Becky Sauerbrunn has been named captain of the U.S. women’s national soccer team. The Ladue native has won two World Cups and an Olympic gold medal. Sauerbrunn has been captain of the team before, sharing the post with Carli Lloyd from 2016 to 2017.
If you had older siblings like I did growing up, you can appreciate the stories that Sauerbrunn shares about growing up with two older brothers. On her official page on USSoccer.com, she details what it was like growing up with two boys. Below is an excerpt from her bio. I’m assuming that since she shared her stories for the entire world to see, she doesn’t hold any ill-will towards her siblings 🙂
Sauerbrunn describes herself as her two older brothers’ guinea pig. They’d duct-tape plywood to her arms and take slap shocks (sic) at her; they’d see how far they could launch her off the couch; they’d roll her into a blanket like a burrito—so tight that to this day, she does not like being tucked in. They’d steal her stuffed animals and beat them up while she tried to rescue them. Once, they accidentally hit her in the face with the bat—she was gushing blood but her brothers didn’t want to get in trouble, so they slapped a Band-Aid on her and tried to barricade her upstairs. She escaped and her parents took her to the hospital where she got stitches.
“Aside from physically toughening me up, they also toughened me up mentally,” says Sauerbrunn. If she cried, they’d call her a baby. Or if she said ‘Ow’ a little too loud, hoping that her mom and dad would hear, they’d hit her harder, onto her tactics and unimpressed. “I learned how to take it. It taught me how to not really rely on other people to solve my problems. I think that kind of stayed with me. I’m very motivated internally. I’m a bit of a scrapper.”
Sauerbrunn won NWSL Defender of the Year three years in a row while playing for FC Kansas City (2013-15). A back bone for the U.S. defense, Sauerbrunn played in her third World Cup in 2019.