Anson Dorrance got the win he felt he needed to secure his legacy. Then he walked away

The end comes for everyone, eventually, no matter how many games or championships you’ve won, or how you’ve reshaped an entire sport in a way no one is ever likely to do again. For Anson Dorrance, the end came in a game last fall when the impenetrable mystique of North Carolina women’s soccer, once as powerful a force as there was in all of college athletics, was finally and firmly punctured.

It just took him a while to figure that out.

Officially, he retired Friday, when he told UNC athletic director Bubba Cunningham he was done. But he also said Monday, as he said his public farewells, that he’d spent the past eight months thinking about something Cunningham told him in January, about protecting his legacy in the wake of how North Carolina’s season ended.

His final game after 45 seasons and an astonishing 22 national titles — one before the NCAA even sanctioned the sport, nine in a row at one point when it did — was an exhibition victory over Davidson on Saturday. At that point, he’d already told Cunningham he was done but not yet his team, only days before the Tar Heels open the regular season Thursday in Denver.

It was the exhibition game before that, a 5-1 win over USL Super League squad DC Power, that convinced him to step aside and explained, in his words, the curious timing. Dorrance said thumping a pro team in an exhibition was enough to wipe out the taste of how last season ended, when the Tar Heels were up 3-0 on Brigham Young with a trip back home to Cary and the College Cup in their grasp, only to give up four goals in the second half, a collapse unlike anything in the history of the program.

For two full generations, the mere sight of a UNC jersey was enough to give opponents cold sweats, a college team so closely tied to the U.S. national team that if you squinted and let them blur together they started to look the same. But now someone had done to North Carolina what the Tar Heels used to do to others, had beat them at their own game: Not talent, not skill, not strategy, but mentality.

That was enough.

“One thing (Cunningham) said to me that resonated in January was, ‘Anson you’ve got to protect your legacy,’ ” Dorrance said Monday. “The more I thought about it, he was absolutely right. When we went out there and this extraordinary collection of young athletes beat a first-division professional team 5-1, I didn’t want my last game to be up 3-0 against BYU and giving up four goals in the second half. I wanted my last game to be beating this pro team to death.”

So that’s how it ends, precipitously, on the eve of what would have been his 46th season coaching the women, and 48th at North Carolina. Dorrance compared it to Dean Smith’s unexpected retirement in 1997, but Smith retired five weeks before his team’s first exhibition, leaving the keys in the ignition of a just-add-water national-title contender for his longtime, there-for-every-step consigliere, Bill Guthridge. This is not the same. Damon Nahas, the interim coach, has been with the program for less than a decade, a mere tick on the clock of UNC women’s soccer. Bill Palladino, Dorrance’s Guthridge, retired in 2019.

Then again, as precipitous as it is, perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising. The cracks had been showing in the program for a while. Dorrance admitted now that there were times, in the past decade, when his “energy was ebbing.” But even if he didn’t have the same command he once did, this wasn’t an old-school coach losing touch with the modern game. (He called the recent and drastic changes to college sports “incredibly positive.”) If anything, North Carolina’s inability to replicate its staggering dominance was a matter of circumstance.

Dorrance, both in Chapel Hill and with the U.S. Women’s National Team, has done as much as anyone away from the field to shape what women’s soccer is today, to help it grow and blossom and explode, and that growth caught up with Dorrance and UNC eventually. The Tar Heels’ dynasty became a victim of its own success.

There are more elite players now, with more options, and more places to play. There are other paths to the national team, and to pro careers at home or overseas. The Tar Heels haven’t won a national title since 2012, although they have reached the College Cup four times in the past six years, and have claimed only two ACC titles since 2009. Florida State, over the past decade, has won more of both.

Dorrance bemoaned the injuries that have plagued the program over that span, but that only underlined how much soccer changed around the UNC program. The days when the second-best team in the country was North Carolina’s second 11 are long gone. North Carolina was once a gargantuan fish in a tiny pond. That puddle is now an ocean. Soccer, women’s sports, college athletics — none of them resemble in any way what they did in the ‘80s and ‘90s, when the Tar Heels put up not one but two triple-digit unbeaten streaks.

Combine the shock of the BYU loss with the mass exodus that followed — nine players transferred and another five turned pro early, almost half the roster — and it’s easy to see why Cunningham’s question about his legacy might have provoked introspection on Dorrance’s part.

But it wasn’t until last week, after bringing in 15 new players and taking the first long summer vacation of Dorrance’s life and even coaching this year’s team in a game, that Dorrance apparently decided his legacy was secure.

It is a legacy unparalleled in college sports. UNC basketball existed before Smith, very much so, but UNC women’s soccer literally did not exist before Dorrance. He started out as the part-time men’s coach and only became full time when Carolina decided to turn the women’s club team into a varsity sport in 1979 and asked him to coach both.

After winning the inaugural Women’s World Cup in 1991, he turned down what had become a full-time USWNT job to stay at UNC. He turned down Stanford, whose recruiting success against him still clearly rankles. He built something at North Carolina no one else will ever build anywhere. And after 47 years, he put an end to a career that is, unquestionably, sui generis.

“I just caught a bolt of lightning at the right time,” Dorrance said, but even the fiercest storm fades, until it’s only a memory carried on the breeze.

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