The Man Watching: Anson Dorrance and the University of North Carolina Women's Soccer Dynasty

Phenomenal stats—a .938 winning average, 21 national championships in the last 29 years including nine titles in a row—support effusive encomiums in this boisterous hagiography of America's greatest collegiate minor-sports coach. Former Sports Illustrated writer Crothers (Hard Work) makes the college coach's eternal conundrum—how to motivate without cash payment—into a treatise on difference feminism. As Dorrance struggles to transpose his own win-or-die fanaticism into a feminine register, he learns to cope with crying jags, organizes rose ceremonies, and ditches bloodthirsty sloganeering about "the gift of fury" in favor of Rilke poems in his motivational speeches. With such methods he manages to impart a brutally competitive style of smash-mouth soccer that's as vicious during scrimmages as it is on game day. ("‘Help you? Help yourself, bitch!'" sneers one lady Tar Heel at a teammate's pleas for mercy.) Crothers's narrative can be equally grueling; the text reprints Dorrance's pep talks and testimonials to his leadership for pages on end, and includes an entire chapter of the coach's post-9/11 pensées. Still, the jockish élan of Dorrance and his players makes this off-beat, all-guts-and-little-glory sports saga an often entertaining and occasionally uplifting read. Photos. (Oct. 12)