Rose Lavelle Is Not From Around Here
She is the future of the U.S. women’s national team, she is the pride of Cincinnati, and she has become a minor phenomenon on social media. But Lavelle’s game is anything but local. How did this Midwestern midfielder learn to play like she was from Barcelona?Rose Lavelle Is Not From Around Here
She is the future of the U.S. women’s national team, she is the pride of Cincinnati, and she has become a minor phenomenon on social media. But Lavelle’s game is anything but local. How did this Midwestern midfielder learn to play like she was from Barcelona?
Rose Lavelle is, in the words of her agent, Remy Cherin, “fucking ruthless.” You wouldn’t think it looking at her, standing 5-foot-4 and slight, and you wouldn’t think it speaking to her. Lavelle, the starting center midfielder for the United States women’s national team, is a product of Cincinnati. She’s Midwest nice. Sweet, sometimes shy—the type to give a little smile to strangers when they pass in the street. The term Lavelle uses is “extroverted introvert.” Her best friend, she’s said many times, is her white-and-tan English bulldog, Wilma Jean Wrinkles. Lavelle hates confrontation. Like, really hates it. Which leads me to realize, a couple of minutes into our conversation in July, that Lavelle might also hate personal questions. Or interviews in general. Though she’d never tell me that. It would be much too confrontational. “I’m not really ballsy at all,” Lavelle says, before realizing that’s not entirely true. “In my normal life.”
Most Americans tend to have an intermittent relationship with women’s soccer. They don’t call regularly, but when the World Cup or Olympics come round every few years, they’re at the door with roses. While the intensity of interest wanes outside major tournaments (the Boston Breakers, who selected Lavelle first overall in the 2017 NWSL draft out of Wisconsin, folded after the season), the USWNT’s popularity is persistent. Lavelle made her World Cup debut in June, a little over a month before we meet. The United States won it all, as they’re wont to do, defeating the Netherlands 2-0 in the final. Lavelle, 24, isn’t exactly new to the national team. Her first match was in March 2017. But she stepped out on the world stage in France—scoring three goals on seven shots on target, and dazzling a global audience with her array of feints, jukes, step-overs, and straight-up magic tricks. Alongside household names like Rapinoe and Morgan, Lavelle was an unknown. By the time the confetti fell in July, she was one of them.
With an iconic goal in a World Cup final, and an iconic goal celebration to go along with it, Rose Lavelle is in line to become the next face of American soccer, following in the cleated footsteps of icons like Mia Hamm and Abby Wambach. But stylistically, Lavelle doesn’t fit tradition. American soccer is stereotyped as bullish and authoritative. Lavelle’s footwork is steeped in skill and sophistication. She is usually the smallest player on the field, much too small to body her opponent. Lavelle beats them—sometimes, mobs of them—before they can reach her. She is calculating, throwing off defenders with acute direction changes, while also creative. Watching her is like watching a 90-minute trick candle: They rush, she retreats. They swipe, she sidesteps. They think they’ve snuffed her, she flickers again. Ask the Dutch: It’s ruthless stuff.
Lavelle is a Cincinnati kid who plays like she came through Barcelona’s famed La Masia academy. Her one-on-one play has been likened to Lionel Messi’s, her craftiness to Zinedine Zidane’s, her stride to Real Madrid and to Germany midfielder Toni Kroos, and her ability to rampage through defenders to England legend Paul Gascoigne. She is a matador with the ball at her feet. The comparisons may seem unbelievable, considering Lavelle’s nationality, until you see her play.
In the 69th minute of the World Cup final, Lavelle scored the last goal of the tournament. The sequence was objectively beautiful: She skated from the center circle to the penalty area unbothered, split the Dutch backline outside the box, tapped the ball, and fired away with the legally registered weapon formerly known as her left foot. Some 20 minutes later, the United States won its fourth World Cup. Lavelle was given the Bronze Ball, the award for the third-most-outstanding player of the tournament. She left France a world champion, a budding superstar, and an enigma. Where did Lavelle’s game come from?
Ten days after winning the World Cup, Lavelle is in a Marriott conference room in Cincinnati. She was born and raised here, where the Midwest coalesces with the tip of the South. Geographically, Cincinnatians are Midwesterners. But there’s a hint of Southern influence, characteristics from each bleeding into each other like watercolor. It’s distinctively Cincinnatian. That’s Lavelle, whose long, chocolate hair swings in a ponytail behind her as she walks up to say hello. Gray New Balance sneakers break up her otherwise all-black attire, a very Professional Athlete™ ensemble of workout tights and a T-shirt.
Lavelle has a full day of appearances ahead. It’s been a busy two weeks. People want USWNT content, and they especially want Lavelle. The media obligations that follow a world championship are all-consuming. So is the commitment to celebrating it. Looking through the portal of backup keeper Ashlyn Harris’s social media, the USWNT’s post-Cup celebrations were the party of the summer. They partied in the locker room, they partied at the bar, on the bar, over the Atlantic Ocean, atop parade floats, under fireworks, by the pool, in the pool, and on a yacht sailing the East River. Name a body of water, and I’ll bet Megan Rapinoe inadvertently poured champagne in it. It was a rowdy, boozy, well-documented, and well-deserved days-long celebration. Lavelle was there for each leg, champagne goggles on.
I ask if she’s used to the attention. Lavelle twists her Claddagh ring on her index finger. “It’s weird,” she says, “I feel like you get in this position, and I would think that I’d feel different, or more important. But I just feel the same. When people want to talk to me, or people want pictures or autographs, I’m just like, ‘Why?’”
Lavelle is solicited for selfies and signings everywhere now, but especially here, in Cincinnati. She’s happy to be home, happy to return to her old haunts (like the Chipotle on Loveland Madeira Road) for meet-and-greets. Lavelle lives in Maryland now as a member of the Washington Spirit, but she likes to joke that she vacations in Cincinnati.
People here speak her language. They don’t think she has an accent. They also like their chili runny, Cincinnati-style. And, like Lavelle, the first question they ask strangers is, “Where did you go to high school?” (In New York, people ask what you do. In Los Angeles, people ask where you’re from. Here, they ask where you went to high school. It’s a big-town, small-city thing. Over two days, I will be asked the question once by Lavelle, once by her mom, Janet, three times by parents during an hour-long event, once by a police officer at a FC Cincinnati game, and twice at an Enterprise Rent-A-Car.)
Then there’s the actual language. You’ll hear “ope,” which is said after bumping into someone, daily. Directly translated, ope is Midwestern for excuse me. “I always say that,” Lavelle says, turning her mouth into a shocked and extremely sorry “O” to act out how it’s used. “Like, ope! Sorry!” It doesn’t matter whether they’re running into you, or you’re running into them: An Ohioan will ope you. A little over-apologizing never hurt.
On Friday, the mayor of Cincinnati throws a ceremony in Lavelle’s honor. We’re at Fountain Square, a block in the city’s business district downtown near the Ohio River. It’s crowded and colorful. Red kits, white signs, blue Sharpie. The audience is made up of little girls and boys, their parents, people on their lunch breaks, teenagers, suits, older admirers, all holding items for Lavelle to sign. On stage, Mayor John Cranley announces that today, July 19, will always be Rose Lavelle Day in Cincinnati. She’s given a key to the city. When it’s her turn to speak, Lavelle begins her speech with an apology. “Sorry, I have my phone,” she says, holding up her right hand and showing the phone in it. “I’m not used to speaking in front of all of you all.” (“All of you all,” by the way, is just “y’all” unfurled. Credit that one to Southern influence.)
Less than a mile walk from Fountain Square is Paul Brown Stadium, where the Cincinnati Bengals play. In 2004, Lavelle was there to watch the USWNT play New Zealand in a friendly. She was 9. They were gods. Hamm, Brandi Chastain, and most of the fabled 1999 team were traveling the country to celebrate their gold medal in the Athens Olympics. The year before, they had lost the 2003 World Cup. Lavelle remembers responding to that loss well: “I went in my bunk bed and cried for the rest of the night. My mom came in to check on me and I was like, ‘I just want to be left alone.’”
Fifteen years later, Lavelle is on her own victory tour. Following their victory in France—the second straight World Cup for the U.S. women—the USWNT would play a series of friendlies across the States, including a 3-0 win over Ireland in Los Angeles, and a 4-0 celebration over Portugal in Philadelphia. They play Portugal again in Minnesota on Tuesday.
But she wasn’t groomed to be a world champion. Her parents, Janet and Marty, didn’t know much about soccer in the beginning. Being a soccer mom and soccer dad wasn’t part of the plan. Lavelle never played on a youth national team. She never even tried out for one. The coaches might not have given Lavelle a second look even if she had. She weighed around 80 pounds entering high school. Colleges weren’t really looking at her, either, she says. But there was never a point when Lavelle considered a future that didn’t involve the United States women’s national team. Lavelle can’t communicate exactly how she knew it would happen. “I always struggle to find words to say it.” She tries anyway: “I just thought it into existence.”
Lavelle first saw European soccer through an old cathode-ray tube television. It was 1997, and Fox Sports World had just launched. Janet would put it on at night, waiting for Marty to get home from work. “It was just me and her,” Janet says. “All the time, that’s what we put on. Soccer.”
I wish I could tell you this was the origin story for Lavelle’s silky, continetal playing style. That she absorbed the footwork of Juventus’s Zidane or the passing of Manchester United’s David Beckham before she could speak in full sentences. But the truth is, Lavelle doesn’t even remember watching. She was too young, so young that her age was still being measured in months. Not to mention, Janet adds, the TV quality “sucked.”
If you want early signs of what Lavelle would become, instead turn to all the times she wouldn’t stay put. At 8 weeks old, Lavelle rolled over. Most infants, even overachieving infants with overachieving muscles, take months longer. No car seat could contain Lavelle as a tot. She saw straps and seat belts as suggestions, not restraints. When the other kids were barely holding on to the monkey bars in preschool, Lavelle was swinging, reversing, trapezing. Flying became her hallmark: In elementary school track and field, the tall girls dominated the long jump. Lavelle, a fraction of their size, beat them all.
Lavelle was 5 years old when she decided to give soccer a try. (Her decision.) Janet signed her up for a YMCA coed league. Lavelle scored in her first game, and as if that weren’t peculiar enough, her reaction to the goal was cutthroat. She didn’t celebrate at all. Not even a smile. In fact, Lavelle tried to keep a straight face. She stuck her tongue in her cheek to keep her cool. “It was this taste of, ‘That was awesome. But don’t let them see how awesome this is,’” Janet says. Just like that, a serious footballer was born.
Even back then, Lavelle was the smallest. It’s a tough break in those early leagues to not be one of the bigger kids. There is no strategy at that stage beyond kicking the ball. It doesn’t even have to be the right direction. Because everyone’s prerogative is the same, the two teams form a singular pack. They move as a unit, chasing the ball like a clowder of cats chase a laser pointer. Lavelle began to hang on the perimeter of the herd. The ball always eventually popped out, she realized, and when it did, she struck. “I guess you could say,” Janet says, “she always knew about the space.”
Lavelle was 8 when Neil Bradford came into her life. It was time to join a club team, and she landed on Bradford’s. “He was this little English guy,” Lavelle says. “I always say he’s the reason that I fell in love with the game.” Bradford, who died of cancer three years ago, coached by preaching footwork. Lavelle—like anyone her height and weight—needed to perfect certain techniques to avoid defenders knocking her off the ball. At the time, these methods were rarely taught in the States. The Englishman told Lavelle not to worry about her size. He introduced her to tactics that hew closer to the European game—maintaining her field of vision with the ball at her feet, essentially problem-solving while playing. Lavelle called them her tricks.
“She said to me one time, ‘Mom, I fooled them. That’s how I got around that goal. I tricked them.’”
The tricks became so advanced that Bradford showed videos of Lavelle’s play in his coaching seminars. One such video, a 2006 clip, surfaced during the World Cup this July. (She had already become a fan favorite by then, making the clip extra charming.) In it, 11-year-old Lavelle performs a few of Bradford’s take-home challenges in her Northern Cincinnati backyard. A foot touch, a knee touch, a chest touch, a shoulder touch, a head touch, a push-up with the ball on her back. For the finale, Lavelle attempts a bicycle kick. Her left foot connects in the air, and the ball bounces between net-less goal posts for a goal. It’s the only time Lavelle, 11, smiles at the camera.
At that time, Lavelle was so slight, some parents of other players greeted her with apprehension. They wanted to know how old she was, really. Or if she was someone’s little sister. Most of all, they asked if she was going to be OK out there. The reaction to her size was cyclical. Every game, every year, and every league, parents couldn’t believe how tiny Lavelle was. And by the end of every game, every year, and every league, they couldn’t believe what a terror she was. Marty used to sit on the other team’s side of the bleachers just to hear them talk. He’ll tell you that he knew it from the start: Since Lavelle was little, he never saw anyone better. Janet agrees that her daughter was always the best kid on the field, but thought about it only on a year-to-year basis. In middle school, she was the best one. High school, the best one. College, the best one. “I knew she was good,” Janet says, “but good-good? I didn’t know.”
The day before the World Cup semifinal against England, Lavelle made a prop bet. Her agent, Cherin, and his wife, Megan, were expecting a daughter in December. “2 goals,” he texted Lavelle, “and you name the baby.”
“Omg deal,” Lavelle responded a couple of hours later.
The line should’ve been set at a hat trick, which is no knock on the English defending. If you watched Lavelle in the weeks leading into the game, you’d agree. Might as well make it as fair a wager as possible, especially since names have a habit of sticking, and the last time Lavelle partook in a christening, it involved the word “Wrinkles.”
To the bookie’s credit, Lavelle’s playing time in the tournament was limited. She averaged 68 minutes over four matches before the semifinal, and rested for the duration against Chile in the group stage. USWNT coach Jill Ellis made the substitutions with load management in mind. Multiple hamstring injuries had haunted Lavelle over the past couple of years, and hamstring injuries love to linger.
The first muscle tear came in June 2017, during Lavelle’s first year with the USWNT. At Wisconsin, her injuries were minor. She’d strain her thigh, tweak her calf. Hamstring tears are more dangerous. But Lavelle returned the following September, for a friendly against New Zealand held in, of all places, Cincinnati. Her clean bill of health quickly expired: Later that fall, Lavelle tore a different muscle in her hamstring. This recovery took many months. Finally, in February 2018, Lavelle felt it was time. Then, yet another sharp pain came, and she underwent yet another MRI. Lavelle had torn a third muscle.
It wasn’t until the next summer that Lavelle was cleared to play for the national team. After so much time away, she returned a hesitant player. The passivity in her “normal life” now seemed to extend to the field. She was no longer confidently shepherding the ball. Her passes were made prematurely. “I wanted to cater to the others,” Lavelle says. “They were great players, and I was like, ‘They need the ball, not me.’” But time and a team captain eventually helped her return to form. Rapinoe told Lavelle again and again that she was helping the team only if she was playing at her best. By the World Cup qualifiers, Lavelle had earned back her starting spot.
In April 2019, her World Cup was in jeopardy again. Lavelle hurt her foot during a friendly against Australia, with the World Cup less than three months away. It wasn’t her hamstring, and it wasn’t as bad as it initially seemed, but behind closed doors, the team was suddenly unsure whether Lavelle would be able to participate in France. After she didn’t dress for the Belgium game three days later, Cherin flew to meet Lavelle in Los Angeles.
“She wasn’t taking my calls,” he says, “and I am like, ‘Rose, I flew all of the way out across the fucking country.’” At one in the morning, Cherin went to the team hotel. “You need to talk to someone about this,” Cherin says he told Lavelle. Finally, she came downstairs. They talked in the lobby for an hour, about soccer, about life, about nothing. “She was like, ‘Great, I am going to miss the fucking World Cup after all of this.’” After all the injuries, and the recoveries, and the injuries, and the recoveries, the thought was devastating.
The injury scare, for once, turned out to be a false alarm. A few days later, Lavelle was fine. It’s the kind of miracle that makes a person gracious enough to let someone outside the family name his baby. Alas, Lavelle didn’t score in the semifinal against England, despite two shots on goal. She played just 65 minutes before Ellis called her to the sideline. Better luck with the next kid.
The next time I see Lavelle, it’s in California. It’s August, and the USWNT is at the Rose Bowl. This is the beginning of the victory tour, and this is hallowed ground. The last time the U.S. played at the Rose Bowl was 1999, when Chastain decided the World Cup final with a penalty kick. It’s sacred ground for the USWNT, especially that upper right corner of the net.
In a half-hour, the women will practice for the first time since the tournament. They’ll take a team picture, then insist on “a goofy one!,” and shoot promotional videos. But first, media availability. I try to catch Lavelle twice. The first time, she’s surrounded by a seven-reporter-deep wall. The second, I’m beat by a giant TV camera. It takes one of Lavelle’s earliest tactics—moving far outside the hoard—to finally reach her.
“Hey again,” she says, smiling. Lavelle’s had a little time to relax since our Cincinnati interview. Those priceless feet are in appropriately expensive all-black Gucci sandals, her nails are painted bubble-gum pink, and the sides of her shorts are tucked into her slides. I have to make this quick, and I run through the things I forgot to ask the first time: Is she homesick for Cincinnati, does she agree that she’s ruthless, and does she want to play in a European league one day? The verdicts: always homesick; eh, sort of ruthless; and yes, she does. “It’s two different styles of play. It’d be cool to go over there and learn from that, and experience that.” Team PR is eyeing us, and the clock, and us, and the clock, and finally, Lavelle is whisked away. So I don’t get the chance to mention the irony in her answer.
It’s an open practice, and not just for the media. Fans are also invited. They begin piling into the Rose Bowl after a couple of minutes, confined to one of the sections on the right wing. The practice is light, as expected, but the women go through a few exercises. When a drill sends Lavelle near the fans’ side, they go wild. It’s like they want the attacker to know they’re all in on her. She’s one of their favorites now. Her game screams Europe, her personality is all Ohio. But these days, everyone is ready to claim Lavelle.