Rose Lavelle is a reluctant star. She doesn’t like the spotlight and she’s never been one to seek it out. But, in the end, her team comes first and that’s what makes this all possible.
The when will the olympics be is a question that has been asked for years. It is unknown when the Olympics will occur, but it’s likely to be 2024.
THE CICADAS HAVE ARRIVED AT Rose Lavelle’s wooded childhood home, screaming and clattering about the Cincinnati cul-de-sac. When the doorbell rings, Janet Lavelle, the family’s matriarch, answers and excitedly walks outdoors. She wants to show a squeamish guest around her backyard, which was once the playground for one of the world’s most exciting soccer players, but is now the scene of catastrophe.
She gestures to a clump of red-eyed animals on a tree and says, “Look at this man.” “When my kid was 14, he ate one of them.” On intentionally, of course!
“They waited for seventeen years beneath. This is the gathering.”
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Janet confesses that she used to be terrified of cicadas, but that changed when she had children who needed to play outdoors during the summer. As a result, she was able to move on.
She takes up a cicada and carelessly holds it in her palm, as if it were a pet.
Rose Lavelle, the left-footed marvel for the US Women’s National Team, was only passing through on her way from Manchester City to the Seattle region (and the OL Reign) and then to Tokyo for the Summer Olympics. She’s no longer with us. Lavelle is elusive these days, in part due to her hectic schedule, but partly because she’s still navigating the celebrity that comes with scoring the tournament-winning goal in the 2019 World Cup final two years ago.
It doesn’t appeal to her in the least. It’s a perplexing contradiction: Lavelle’s play is so captivating that it compels you to watch it, yet she wants to direct your attention elsewhere. Her personality is likewise… one-of-a-kind. In February, the midfielder posted a list of things she’s ashamed of for no apparent reason, including utilizing a supermarket cart, going through airport security without shoes, and wearing pants.
Lavelle’s childhood home, a 2,200-square-foot ranch house, provides a glimpse into the life of Team USA’s reluctant superstar. The family’s 9-year-old English bulldog, Wilma Jean Wrinkles, is yawning and slowly moving from the sofa to a leather chair, begging for attention, the polar opposite of Lavelle.
Janet and Marty are in the family room, gazing out over a large green yard with towering oak trees. Their second-youngest daughter used to live in the yard, kicking soccer balls into a rusted-out goal.
She fractured her leg on a swing set out there when she was 5, but she didn’t tell anybody and managed to hide it for at least two days. She was eager to continue playing.
Janet, who comes from a family of 12 siblings and 65 first cousins, believes that each of her four children is “a bit wacky.” She can’t tell whether it’s due to nature or nurture. Janet performs the most of the talking, showing the pet cam/treat feeder that Lavelle uses to keep in touch with Wilma Jean when she’s on the road, and imitating, in a British accent, how her daughter’s Man City colleagues would communicate with Wilma Jean through the app. However, the topic of discussion keeps returning to the cicadas. Marty, the owner of a construction business, is a calm, calculated guy who mainly listens with a few deadpans thrown in for good measure.
He says of the cicadas, “Take as many as you want.”
Lavelle, like her mother, is ecstatic about the 2024 Brood X cicada invasion. They remain up till the wee hours of the morning to watch the cicadas emerge from their shells, cheering them on.
It isn’t in the least bit ridiculous.
Lavelle credits her passion of the game to her childhood coach, Neil Bradford. Bradford passed away in 2016 from cancer. Family Lavelle
THEY HAD AN OLYMPICS WATCH PARTY LAST WEEK AT Rose Lavelle’s former high school, which doesn’t have a monument or shrine dedicated to her since that would be humiliating. More than 100 females crammed into Mount Notre Dame’s auditorium and awoke in the middle of the night to watch the match, which began at 4:30 a.m. ET.
Sweden defeated Team USA 3-0, ending their 44-game winning run. Following that, Kelley O’Hara, a veteran of the USWNT, attempted to motivate the Americans, who are favorites to win gold. She instructed them to be “ruthless.”
Lavelle began the assault three days later against New Zealand, scoring in the ninth minute of a 6-1 win. It was Lavelle’s maiden Olympic goal, and although COVID-19 may have prevented Janet and Marty Lavelle from flying to Tokyo to see their daughter compete, they take comfort in the knowledge that they had a seat at the Parc Olympique Lyonnais in France on July 7, 2019, before the world changed. The day that has come to characterize Lavelle’s professional life.
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The Goal has become so famous that it has been recorded in 14 different perspectives in a single YouTube video. The United States had a 1-0 lead against the Netherlands, and the World Cup was still up for grabs. Many lyrical terms have been used to characterize Lavelle’s play, but “magician” is perhaps the most appropriate. Her feet move so quickly that it’s as though she’s in a fast-forward salsa video. Lavelle, who is always the tiniest player on the pitch, gracefully moves herself out of tight places. The ball managed to go past four defenders. In the 69th minute, Sam Mewis passed to Lavelle in the center circle, and Lavelle glided up the middle to the top of the penalty box. She feinted with her right foot, then unleashed a rocket with her left, with the stadium on its feet and two Dutch players after her. The area exploded in a flurry of activity.
The 17-yard kick was so strong that she lost her footing and collided with a defender. Just as the ball hit the bottom corner of the goal, she fell on the ground.
She filled out one of those athlete-of-the-month surveys for a pizza restaurant while she was in high school. Megan Rapinoe was Lavelle’s response to the question “MOST LIKE TO MEET.”
Rapinoe was among the first to swarm her.
“I’d imagined myself in that situation,” Lavelle adds. “I thought I’d burst out laughing, like, ‘Oh my goodness, we did it,’” she says. It was all so… It was clearly enjoyable, but I was taken aback by how normal I felt after the whistle sounded. I was overjoyed, but I was afraid I was going to weep. I, on the other hand, did not.
“It sounds terrible, but I’m often asked how my life has changed since that time, and I honestly don’t believe it has. I’ve always assumed that after accomplishing a major goal in my life, I’d feel a certain way. But I just don’t. For me, it’s less about the major events and more about the road that lead up to them.”
That six-second moment, on the other hand, solidified her legend. She was 24 years old and the future of women’s soccer in the United States. The national team returned to New York for a parade, and Lavelle’s agent, Remy Cherin, wanted to meet and discuss the future.
Cherin wanted to be sure she was ready for what was going to happen. He’s always seen Lavelle as more of an eccentric artist than an athlete, never willing to compromise her body of work or authenticity for the sake of a fast profit by tweeting out discount coupons 10 times a day. However, the opportunity for a female athlete to cash in is small, and it was wide open for Lavelle in the summer of 2019.
Lavelle didn’t want to cope with the fact that her endorsement money was going to double at the moment. She simply wanted to be among her teammates and enjoy the occasion.
“Wow,” she said to Cherin. “Let’s see what happens.”
During the 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup Final in Lyon, France, Lavelle (right) celebrates The Goal with Alex Morgan (center) and Megan Rapinoe (left). ISI Photos/Getty Images/Brad Smith
SHE WAS BORN ON MOTHER’S DAY, and if she’d been a boy — Janet was convinced she was carrying a boy for most of her pregnancy — her name would have been Patrick. Instead, she was referred to as “Rosie.” She came soon after a tornado warning, which felt appropriate two years later when she was climbing so many objects that the medications had to be locked up in a lockbox on top of the refrigerator.
At the age of five, she scored her first goal in a co-ed YMCA league game. To avoid smiling, Lavelle turned to her parents and twisted her tongue inside her cheek. She didn’t want anybody to know how pleased she was. The Lavelles didn’t know much about soccer at the time — Marty’s father, Charles “Red” Lavelle, was a great quarterback for Xavier in the 1940s — but they dragged their lawn chairs through the damp southern Ohio heat to see their daughter play.
She’d dribble and then come to a halt, waiting for the defender to react. She’d tell her mother, “Mom, I fooled ’em.”
Neil Bradford, an upbeat Englishman who often used the term “excellent!” and who loved soccer and enjoyed teaching it to youngsters, piqued her attention. Lavelle had been dribbling and juggling in the backyard since she was eight years old when she joined Bradford’s Greater Sycamore Soccer Association squad.
Bradford contacted Joe Wuest on the first day he began teaching another squad in the program, saying he had a great athlete and wanted to test whether Wuest could spot her among the flailing limbs.
“All OK,” Wuest said. “It’s that diminutive young lady. She’s incredible.”
Bradford wasn’t always loved by his parents, particularly those on a tight schedule. Bradford always had to complete a great exercise that would get the kids thrilled and continue forever, even though practice was only scheduled to last an hour and a half. Practices lasted far into the night, and the kids had a great time playing in the glow of headlights.
Bradford, according to Lavelle, is the one who made her fall in love with soccer. When she returned to visit him years later, she tried to thank him, but he refused to take credit, claiming she had arrived on her own. Bradford died of cancer in 2016 at the age of 44, thus she never saw her play in a World Cup or Olympics. But a large part of him remained with her. She remembered him by wearing his No. 8 in a match at Stanford a few days after his death.
“When things aren’t going well or I’m simply having a bad day,” Lavelle adds, “I remind myself why I’m still playing.” “It’s because it’s always been something so enjoyable for me.”
“I feel like I owe him a debt of gratitude for it.”
In one injury-plagued season with Manchester City, Rose Lavelle averaged approximately 30 minutes per game in the FA Women’s Super League. In May, she joined the OL Reign of the NWSL in Seattle. Getty Images/Joe Prior/Visionhaus
IN EXPLAINABLE WAYS, THE GOAL isn’t even her favorite. The one she adores took place ten years ago, during her freshman year in high school. In the state tournament, the Mount Notre Dame Cougars were tied with Lakota West, who were unbeaten. Lavelle kicked the game-winning goal with 25 seconds remaining.
It was the only year she was able to play with her senior sister Nora.
“After I scored, she was the first person I got to embrace,” Lavelle adds.
When people in Cincinnati ask what school you went to, they aren’t talking about college. There’s a lot of pride in graduating from high school, particularly if it’s a Catholic institution. Mount Notre Dame is a private Catholic all-girls school that prides itself on being a sisterhood, which it is. At least 25 members of Lavelle’s family have gone to the school.
Outside of Wilma Jean, her closest friend is her cousin Jodi Folzenlogen, an aspiring veterinarian who is a month younger and has little interest in soccer. However, Lavelle has a large circle of friends, including Donna Groene, the admissions director at Mount Notre Dame.
Groene was her homeroom instructor at the time. She’s a member of Lavelle’s tiny reading club, which she formed when she was in Europe and homesick during the epidemic. The Nancy Drew Mystery Stories Collection was at the top of their reading list. Lavelle had enjoyed the novels in sixth grade and was eager to see how well they had kept up.
“I believe we got through the first two novels,” she says. “They were a bit less interesting than I remembered them being. That was the end of it.”
When Lavelle arrives in town, she texts Mount Notre Dame athletic director Mark Schenkel, whom she simply refers to as “Schenkel,” to see if the soccer field is available, which it is, because how often does a small private school have a member of the United States National Team running around on its field? Regardless of the weather, Lavelle trains there alone, while star-struck pupils gaze at her throughout class.
Sally Knoll, an MND instructor, was delivering an exam a few years back and couldn’t figure out why her class was obviously preoccupied, pointing and talking. Outside of training, Lavelle was. Knoll brought the girls outside after class to meet Lavelle. “It was simply for fun since Rose is just Rose,” Knoll adds. “However, they believed they had seen the Beatles.”
Lavelle places a high value on her relationships. One of the reasons she chose Wisconsin, a strong school in the early 2010s but not a North Carolina or Notre Dame, was because of this. Paula Wilkins, the Badgers’ head coach, was also a young coach in the Olympic Development Program, and she observed that it took Lavelle a few days to get used to her surroundings, the players, and the coaches before she began to play well. Most of the would-be recruiters had left by that point.
Lavelle wasn’t much of a looker at 5-foot-2 and maybe 100 pounds, and American soccer is more about brawn than elegance. Opponents, on the other hand, were unable to keep up with her.
Wilkins compares her ability to stop on a dime to Mia Hamm’s. “As a defender, you’re trying to keep up with her at full speed, and suddenly she simply stops and walks away.” That is very difficult for individuals to cope with.
“It’s not even close to speed, but she can dribble with the ball as quickly as most players can without one. I believe she has an edge in this area, even at the top level. She has the ability to nullify people’s physique.”
Wilkins, who is also interested in relationships, believes it was a cosmic coincidence. Lavelle landed exactly where she needed to be. Her debut match was a scrimmage versus Marquette, which was rated No. 14 at the time. The Badgers defeated their in-state rivals 5-1, with Lavelle scoring two goals and adding an assist.
Wilkins describes the experience as “holy s—-.” “I believe it was the first time she or us understood what she was capable of.”
Wilkins was always unsure whether she’d been tough enough on Lavelle, if she’d gone above and above to bring her to a World Cup or the Olympics. Lavelle’s nutrition – or lack thereof – has been a problem for a long time. (Her sole misdemeanor in high school was for eating a bag of Skittles in class.) As a result, Wilkins would bug her about eating something, preferably anything that wasn’t on the candy aisle. Lavelle finally gave in and began slapping her banana peels into Wilkins’ clipboard. She also left something else during her previous game: her headband.
Everything worked out in the end. Wisconsin improved its soccer reputation because to Lavelle, who was a three-time All-American. Lavelle and Wilkins still speak, of course, and it’s obvious that Lavelle is no longer the young girl who needed to get used to her circumstances before shining. She doesn’t need affirmation.
Wilkins describes her as “more than simply a player.” “She’s become a member of my household. I coach because of the connection and trust I have with her.”
Lavelle (far left) fractured her leg on a backyard swing set when she was five years old. She kept it a secret for three days. She couldn’t stand the idea of not being able to play soccer anymore. Family Lavelle
Lavelle has been plagued with injuries for the most of her adult life. Soccer is a grueling sport, and it’s impossible to glide through the woods without colliding with a few trees. Lavelle tore a muscle in her left hamstring in June 2017, two months after scoring her maiden international goal. She recovered, returned on the field, and then tore another hamstring muscle the next fall. She tore the last of the three hamstring muscles in early 2018.
Lavelle was heartbroken. She had just recently joined the USWNT and was unable to participate. Jill Ellis, the United States’ coach at the time, had faith in Lavelle. Even when Lavelle had doubts about herself.
While her teammates trained, she’d go for a jog alone.
Rapinoe recalls, “It seemed like a full year when all I saw was her running around the perimeter of the field.” “And it’s particularly tough to do when you’re around this squad.”
“Just watching her work through it, knowing how difficult it was… That mother——— is tough as nails on the inside and out, just like me.”
Lavelle was hurt in a friendly against Australia the following spring, three months before the World Cup. Her hamstring injuries had preoccupied her, and the first thought that sprang to her was that one of the three muscles running down the back of her leg had failed her once again. She was thinking about France. But it was just a minor foot injury, and Lavelle was cleared to compete in the World Cup. She scored two goals in the US’ 13-0 triumph against Thailand in the opening group stage encounter, and she drew a penalty kick in the Round of 16 victory over Spain, which Rapinoe converted.
But even Lavelle had no idea what was about to happen.
Aaron Heifetz, a long-serving USWNT press officer who was there in Los Angeles when Brandi Chastain pulled her shirt off after her World Cup-winning penalty kick in 1999, described Lavelle’s goal as “a moment that transcended” athletics.
“Any other player scoring in such a dramatic World Cup Final would have rode that goal for much longer than she did. That, however, is not Rose.”
Lavelle did play for Man City for nine months, but it was a dismal debut in the FA Women’s Super League. She suffered injuries, was forced to switch positions, and her playing time was cut in half, with just three starts. “I believe it was a combination of factors,” City coach Gareth Taylor says. “The epidemic, as well as the cross-state transfer, were not ideal, and she arrived wounded. I believe we were just beginning to see the best of Rose Lavelle as the season progressed.”
Lavelle has had a hard winter. When soccer didn’t go well, it made her homesick, and the time difference made it difficult to contact her family for support. (She has two sisters, Nora and Mary, and an elder brother, John.)
Lavelle, on the other hand, has no regrets about his time in Europe. She said that overcoming hardship helped her become a better player and teammate, and that it was the greatest thing she could have done for her career.
Lavelle, 26, will be highly depended upon as the United States attempts to win its sixth Olympic gold. Vlatko Andonovski, her coach, says he can always rely on her to come up with something unique.
He adds, “Rose is in the middle generation.” “She represented a blend of the team’s history, present, and future. Her role will expand not just on the field, but also off it. She’s one of those players who is adored by everyone.”
Following the United States’ 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup triumph, a sight from the Lavelles’ garden party, without cicadas. Family Lavelle
LAVELLE DID NOT GO TO HOLLYWOOD. She returned to Cincinnati and purchased a home a mile and a half from her parents’ home and within sight of her former babysitter’s home. She is still sleeping on a queen mattress with a king frame since she hasn’t fully outfitted it.
It’s not for a lack of money; the World Cup’s popularity enabled her to sign sponsorship deals with Nike, Yuengling, American Girl, and IcyHot. “I’m lazy,” she admits of her sparsely populated home. “I still consider it new since I haven’t equipped it yet.”
The lady who won’t speak about The Goal or the Bronze Ball she got for being the World Cup’s third-best player was ecstatic in January when Forward Madison FC, a professional soccer club from her college town, named their team cow after her. Rose Cowbelle is a fictional character.
Rapinoe is still perplexed by her teammate on occasion. Lavelle was ashamed and muttering when they boarded a flight lately, since the overhead baggage bin was full and she was one of the last passengers on board.
Rapinoe adds, “She feels humiliated about all of these small things.”
“I believe she has a large personality, but it is not a loud one. I have a large and boisterous personality.”
When informed about Lavelle’s high-school questionnaire and the line about wanting to meet her, Rapinoe said she’d give her grief at first, but then admitted it was nice and charming.
When the World Cup ended in 2019, they stood together on the pitch, Rapinoe holding the Golden Ball and Lavelle with the Bronze Ball, which was awarded to the tournament’s best player. Rapinoe claims she has a photo of herself pointing to the newcomer and telling her she’s arrived.
Rapinoe adds, “I don’t believe Rose has even touched the surface of how amazing she will ultimately be.”
It’s hardly surprising that Lavelle didn’t notice anything different. She is adamant about not wanting things to change. She enjoys being able to come home, with family members picking her up at the airport, and making a beeline for Skyline Chili, where she orders the usual: four cheese coneys, despite the fact that she can only eat three.
She like the fact that she can work out at her high school, pet her dog, and get lost in the monotony of midwestern life.
Janet Lavelle sent a picture of her daughter in late May, as the excitement for her daughter’s first Olympics grew. Rose is sneakily smirking and looking away from the camera, as she always is.
Her face was covered with a huge cicada.
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