really prepared me for college and beyond.
What’s your day-to-day like prepping for the World Cup?
The preparation for the World Cup basically started right after we won the first one. So it's been ongoing, and it's been so tough. It's really physically demanding. You start off, and it's really about evaluation. “OK, who's going to be the core group of players that we're really going to invest in over these next four years?” From there, it's OK, we're going to layer in. How do we want to play with the people that we have. Then it gets down to, who’s going to be the starting group, and here are the very, very small details that we need to focus on. We're getting to the point where the final roster is going to be announced, and everything's going to get even more finite, more detail-oriented. It’s just getting down to the nitty-gritty now. And that's really exciting, but it's also demanding—we’re playing the best teams in the world in preparation, we’re playing each other every day in preparation. It’s exciting, and it's tiring, and it's nerve-wracking, but we're so excited to be going to France. We want to win the whole thing, so we're preparing to do so.
How many hours do you spend training a day?
When we're in national team camp, we either have one or two training sessions a day, and each one is about two hours. So yesterday, for instance, we had a meeting in the morning to go over what we were going to do at training, we had training, came back, had lunch, then we went back out to the field to do kind of a walk through some of the set pieces that we're going over, then we went into the gym, and then came back to the hotel and had dinner. So that's a little bit more of a physically demanding day than normal….It’s probably all together spending about five hours with the team really doing soccer stuff.
Wow, so even professional athletes have to go to meetings?
[Laughs.] Oh, all kinds of meetings all the time.
Tell me about the She Breaks Barriers campaign.
[Adidas] saw that women are really underrepresented when it comes to TV and showing sports and that sort of thing, and they wanted to have a campaign to push to make women more visible in what they do. I was lucky enough to be one of the athletes chosen for the sports side. There's also female commentators, a dance squad. It was really fun to be a part of it and be able to talk about my experience with fighting for pay equity and better working conditions.
You’re one of 28 women’s team players fighting for equal pay. That’s a lot of pressure—preparing for the World Cup and also being involved in a lawsuit.
We are one of the rare women's teams that do get a lot of press, and we wanted to use our platform in the best way possible to make the most impact that we can. So aside from being soccer players, we also wanted to push these other issues because of that platform. Pay equity is something that we have been dealing with for as long as we've been a program within the Federation. And it just got to the point where we used the success of 2015 to show the pay disparity in the prize money, and then when we started negotiating our next CBA [collective bargaining agreement] with the Federation, we took it as public as possible, because we wanted people to know about this fight. We wanted to be as visible as possible because we know that in sports and in other work areas all across the world, there are women who are being paid less for the same quality of work. That's something we feel is worth the time and energy. And of course, we're soccer players, and we're focused on winning this World Cup, but we're also powerful women who can do multiple things. And this is also something we wanted to take on.
