Jill Ellis takes USWNT's managerial job with immense expectations, scope
Jill Ellis was 47 years old when she was officially handed the keys to the United States women's national team head coaching job on Friday. Yet she had been preparing for the job since she was 16.
She grew up in Portsmouth, England, but the family moved to the United States when she was 15, following a 2-year stint in Singapore. Her father, John Ellis, was a soccer coach. He ran camps in Florida and eventually hired Jill as an assistant.
"I used to watch him, and it didn't matter if he was working with a 6-year-old or a 19-year-old, he just had a really amazing way of teaching," Ellis recalled in an interview with FOXSoccer.com.
Soon enough, he gave her a bigger role. "At the age of 19, he would throw me in front of groups and ask me to teach principles of attack to 200 people at camp," she said. "He certainly vetted me in the process of inspiring me. I loved his way of teaching and I loved his passion for the game."
As a player, Ellis won a national championship on her father's club team and was named a third-team All-American for the College of William & Mary as a forward. Then she went to graduate school at North Carolina State, got a degree in technical writing and landed a job. That's when April Heinrichs called. She was the head coach at the University of Maryland then, and offered Ellis a job as second assistant coach for $6,000 a year. "My mother was horrified," said Ellis. "My father goes, 'Sweetheart, it's your path, it's your destiny.' He gave me the confidence to walk away from a pretty good job to take a chance."
From there, she followed Heinrichs to the University of Virginia, became a head coach at the University if Illinois, coached UCLA to eight NCAA Final Fours in just 12 years and wound up working for the federation in various youth development capacities, including coaching the Under-20 and Under-21 national teams and serving as an assistant on the senior team. All along, her father has been there to mentor her.
"He's always been the guy, it doesn't matter what team I'm coaching, whether it was the Baltimore Mustangs or UCLA, he's always been in the stands with a piece of paper and a pencil ready to give me his thoughts," said Ellis.
Does he still today, at 75? "Oh, God, yes," Ellis said empathically.
When Pia Sundhage left the head coaching job on the senior national team in 2011, Ellis was thought to be one of the front runners to take over. But having only just taken on the role of development director and wanting to spend more time with her daughter, she took herself out of the running. This time around, after Tom Sermanni was fired on April 6, for reasons that are still unclear, she was one of just three candidates and accepted the full-time position after six weeks and two games as the interim head coach.
That's how she became just the eighth women's national team coach in some 30 years -- Heinrichs is one of the others, incidentally, and was part of the hiring committee as technical director.
"We think Jill has got all of the right credentials, in terms of experience and how she relates to the players," said another member of that committee, United States Soccer Federation president Sunil Gulati. "She gets top marks in all the work she's doing on the technical side with all of our programs over the last several years."
"We are very, very confident in her abilities to lead the team forward and the marching orders are pretty straightforward," added Gulati. "And that's success next summer in Canada [at the Women's World Cup] and in Rio [de Janeiro at the Summer Olympics] a year later."
"I know the expectation," said Ellis. "When you work for U.S. Soccer, it is about winning gold medals and being on the first-place podium."
Whereas Sermanni, upon starting the job in Jan. 2012, had a sea of time stretching out before him, Ellis has much less of it to race through a lengthy to-do list, especially with World Cup qualifiers looming in October. She has to continue rejuvenating what was an aging squad, build depth, establish a core and guide the team towards a more technical style to stay competitive in the rapidly evolving women's game -- all projects Sermanni started but never got to see out. Gulati has made it clear he thinks there's enough time to do all this and win.
Ellis points out that she had coached just about all of her senior players at some stage at the youth level, before she oversaw the team for a few months in her first spell as interim in late 2011. "Having been already immersed in US Soccer, I don't feel disconnected," she said. "I don't feel like I've got to suddenly find players. I feel like I've had my finger on the pulse."
Still, her aspirations for the team are considerable. She is a soccer aesthete. And that increased technicality, she argues, is paramount. The last Women's World Cup showed her that the game had reached "a tipping point."
"It just makes sense, when you've got players as skillful as some of the players that are on this team, playing that way," she said. "Tom, like myself, recognized the demands of the modern game and it really is about keeping the ball and solving bunkering teams and being able to really move the ball and move the opponent."
American soccer is aggressive and high-paced, and so it doesn't produce players who know how to pick apart a team that sits back. That's the next frontier in the battle for World Cups. But instilling that ability takes patience and practice."
"If you want to build and have phases of the game that people talk about, you definitely have to have players understand movement and counter movement," she said. "It requires not just coaching the lines; it's coaching the whole team about finding spaces."
"We calculated that between now and our first qualifying match we'd have 35 days of intermittent training," Ellis added. "It's not a whole lot of time on the field together if you break it down as far as trying to really build in concepts. We're going to have to really maximize our time together."
There is much to do and little time to do it in. Ellis has taken no job that is immense in both expectation and scope. But then she's been getting ready for it for 31 years.
