The Man Watching
Anson Dorrance and the University of North Carolina Women's Soccer Dynasty
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4.3 • 32 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The Man Watching: Anson Dorrance and the University of North Carolina Women's Soccer Dynasty is the authorized biography of a fascinating head coach and the more than 200 young women he inspired to believe that anything is possible.
Updated to include the story of the Tar Heels's 2008 and 2009 NCAA championships.
As coach of UNC's women's soccer team, Anson Dorrance has won more than 90 percent of his games, groomed far more All-Americans, and captured more NCAA championships than any other coach in the sport ten times over. Author Tim Crothers spent four years interviewing Dorrance and Tar Heels players from every era, along with players and coaches from rival college programs, to create the most comprehensive, intimate, and unfiltered look ever inside the most prolific dynasty in college athletics.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Phenomenal stats a .938 winning average, 21 national championships in the last 29 years including nine titles in a row support effusive encomiums in this boisterous hagiography of America's greatest collegiate minor-sports coach. Former Sports Illustrated writer Crothers (Hard Work) makes the college coach's eternal conundrum how to motivate without cash payment into a treatise on difference feminism. As Dorrance struggles to transpose his own win-or-die fanaticism into a feminine register, he learns to cope with crying jags, organizes rose ceremonies, and ditches bloodthirsty sloganeering about "the gift of fury" in favor of Rilke poems in his motivational speeches. With such methods he manages to impart a brutally competitive style of smash-mouth soccer that's as vicious during scrimmages as it is on game day. (" Help you? Help yourself, bitch!'" sneers one lady Tar Heel at a teammate's pleas for mercy.) Crothers's narrative can be equally grueling; the text reprints Dorrance's pep talks and testimonials to his leadership for pages on end, and includes an entire chapter of the coach's post-9/11 pens es. Still, the jockish lan of Dorrance and his players makes this off-beat, all-guts-and-little-glory sports saga an often entertaining and occasionally uplifting read. Photos.
