Sports
E
L
L
I
S
C
O
L
OR
P
H
O
T
O
G
R
A
P
H
S
B
Y
I
N
T
E
R
N
AT
I
O
N
A
L
S
P
O
R
T
S
I
M
A
G
E
S
Jill Ellis didn’t come to NC State almost 30 years ago to be a soccer coach. She came here to go to
graduate school, pursuing a master’s
degree in technical communications. But,
like many graduate students, she needed
to make money to pay for her studies. And
so a soccer coach was born, when Ellis
took a job as a graduate assistant for the
Wolfpack’s women’s soccer team.
Years later, Ellis is one of the most
successful soccer coaches on the planet.
She led the U.S. women’s national team
to the World Cup in 2015 and was named
by FIFA earlier this year as the international coach of the year in women’s
soccer. In August, she will lead the team
in the summer Olympics in Brazil,
where it will be favored to win a
fourth consecutive gold medal.
And it all began for Ellis
on NC State’s campus.
Ellis was familiar with
soccer before she arrived
at NC State. She had been
a star forward during
her undergraduate days at
William & Mary, and her father
had been a successful soccer coach,
serving at one point as the head coach for
Trinidad and Tobago’s national team. But
she came to NC State in 1988 to study tech-
nical communications, even if she wasn’t
sure what sort of career she might make
out of it. “I was an English major [as an
undergraduate] because I could write and
I enjoyed it,” she says. “I also enjoy tech-
nology, so I was trying to blend the two.”
To help pay for her studies, Ellis took a
job as a graduate assistant for Larry Gross,
the head coach of the NC State women’s
soccer team. Ellis says she had talked with
her dad about coaching, so she had a
sense of what the job would entail. But
she had no way of knowing how much
she would enjoy it.
“What I quickly got hooked on was
the adrenaline of competing and being
on the sidelines during games,”
she says. “The other part was
helping players reach another
level. When you’re working
with driven athletes, they
want to continue to grow.”
Kick-starting a Career
Jill Ellis, head coach of the U.S. women’s
national soccer team, launched her career
as a graduate assistant for the Wolfpack.
It didn’t hurt that the team was pretty
good that year, winning the ACC cham-
pionship (still NC State’s only conference
championship in women’s soccer) and
reaching the finals of the NCAA cham-
pionship. She also enjoyed working for
Gross. “Larry kept giving me more respon-
sibility,” Ellis says. “He was a really good
role model.”
Ellis coached at NC State for three
years before getting a job as a technical
writer at Northern Telecom in Research
“When you’re working with driven athletes,
they want to continue to grow.” —Jill Ellis
B
L
A
C
K
A
N
D
W
H
I
T
E
P
H
O
T
O
GR
A
P
H
S
C
O
U
R
T
E
S
Y
O
F
N
C
S
T
AT
E
AT
H
L
E
T
I
C
S
