Jill Ellis will coach the United States against Japan in the Women’s World Cup final on Sunday, quite a geographic and cultural distance from her upbringing in England, where soccer was invented for men and discouraged for women.
Ellis, 48, did not play formally until she moved to Virginia in 1981 as a teenager. Before that, she played pickup soccer with boys in Cowplain, a village in southeast England. She would play in the schoolyard, or at home, with her brother Paul, sometimes using a tennis ball and makeshift goal posts fashioned from a tree and a flower pot.