University of Georgia Athletics
Golden Memories After 20 Years
August 01, 2016 | Soccer
By John Frierson
UGAAA Staff Writer
If you were in Sanford Stadium that night 20 years ago -- Aug. 1, 1996 -- and there were more than 74,000 of us, the memories are probably still pretty fresh and powerful. Golden, in fact.
Two decades have passed, though that hardly seems possible, since the U.S. women's Olympic soccer team stepped inside a hedge-less Sanford Stadium and swept us off our feet. The 1996 Olympics in Atlanta were the first to feature women's soccer and what a debut it was, especially with the semifinals and final being played in Athens.
The U.S. squad -- featuring legends in the making like Mia Hamm and Brandi Chastain -- beat China, 2-1, to win gold. And did so in front of a crowd of 76,481, then reportedly the largest crowd ever to watch a women's soccer game. Some stellar ball movement set up Tiffeny Milbrett's game-winning goal in the second half, with Hamm feeding Joy Fawcett, who hit an open Milbrett in position for what proved to be a golden strike.
From the Washington Post's game story: "The roar that went up must have matched any heard by this stadium's customary home team, the University of Georgia's football Bulldogs."
That's about right, actually. Cheering a Bulldogs victory is a powerful and wonderful thing, but it may not match the joy and elation of seeing Team USA win Olympic gold -- in a stadium that feels a lot like home, less than a mile from your house. As a spectator, there watching with friends and family, it was impossible to not feel part of the whole thing.
Maybe that's because when you're watching the Olympics -- unlike a regular-season college football game, even a super-special Bulldogs win -- you feel like you're watching history in the making, which the U.S. women certainly did that night. It was a shared experience, one we're so used to seeing on television from thousands of miles away from the Games themselves, which is perhaps why the memories are still fresh, still capable of producing goosebumps 20 years later.
Former Georgia football coach and athletic director Vince Dooley was there, of course. He was also in Tokyo in 1990, with Billy Payne, president and CEO of the Atlanta Committee for Olympic Games, when the International Olympic Committee announced at Atlanta would be hosting in 1996. Payne played for Dooley in the late 1960s.
"When Atlanta won, I remember seeing Billy the next morning," Dooley said. "I went by his suite and said, `Don't forget Athens,' and he said, `I won't.'"
Six years and a lot of work later, including the removal of the beloved hedges from the stadium so that the field could be the proper width, Dooley watched as the U.S. women won gold in front of a massive crowd. Georgia's Stegeman Coliseum also hosted several days of volleyball and rhythmic gymnastics, but the soccer was the Athens showcase event.
"It worked out great, the women won and that was quite a crowd and celebration," he said. "An incredible crowd."
Also there that night was a man who nearly two decades later would be hired as Georgia's women's soccer coach, Billy Lesesne. Hired by J. Reid Parker Director of Athletics Greg McGarity in December 2014, Lesesne was at the time the men's and women's soccer coach at his alma mater, Erskine College, in Due West, S.C., about 20 miles south of Anderson.
Lesesne said he was busy working soccer camps that summer, but he wasn't about to miss seeing some of the men's and women's matches in Athens, including that women's gold-medal game.
"That was amazing," he said. "It was a very historic moment in women's soccer. ... Even now, just when you walk by the stadium and look down at the field, you see the Olympics (in your mind) and picture soccer in Sanford Stadium. The notion of that, now, is pretty incredible."
The U.S. women first caught our attention by winning the very first Women's World Cup in 1991, but that was played in China (in front of 65,000). This were here, in our backyard (almost literally for some of us), in the same stadium where our heroes did their things in the red and black. This was different, this was about the red, white and blue.
According to the U.S. National Team's website, to this day two of the six largest crowds to ever watch women's soccer in the United States showed up at Sanford Stadium during the 1996 Olympics. The gold-medal game remains the third largest and the sixth largest is from the semifinals, when 64,196 showed up to watch the U.S. beat Norway 2-1.
"It was a great atmosphere and you saw so many people, so many kids, walking around hours before the game, just soaking it all in," Lesesne said. "You really got the sense that this was something special and the start of something special, like `this is coming and the sport is really taking off here,' and from a youth movement I think it certainly has."
The soccer lines at the stadium are long, long gone, but the memories are as fresh as ever for those of us lucky enough to be there.
John Frierson is the staff writer for the UGA Athletic Association and curator of the ITA Men's Tennis Hall of Fame. You can find his work at: http://www.georgiadogs.com/ot/frierson-files.html. He's also on Twitter: @FriersonFiles and @ITAHallofFame.