As a former defender for the U.S. women’s national soccer team, Staci Wilson has played for some of the best coaches in the world. Now, after leading The Pine School’s men’s soccer team to back-to-back state championships, she’s coaching a new pre-professional women’s soccer squad, the Tallahassee Reckoning.
“With interest in women’s sports at an all-time high, I wanted to do my part,” says Wilson, who worked in Tallahassee from May through June before returning to coach South Florida club teams.
And there’s no doubt she will, given her playing and coaching résumé. At 5 feet, 1 inch tall, Wilson was never the biggest player on a team, but she had what her former college coach, University of North Carolina’s (UNC) Anson Dorrance, called “the gift of fury.”
“When you played against Staci you thought she [was] psychotic … and she’d do nothing to cause you to think any differently,” Dorrance wrote in his 2005 book, The Vision of a Champion: Advice and Inspiration from the World’s Most Successful Women’s Soccer Coach.
As a child, Wilson was a competitive tomboy, and she loved the freedom she felt when she played soccer. Her mother signed her up for a recreational league team, and it didn’t take long for Wilson to be promoted to a select (or travel) squad; she remained with that squad until she joined the Olympic development program and began playing for UNC.
Wilson was one of the nation’s top-ranked players at the time. A coach nicknamed her Buzzsaw, and she says she lived up to the moniker by cultivating “a playing persona that was rock solid and invincible and never showed pain.”
This phase of her life was a whirlwind, Wilson says. She was named the National Freshman of the Year in 1994 before training with the national team for that year’s World Cup, only to return to Chapel Hill for another season. In 1996, she celebrated her twentieth birthday while competing for—and winning—the first-ever Olympic gold medal in women’s soccer, on a team that included stars such as Mia Hamm and Brandi Chastain.
“I had been pushing for so long, by the time it was over, I had never experienced burnout like that,” she says of her Olympic journey.
Now as a coach, Wilson shares experiences like this to help young players keep things in perspective. After coaching soccer at a Virginia private school, she moved to the Davie area in 2006 and began coaching in South Florida. She also launched Fit for Her Football Inc., which offers soccer training and education to players and coaches around the world.
“I have found a great spot,” she says of her job and life in South Florida. “The grass is always greener when you water it.”
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