I Believe That We Will Win

Americans love to win. But when it comes to soccer, the world’s most popular sport, the US women’s team has delivered three World Cup victories in as many decades, while the men have not advanced past the quarter-finals in nearly ninety years. In October 2017, the US Men’s National Team (USMNT) startled fans by failing to qualify for the upcoming World Cup, an episode that led both USMNT head coach Bruce Arena and US Soccer Federation President Sunil Gulati to step down from their positions, and which launched a new era of reckoning for US Soccer as a whole. As the 2018 World Cup commences with the US sidelined, fans are becoming impatient: What will it take for the USMNT to finally rise to an elite level and bring home the FIFA World Cup Trophy?In I Believe That We Will Win, veteran soccer journalist Phil West delivers a compelling assessment of the history and future potential of American soccer on the international playing field. With insightful commentary and endless enthusiasm, West examines every aspect of the USMNT and their competition, detailing how the US returned to the World Cup in 1990 after forty years without qualifying, delving into the growing symbiotic relationship between the USMNT and Major League Soccer, and exploring how the US is cultivating young talent through MLS academies and the US Development Academy—and how Latino outreach initiatives, like the Sueño Alianza competition that brought Jonathan González to prominence, can be better integrated into US Soccer’s quest for talented players. Along the way, West touches on the controversial tenure of former coach Jürgen Klinsmann, the role of dual-national players, Christian Pulisic and the new wave of American players playing abroad, and other issues that have engaged American soccer fans in spirited debate. Punctuated with dozens of revealing interviews from players, coaches, and journalists, I Believe That We Will Win is both the definitive history of American World Cup play and an incisive and inspiring analysis of America’s potential to win big in the near future.

With the playoffs over, Devin and her seventh-grade friends decide to try out for a soccer travel team, but friendships are threatened because not everyone makes it on to the tough, competitive team, and in the mean time the girls are faced with a crisis--budget cuts threaten to eliminate the soccer program at the elementary school Devin's little sister attends.

From World Cup champion, Olympic gold medalist, and bestselling author Alex Morgan comes the fifth book in an empowering and fun-filled middle grade series about believing in yourself and working as a team. Devin is finally getting used to California; she’s got sunstreaks in her hair and has even picked up some So-Cal lingo. Then Devin experiences an earthquake, and she’s more freaked out than she expected she would be. The earthquake is just the first in a series of chain of events that shake Devin’s confidence. She fails a test in a subject she knows well. Her crush seems to have his attention on another girl. And worst of all, her soccer mojo is nowhere to be found. Now Devin, the girl who usually inspires confidence in her friends and teammates, will have to turn to them for support.

For years Elle Dowd considered herself an advocate for justice, but her well-meaning support always took a back burner to what Martin Luther King Jr. called the tension-free, ordered "negative peace" of white moderates. Then Michael Brown, a Black man, was murdered by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, and the subsequent Uprising changed everything. In Baptized in Tear Gas, minister and activist Elle Dowd tells the gripping story of her transformation into an Assata Shakur-reading, courthouse-occupying abolitionist with an arrest record, hungry for the revolution. Thanks to deep relationships with people in Ferguson and St. Louis, and to experiencing a fraction of the system for herself--including the fear of rubber bullets, the shock of sound cannons, and running from tear gas--Dowd fully committed to the work of anti-racism and abolition. Now she wants to help other white allies do the same. Like in baptism, this transformation requires parts of us to die: our lack of power analysis, our commitment to white niceness, our tone policing, our respectability politics--all of those impulses we have been socialized by since birth must die so that something new can be resurrected in our lives and in the world. The uprising in Ferguson changed Dowd, and through it, God made her into something new. Now it's our turn.

When the White Sox met the Astros in the 2005 World Series, it marked only the second time Chicago team had appeared in a televised World Series. (The first was in 1959 when the White Sox lost to the Dodgers.) Of the other 12 Series involving the Cubs or White Sox, seven occurred before the radio broadcasting of baseball. Five others were broadcast, but because the games were played during the workday, fans continued to get their coverage from newspapers. There they found accounts penned by some of the greatest journalists of the 20th century, including Ring Lardner, Grantland Rice, Arthur "Bugs" Baer and Westbrook Pegler, as well as legendary Chicago scribes Charles Dryden, James Crusinberry, Hugh Fullerton, I.E. Sanborn, and Irving Vaughan. With a chapter on each World Series involving a Chicago team, this book covers 100 years of championship diamond contests in the Windy City, from the intra-city classic of 1906 to the end of the White Sox's 88-year championship drought in 2005. Contemporary accounts from newspapers and sports publications complement the author's informed commentary, providing two views of the Series: one shared by those who were there, and one informed by the decades since.