Though Raising Her Game focuses on the Texas Longhorns women’s soccer program, the University of North Carolina works its way into the narrative in a number of significant ways.

• Longhorn coach Ange Kelly played there as an undergrad.
• Lexi Missimo’s father, Derek, also played his college soccer at UNC Chapel Hill.
• We interviewed legendary North Carolina coach Anson Dorrance for the piece (he coached both Ange and Derek).
• Dorrance also coached the U.S. Women’s National Team in its early years and it featured a number of his standout Tar Heel players.
• We interviewed former UT assistant Keri Sanchez, who played at Chapel Hill with Ange.
• We talked about Lexi and Trinity’s former Solar Soccer Club teammate Jaedyn Shaw who skipped college to turn pro at age 17. Had she gone to school instead, her choice would have been UNC.
• Solar has sent players to UNC, including Sam Meza. She played with a number of Longhorns at Solar.
• Abby Allen, a defender on the 2023 Longhorns, transferred to the Austin school after playing at North Carolina.

Another interesting UT/UNC connection we didn’t have time to cover in the docuseries involved American football. That sport features prominently in RHG in terms of its status as a dominant men’s sport and the pros and cons of how it affects women’s sports and soccer. During her time at North Carolina, as she was contributing to multiple national championship teams, Ange Kelly got know the school’s head football coach, Mack Brown. He took an interest in how the women playing a different code of football achieved success.

“He heard about what we were doing, going four years undefeated,” Kelly recalled. “He used to come out to training and watch us, and he just loved the bite and the tenacity.”

Brown’s interest in a women’s team would have been atypical in the early 1990s. But it serves as an example of how sports breaks down barriers. He wanted to win football games, and if he could learn something that would help him by watching another one of the school’s teams, he humbly did so – no matter the gender of the team’s athletes. He won 69 games in his first stint at UNC.

North Carolina had become known for its success on the hardwood under Hall of Fame coach Dean Smith and served as a rare example of a college in which the basketball program achieved more prominence than its football counterpart. But Kelly remembered a press conference in which Brown demonstrated his support for their program. She said a reporter asked Brown, “How does it feel to be at a basketball school?”

“And Mack said,” as Kelly remembered it, “Well, I don’t know. Last time I checked, I was at a woman’s soccer school.”

Kelly and Brown kept in touch when she moved to Knoxville to become the head coach at Tennessee. Brown made a move himself shortly thereafter to become head football coach at UT Austin. He brought with him his appreciation for sports beyond his own.

“Mack came in and I think he showed that in order for the athletics and football to be where it needs, everybody needs to get on board,” said Hue Menzies, a Texas assistant soccer coach under Dang Pibulvech of Brown’s 1998 arrival at Texas.

“The relationship we had from Mack was awesome, because we’re sharing facilities,” Menzies said of the soccer team’s use of football practice fields in the era prior to the construction of Mike A. Myers Stadium. “It was our game field, and I think they had the best maintenance crew around. Because those 300-pound guys would pound the fields at practice and we had a game on a Sunday or Friday, right, and we would come out there and the field was just immaculate.”

Brown remained head coach at Texas through 2013 – long enough to re-encounter a former co-worker.

“My first day on the job here, I get a call from my administrator: ‘Hey, listen, head downstairs, somebody’s waiting for you,’” Ange Kelly remembered of her 2012 arrival in Austin. “And Mack was in his car, and he goes, ‘All right, get in here.’ And he took me to lunch and he told me the way of the world here at Texas.”

As we shot with Longhorn players in the UT Athletic Hall of Fame, they discovered a display about Brown’s career. Lexi Missimo read one of his quotes from the wall signage: “We have to create a culture of trust. That’s the biggest thing that you have to do as a coach.”

The student-athletes then commented on how they felt their team had such a culture. We think there’s a good chance their coach picked up tips on how to instill it from her North Carolina days.

Speaking of North Carolina, Texas has never defeated the Tar Heels. Coach Kelly’s 2018 recorded the only draw of the seven-game all-time series with a 1-1 result in Chapel Hill. But with a program the caliber of UNC’s, even a close loss had value for Dr. Kelly McDonald Freeman.

“North Carolina was the powerhouse at that time,” she recalled. “To be able to take our Texas team that was, you know, pretty fresh and new, and compete against North Carolina, and that’s exactly what we did. We competed. We took this university from, you know, years prior, they probably wouldn’t even attempted to play North Carolina.”

Her squads suffered three one-goal defeats, which marked a significant improvement on a 9-2 defeat in the teams’ first meeting the year before she and a number of her high-profile teammates joined the program. She especially remembered the 2002 game at a tournament in Spring, Texas, near Houston.

“It was muddy. It was really wet,” she said. “The score was 3-2. I had a goal. One of my best friends who was who I came here for, one of the reasons, Kylee Wosnuk, had a goal. And it was tied for a long time. And I think at that moment, we showed that we can compete at that level. And this team and this program can compete at that level.”

Texas has played other schools from the Old North State. McDonald Freeman’s team beat East Carolina 5-3 in 2003. The Longhorns defeated Duke in the only meeting in Austin, but have lost four other games in Durham.

The Longhorns also recorded a 2-1 overtime win against Central Florida in a 2018 neutral-site game in Chapel Hill, but lost a 2010 contest to James Madison University of Virginia in the same spot.

They have also recorded a winning record, two wins and a loss, against North Carolina State. The first meeting came in the program’s third varsity season.

“NC State, at the time, was one of the pinnacle programs,” noted Karla Thompson, an assistant on that 1995 Texas team. She felt the game set a tone for much of the program’s subsequent development.

“We beat NC State on the road, that was a huge selling point, that right there. That was the turning point of us going, ‘Okay, what we’re doing is right, and, you know, I think our players are starting to buy into what we’re trying to say, and we’re heading in the right direction at that point.’”

Incidentally, Ange Kelly is still looking for her first coaching victory against her alma mater. In fact, her former coach, Anson Dorrance, notched his 700th career win in a 7-2 victory against Ange’s Tennessee team in 2010. She did record the program’s only non-loss against the Tar Heels, however, with a scoreless draw in 2004.