From the Archives: Vogue’s Hamish Bowles Trains With Soccer Star Alex Morgan

“Kick Off” by Hamish Bowles, was originally published in the April 2016 issue of Vogue.

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“I was the ultimate tomboy,” says women’s-soccer supernova Alex Morgan, remembering her childhood self. “I’m supercompetitive. I wanted to beat the boys at everything, I wanted to be faster; I wanted to be stronger.”

I, on the other hand, was the ultimate sissy. “He’s got footballer’s knees!” exulted my father at the very moment of my first appearance in this world. Unfortunately for him, I showed no interest whatsoever in the Beautiful Game. I don’t remember anyone ever teaching me how to play; in England it was simply assumed that every boy would understand the rudiments of the sport. (Girls weren’t part of the equation at that time: They had netball, rounders, and hockey to keep them occupied.)

In a doomed attempt to hook me in, Dad took me, aged ten, to watch his beloved local team, Hendon, play in the Amateur Cup semifinal. I vividly recall my father’s disquieting transformation from mild-mannered accountant to Tasmanian Devil, hurling invective, forbidden swear words, and spittle at the hapless players below. Not long after, Dad had to bribe me to attend a white hot–ticket Liverpool vs. Chelsea match with the promise of a trip to the antiques market of Portobello Road the following morning.

In 1999, when Morgan was ten, the U.S. Women’s National soccer team, led by Mia Hamm, Julie Foudy, and Michelle Akers, won the FIFA Women’s World Cup, 5–4, against China. From that point on, she was hooked. At sixteen, already a star on her Diamond Bar, California, high school soccer team, she felt that her childhood dream of making it as a professional player was an achievable goal.

My achievable soccer goal, meanwhile, was to continue avoiding the ball at all costs. In my first term at high school I was inexplicably picked for the first eleven—the elite soccer team—presumably because I could run fast. I briefly served as goalkeeper, a role in which I displayed astonishing thespian, if not athletic, skills as I pretended to miss the ball by inches as it pelted toward me at breakneck speed. Mostly, though, I just loitered about on the outskirts of the field with my best friend, gossiping away and admiring our imaginary nail varnish as the ball and the rest of the players went whizzing past. Never, then, in my wildest teen dreams did I expect that one day I would be gossiping away and having my nails done alongside one of the most admired and lauded soccer players in America.

Morgan is understandably dumbfounded by the pitiful trajectory of my soccer odyssey, with its pattern of resistance to the sexist norm. “It’s almost the complete opposite for women soccer players,” the 26-year-old explains. “We’re dying to play and people are telling us, ‘You can’t play.’ I almost wish I’d been forced into it, instead of my having to fight for it!”

I confide in Morgan that I am being forced into the sport again now, for the first time since those early teenage mortifications. The assignment would be tolerable were it not for the childhood traumas keeping me awake at night. But if England’s Sir Stanley Matthews, a mid-century star revered by Dad for his dribbling skills, was still playing at 50, the least I could do was give it a go.

My friend Simon Doonan was able to provide further reassurance: He is currently writing a book about soccer through the lens of fashion and style, a project that I am at least half-interested in. “There’s nothing I don’t know about George Best’s cleats,” Doonan told me over our pep-talk lunch.

“It’s a stat-mad world, so I’m looking for correlations where fashion-obsessed players score more goals!” He supports his thesis by citing style-crazed players including A.C. Milan’s Mario Balotelli (and his camouflage-wrapped Bentley Continental GT); Paris Saint Germain’s Zlatan Ibrahimovi´c (who favors Rick Owens and a man bun); and Real Madrid’s Cristiano Ronaldo, who arrives for training carrying a Gucci wash bag tucked under his arm like a minaudière.

The ultimate football fashionisto, of course, is David Beckham, who practically minted the concept of the metrosexual male with his unquestioning embrace of fashion. “I like nice clothes, whether they’re dodgy or not,” Beckham has said, and who can forget his brave experiments with faux-hawks and sarongs?

As it happens, I recently found myself at an intimate Manhattan dinner party with Victoria Beckham and her husband, and I thought that I would seize the day and ask the glamorous soccer legend (impeccable that night in Savile Row tweeds and elaborate tattoos) what advice he might have for me. David is a man of few words, but they are usually well chosen. “Listen to the girls,” he counseled. “They’re the most driven athletes I’ve ever known, and their success is showing it. They know better than most of the guys. Listen to them—and run fast!”

Heeding his advice, I begin my odyssey by flying to Los Angeles to work with Dawn Scott, the revered trainer responsible for keeping the U.S. women’s team in fighting and winning form. In the spirit of that person who does a spring clean before the housekeeper arrives, I book in for some pre-training sessions beforehand.

I meet my fetching Brazilian-Swedish trainer, Daniel Söderström, in the prettily landscaped gardens surrounding the La Brea Tar Pits on the grounds of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He has set up a floor ladder, cones, and a series of nets and goal posts under the shade of a spreading maple tree next to a pit in which a prehistoric sloth was once trapped, an ominous metaphor for my own speed if ever there was one.

Söderström and I work on my “cognitive skills,” which are sadly, if not surprisingly, wanting: I can’t quite connect my foot to the ball. When I finally make contact, I kick it so wide of any of the goals that it hits the maple tree’s trunk with a force that sends half a dozen squirrels hurtling from its sheltering limbs.

Two days later, I meet Scott in the StubHub Center in balmy Carson, where she is putting Morgan’s teammate Christen Press through her paces. Growing up, Press tells me, she thought, “Soccer’s so fun because you have all your friends. You come to practice and you talk about everything and you’re running and gossiping. It’s like social hour!” If only I had looked at it that way myself.

Scott, who wears her fine, flaxen hair pulled back sensibly, hails from the no-nonsense north of England, where she “grew up playing on the streets with the boys.” She fondly remembers her father taking her to the local Newcastle games during the era of the charismatic Kevin “Mighty Mouse” Keegan, famed for his Barbra Streisand–in–Evergreen perm.

Scott’s training programs are customized to each player, taking into account age and injury history. The athletes, based all around the country with their local teams when they are not training for the U.S., contribute their information—including diet and all-important sleep recovery—to a central online database so that Scott and head coach Jill Ellis can download it at the end of the day and monitor the GPS and the heart rate of all the players, along with their speed, agility, and fitness levels, and adjust the routines accordingly. “It’s a daily ongoing process,” says Scott. “You’re dealing with 25 different personalities. You can’t expect they’re all going to be the same.”

Now it’s my turn to become intimately acquainted with Scott’s all-star program. I start with forward-bend walks “to switch on the glutes and core,” according to Scott, who then introduces me to something fiendish called a “Turkish get-up,” which, sadly, is not some fabulous sable-trimmed robe to prance around Topkapi Palace in, but a grueling warm-up exercise. Press does the movements with sleek balletic grace and a fifteen-pound weight held aloft as though it were a dandelion clock. Scott coolly assesses my form and hands me a shoe to work with instead.

We follow up with trap-bar work, power cleans, dead lifts, squats, kettle bells, Bulgarian splits, down slides, mountain climbers, and box jumps. “This takes months, years to learn the technique,” Scott says reassuringly. “I don’t want you to feel fatigued too soon.” Frankly, I am already wiped out. “Let’s do two different exercises,” she adds cheerily, “and then we will go out to the field.” Gawd, I’d almost forgotten that bit.

A typical field session begins with a good warm-up and might include some speed work, then high-intensity interval training. “You run 90 yards, which should take you fifteen seconds, and you rest for fifteen seconds. You do twelve of those,” Scott says. I am trying to take this alarming information on board, but I am also soaking up the beauty of the field, fringed with eucalyptus and palm trees and blissfully unlike any of the frigid muddy pitches I remember from childhood.