Though it has been 10 years since U.S. women’s national team members Abby Wambach and Heather Mitts last dressed out in orange and blue, memories of their time in Gainesville flood back in an instant.
Immediately, UF’s national championship win in 1998 comes to mind, followed closely by the friendships they made as teammates building a new program.
Even the “awesome,” 25-cent drafts at Calico Jack’s on Tuesday nights, as Wambach recalls, seem as if they were enjoyed yesterday.
“I was driving around and I’m like, ‘That wasn’t there, that wasn’t there,’” Mitts said. “It’s changed a little bit, but at the same time, a lot of it’s very familiar and obviously it’s still an amazing place to be.”
Perhaps the most recognizable aspect of their college days, however, was the crowd of 3,728 on hand — the largest in four years at Pressly Stadium — to greet them Friday night during No. 13 Florida’s 3-0 win against Texas Tech.
With the 2010 opener drawing just 1,932 people, the last time the Gators started the season with the same buzz around the program was in 1999, when more than 4,700 showed for the first home game against Florida State.
To begin that season, the summer heroics of the famous World Cup title over China were still fresh in the nation’s memory.
“I was 19 years old sitting here in Gainesville when the women won the World Cup in ’99 and never in my wildest dreams did I think that I would have a moment similar to that,” Wambach said.
Much like her sophomore year, Wambach has seen a spike in attention toward women’s soccer, which is even more impressive to the 31-year-old considering the U.S. fell short of winning the Cup this year.
Following the July 17 final against Japan, Mitts and Wambach saw attendance skyrocket 88.8 percent in Women’s Professional Soccer, where they play for the Atlanta Beat and magicJack, respectively.
“We, as a national team, hope that it transcends all the way down the ladder,” Wambach said. “We want people talking about women’s soccer because, truthfully, it’s not nearly as popular in this country as we think it could be, and I think we did something special in Germany that got people talking about it.”
For Mitts, making the sport relevant year-round and not just every four years starts at the collegiate level with the type of work UF coach Becky Burleigh does to produce international-caliber players.
“Obviously Title IX has a lot to do with that,” Mitts said. “Just having the opportunity for so many girls to come here and to play college soccer and for us to have a league now, all of this is a part of the result of how far soccer has come here in the United States.”
Contact John Boothe at jboothe@alligator.org.
