By Jeff Faraudo
#WCChoops Columnist | ARCHIVES
2020 WCC HALL OF HONOR PROFILES
 
Jerry Smith, legendary coach of the Santa Clara women’s soccer program, first laid eyes on future two-time Olympic gold medalist Aly Wagner when she was an 8-year-old attending the university’s summer soccer camp for kids.
 
Asked when he first saw something special in Wagner, Smith said, “When she was 8.”
 
Smith wasn’t joking. “You don’t know that kid’s going to be able to run well at 16,” he explained, “but when you see someone have that much passion for mastering their craft, you just know.
 
“The great players at some point have that passion, whether it’s at 4 or 8 or 16 or 20. That’s what Aly had.”
 
Wagner didn’t fall short of Smith’s vision. She won two national player of the year honors at Presentation High in San Jose, scored the game-winning goal in Santa Clara’s 2001 NCAA championship victory over North Carolina, played on two World Cup third-place teams and last year became the first woman on a TV broadcast team to call a men’s FIFA World Cup game.
 
Now 39, Wagner is Santa Clara’s 2020 inductee into the West Coast Conference Hall of Honor.
 
“You feel grateful and it’s incredibly unexpected. I feel like I've passed that phase of my life,” said Wagner, the mother of four, including 6-year-old triplet boys. “It’s a cool reminder of where I've been.”
 
Wagner has been just about everywhere the sport can take you. She acknowledges much of it was spawned by her approach to the game. But she stops short of echoing her former coach’s assessment that her path to great things already was laid out when she was in grade school.
 
“Absolutely not. I just knew I loved it and wanted to get better,” Wagner said. “It was more about mastering skills and things I saw that I wanted to be able to do.”
 
That’s really not far from what Smith meant. He and his wife Brandi Chastain are friends with Wayne Gretzky and his wife, and Smith tells the story about how Gretzky’s friends would ask about going to the movies or shooting baskets at the park when they were kids.
 
“You know what would be more fun?” Gretzky would tell his friends. “Shooting pucks.”
 
“That’s what I saw in Aly. The most fun she would have as a youngster involved the soccer ball. That’s abnormal. That’s unusual. That’s unbalanced. That’s what often-times the great ones have, and it never stopped.”
 
Wagner didn’t immediately see that in herself. “Later I realized I was weird,” she said. “Early on I wouldn't have called it a sacrifice, but when I look back I made tons of sacrifices that helped make me a better player.
 
“My social life ended up taking a back seat. But it never felt like a sacrifice. It was more of a badge of honor, knowing I was doing things my teammates were not doing. It was how I needed to exist in the world. I actually got a tremendous amount of guilt if I didn't make the right decisions.”
 
The first big decision young Aly had to make was picking a college. As the Parade magazine and Gatorade national high school player of the year in 1997, she had her pick of schools, starting with perennial NCAA powerhouse North Carolina. Her parents “lovingly” pressured her to go to Notre Dame.
 
“In the end, I wanted to do something different. I wanted to win a first national championship. I didn't want to win North Carolina’s 14th or whatever it was at the time,” she said. “I liked Notre Dame a lot, but it was really cold and they had already won a national championship.
 
“I just really gravitated to the way Jerry saw the game, the way he taught players. The class of players he was bringing in, I thought they were the next wave. I thought we could do something special together.”
 
So she picked the Broncos and promptly announced her intention to bring a national championship to a small private school in the WCC.
 
“Thanks for that,” Smith recalled thinking at the time. “And she did it. She was as good as anyone we’ve had.”
 
Smith said Wagner’s exhaustive preparation made the ball itself almost an afterthought.  “Most players are thinking about manipulating the soccer ball,” he explained. “Aly never thought about the ball. Whatever the moment was, Aly had done it 500,000 times in her head. Her eyes and her mind played the game.
 
“I always compared Aly to Steve Nash. Steph Curry is that way. He doesn’t think about the basketball. That’s Aly.”
 
Wagner explains the same thing in somewhat different terms. “I would say 
what separated me is my spatial awareness is different than most,” she said. “I always loved geometry and I feel like I saw spaces and pathways and angles. I think that was my greatest gift.”
 
Wagner sat out her freshman year in 1998 at Santa Clara while rehabbing a torn ACL. Healthy a year later, Wagner helped the Broncos to a 23-0 start before losing 1-0 to Notre Dame in the NCAA semifinals. 
 
In 2001, Santa Clara reached the top. Wagner scored the winning goal in four NCAA tournament games, including in the 1-0 victory over North Carolina in the title game.
 
She says winning the NCAA crown sits alongside her two Olympic gold medals as high points of her playing career.
 
“The camaraderie you build with your collegiate team so much more organic and authentic,” she said. “The closeness I felt with my national championship team, and to score the winning goal.”
 
A two-time first-team All-American, Wagner won the 2001 Honda Award as the top female soccer player in the country, and the Hermann Trophy as collegiate player of the year in 2002.
 
She scored 39 career goals and had 49 assists for the Broncos, and saved her best for the big moments, with postseason totals of nine goals and nine assists.
 
A member of the national team starting in 1998, Wagner made 131 appearances in international games, scoring 21 goals with 42 assists. She played for third-place World Cup teams in 2003 and 2007, and as a member of Olympic gold medal squads in 2004 and 2008, although she had double-hernia surgery early in ’08 and played in just one group-stage game in Beijing.
 
“On the podium with the gold medal around your neck, you stand up there and see every decision you made on the way,” she said.
 
Her playing career now over, Wagner continues to impact the sport. InStyle magazine in 2019 listed her alongside the likes of Michelle Obama and Simone Biles among “The Badass 50,” women who are changing the world. 
 
That was in response to her working as an analyst for the broadcast of Iran’s 1-0 victory over Morocco in the 2018 FIFA World Cup — the first woman to help call a men’s game on the sport’s biggest stage. 
 
“That experience was probably the hardest thing I’ve done, outside of raising triplets,” Wagner said, citing the detailed preparation and intense scrutiny that came with the assignment. “You’re putting yourself out there. You’re incredibly vulnerable. But it was also maybe the most rewarding thing I’ve done.”
 
When Fox Sports tweeted congratulations afterward for her making history, Wagner said, “That’s when it hit, how it was going to open doors for women.”
 
Jerry Smith isn’t surprised in the least that Wagner continues to raise the ceiling. He recalled seeing an old interview with Kobe Bryant after his death in the helicopter crash on January 26, where Bryant told the story about a fan wishing for him to have a son to carry on his basketball legacy.
 
Daughter Gianna, who also died in the crash, interrupted the conversation and confidently made the case for herself. “I’ve got this,” she insisted.
 
Said Smith, “That’s Aly Wagner.”