The game of football is already steeped in rich tradition and history, but the sport's annals are about to contain a new chapter.
When the United States National Team touches down in Stockholm, Sweden, for the start of the International Federation of American Football (IFAF) Women's World Championship (June 27-July 3), it will be a part of the first-ever international women's American football competition - a tournament comprised of six countries: the U.S., Canada, Germany, Austria, Sweden and Finland. Forty-five of America's best women's tackle players will have less than two weeks to mesh into a cohesive unit, and it is up to Team USA Head Coach John Konecki and his staff to oversee the process.
"We're going to take 45 individuals and turn them into a team and try to take the philosophy of any team that I've ever coached - and that's we don't have any superstars," Konecki, the head coach of the IWFL's Chicago Force, said. "We have 11 good people on offense, 11 good people on defense and 11 good people on special teams, and we win together."
"The biggest thing is that it's a lot of individuals, a lot of stars who have to meld together and become a team," Special Teams Coordinator and Defensive Backs Coach Mark McLaughlin added. "Team USA - this country started as a melting pot. We have a melting pot. We've got to come up with a good soup is what we need to do."
Preparations begin in earnest next week amid the Texas heat as the team will travel to Austin to fine tune its attack on the field and come together off it. While Konecki and assistant coaches Jennifer Huston, Anthony Stone and McLaughlin have planned activities to facilitate strong bonds among the women - many of whom do not know each other - the nature of football itself will also take its course.
"It's real easy out on a football field ... to develop camaraderie on either side of the ball," Konecki said. "Obviously your first competition is against the defense or the offense, depending on what side of the ball you're on. So there's that kinship among those players that develops right away, just on the field.
"Then we're going to do something a little bit different with this group," he added about his non-football plans for creating team chemistry. "We're putting a thing in place that I'm calling the success period, and that's at the end of the night when we're done with practice that the group will get together and we're going to just do some team-building activities, some mental imagery stuff and really just pose the question, 'What do you want to be remembered as? Do you want to be that original Dream Team or like that USA basketball team that barely medaled [in 2004]?'"
With the clear goal of a gold medal in place, Team USA will also spend time visualizing the culmination of their work both on the field in the dry Texas heat and in the much cooler Swedish air.
"I'm going to actually have these ladies write - if ESPN were interviewing you, what would you be saying? How would you be politically correct? You're going to be gracious, and all this type of stuff," McLaughlin said. "When they walk away, there'll be a bond with these ladies. They will be the Michael Jordan, the original Dream Team."
When it comes to the X's and O's of the game, Konecki plans on running two-a-day practices during camp - one in the morning between breakfast and lunch and the other in the late afternoon between lunch and dinner - designed to avoid the hottest parts of the day. The evenings will be reserved for team and positional meetings and the success period. Even the technical aspects of solidifying a team built to win will need to come together at an accelerated pace.
"We are charged with a very short period of time," Konecki said, "but we're going to be together from essentially - as a team - from 9 a.m. till almost midnight every day."
"We're walking a fine line between how do we physically get everybody on the same page functioning as a team and how do we be sure we're not running the legs off our ladies?" McLaughlin added. "We don't want to get to Sweden jet-lagged. We don't want to get to Sweden and be a tired team. Hopefully they're reporting in good physical shape."
Beyond the overall development of Team USA in the days before the World Championship, Konecki 's squad will head to Europe as part of something with far-reaching implications for the future of the sport.
"This could be - and I have said this right from the very beginning - this may be the incident that puts [women's football] on the map," McLaughlin said. "Depending on how the league itself - the IWFL - or Team USA, depending on how we can start getting the word out about this, then this may be something that puts the league on the map."
A resident of Wisconsin, McLaughlin has gone as far as contacting Russ Feingold and Herb Cole, the state's U.S. Senators, and Tammy Baldwin, McLaughlin's district's Congresswoman, to drum up support. Feingold sent a letter of good luck to the team, and in a dream scenario, McLaughlin hopes a gold medal might result in a White House visit. Indeed, the international event has national ramifications for Team USA.
"The World Championship is a major milestone in women's football," Konecki said. "My hope is that stateside the game continues to grow and gets more publicity and that people realize that this isn't a fluke or a niche sort of thing. ... The goal of USA Football is to continue to grow the sport internationally and to be good ambassadors of the United States while we're over there playing the game of football."
