Feb. 10, 2009

By Ashley Hicks, Patriot League Media and External Relations Intern

Navy senior midfielder Julie Reynolds may need to find a new way to describe Head Coach Carin Gabarra to those unaware of Gabarra's accomplishments.

"I always tell people when I talk about her, `Oh yeah, my coach is a gold medalist, she was Mia Hamm before Mia Hamm and was a world MVP...'," Reynolds said. "Soccer wasn't as big when she was making her name, but she was Mia Hamm before Mia Hamm."

Upon hearing her player's description of her, Gabarra pauses thoughtfully before commenting on whether she thinks it is accurate.

"That's hard for me to say," she said. "These are my friends and people I grew up with, and I like to see them as people. I actually don't like to compare soccer players because I think everyone's different."

But it is hard to resist making the comparison between Hamm and Gabarra. Hamm is one of the most accomplished and recognizable faces of women's soccer in America, breaking the NCAA scoring record while playing at North Carolina before playing internationally with the U.S. Women's National Team and winning a gold medal at the 1996 Olympics. But it was Gabarra's NCAA scoring record that Hamm broke, and Gabarra who starred internationally before bowing out as a player just as the popularity of women's soccer in America started to rise.

Born in New Jersey, the former Carin Jennings moved with her family to California, where she started playing soccer at age eight.

"All the little girls in the neighborhood had on uniforms, so my parents just signed me up,"Gabarra quipped.

A prolific scorer from early on, Gabarra excelled in the sport and earned high school All-America accolades four times at Palos Verdes High after scoring 226 goals from 1980-83.

Gabarra attended then UC-Santa Barbara, where she set an NCAA scoring record with 102 goals and 60 assists and was a four-time All-American.

After graduating with a degree in business management, Gabarra started a nearly 10-year balancing act of coaching and playing internationally when she was hired as the head coach at Westmont College in 1987 After compiling a 6-10-0 record in her only year at Westmont, Gabarra was hired as an assistant coach at Harvard in 1988. In 1991, Gabarra was named the MVP of the first Women's World Cup, on the heels of scoring three goals in a 5-2 U.S. victory over Germany in the semifinals.

Gabarra took over the Navy program in 1993, but continued to play. She earned a gold medal as a member of the 1996 Olympic team, an event that many credit with skyrocketing the popularitysoccer in America.

She retired from international play after the Olympics and is seventh on the all-time U.S. Women's National Team list with 53 international goals.

"Navy was incredibly loyal to me as both a player and a coach. They embraced that I was still playing, they recognized that it was good for the program," Gabarra recalled. "They let me go and live in residency in Florida before the `95 World Cup and `96 Olympics while Rob (Blanck, a longtime Navy assistant coach) did the daily duties here while I did what I could recruiting-wise on the road. They were very good to me and respectful of my career. And they were one of the only schools that kept me paid as I continued to play."

And Navy's loyalty to Gabarra has paid off, as Gabarra took the program from a 2-5-0 record in her first year as head coach in 1993 to amassing a 17-3-1 record and Navy's first Patriot League women's soccer title in 1998, a span of only five years. Gabarra now has more than 200 wins at Navy and is one of the winningest Division I active head coaches.

"I know our whole team respects her so much for everything she's accomplished and for everything that she brings to the team," sophomore forward Carissa Youker remarked. "She's someone we can relate to, both on and off the field. She has so much to offer, so much knowledge."

In 2002, Gabarra was only the second woman inducted into the National Soccer Hall of Fame, and in 2003 was inducted into the U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame.