In my short time at Let’s Fantasy Game, I have gotten to write a lot of fun articles. I love making Sparket picks, doing deep-dives into which teams are WNBA title contenders and highlighting athletes I love to root for. I’m not sure if any of that can compare, however, to getting to speak to a true legend in women’s sports.

Casual women’s soccer fans may not know the name Anson Dorrance, but they almost certainly know about the University of North Carolina Women’s Soccer program. For decades, that program has been known for winning NCAA Championships and producing U.S. Women’s National Team players. When Dorrance retired from coaching last year after 47 seasons coaching at North Carolina and 45 as the women’s soccer coach, he did so with too many records to count. He won 1,106 games as a head coach, and his 21 NCAA women’s soccer championships are the most for one coach in any Division I sport.

A big part of any college coach’s legacy is what his players go on to do after college, and Dorrance has some incredible records in that regard as well. Over 55 UNC players have gone on to appear in international games for the USWNT. Since 1991, there have been at least two former UNC players on every U.S. Women’s World Cup roster.

It would be impossible to chronicle all of North Carolina’s success under Anson Dorrance in one article, so I’m not even going to try. For more insight into how he built the North Carolina soccer program, Dorrance recommends The Man Watching by Tim Crothers. For our conversation, I wanted to find out what retirement looks like for Coach Dorrance and pick his brain on the state of the game and what changes could be made going forward.

That proved to be a rather easy endeavor. Dorrance was incredibly thoughtful, and you can wind him up and let him go on a number of topics and get deep, thorough answers. That isn’t shocking for someone who was well-known in his career for rousing pre-game speeches and is an accomplished public speaker. It is surprising, however, for a self-described “radical introvert.”

“I don't have any issues speaking publicly, because I'm not shy and I have extraordinary confidence, but that doesn't change the fact that I'm introverted, and it took me late into my 60s to actually discover that,” Dorrance said.

Like many introverts, Dorrance loves reading, which he has been able to do a lot more in retirement. Dorrance said before he retired, he was getting 200 emails a day. Now that the emails have slowed down, he has more quiet time to read.

“Well, I love to read. So I'm back to reading books. I love reading The New York Times Sunday paper. I sort of read that cover to cover, so not just the news parts, but I like the opinion pages and the book reviews,” Dorrance said.

In addition to reading, Dorrance has had a lot of time to watch women’s soccer. He has been following the European championships closely, catching up on teams that he hasn’t always gotten to see play in the past. He has also enjoyed watching several of his former players get a chance with the USWNT.

“So in the last recent cycle of national team games, Avery Patterson has done extraordinarily well as have Claudia Dickey and Ally Sentnor, and Sam Meza, so it's been really enjoyable watching our kids play,” Dorrance said.

Dorrance hasn’t just been watching international play; he has also had a front-row seat for The Soccer Tournament, a $1 million winner-take-all tournament held in Cary, North Carolina. That tournament offers a unique format that Coach Dorrance would like to see replicated at the highest levels of the game. Rather than settling ties with penalty kicks, which Dorrance compares to breaking a tie in a basketball game with a free-throw contest, TST sets a target score based on the score at the end of regulation. So if the score is 2-0 at the end of regulation, the first team to score three goals wins. This way, every game ends on a game-winning goal. There are no penalty kicks, and no time wasting. Fans don’t have to watch the team that’s winning take two minutes on every free kick, since you cannot win by simply letting the time run out.

The other big rules change Dorrance advocates for is what he calls a “sin bin,” which would basically be like a penalty box in hockey. Right now, a referee’s only tools for players who commit a serious infraction is a yellow card or a red card. A yellow card doesn’t really hurt the team, and in some cases it encourages players to push the rules further because they know the referee doesn’t want to give them a red card.

A sin bin would allow referees to send off a player for a period of time before allowing them back on the pitch. Now, if a player makes a reckless challenge or stops an obvious goal-scoring opportunity, that player’s team has to play shorthanded for a while. This would provide a much greater disincentive to fouling than the current rules.

While I loved hearing about Coach Dorrance’s time at North Carolina and picking his brain about the state of the game, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to ask him about a former player near and dear to my heart, Let’s Fantasy Game’s Head of Content, Brittani Bartok. Bartok was a three-time National Champion at North Carolina and later served as Creative Director for UNC Women’s Soccer.

“Well, I think she's an extraordinary artist, and when she was doing social media for me, the stuff that she produced is some of the best stuff we have ever produced. So I really think she has a unique artistic flair that I think needs to be expressed in some fashion because I think she is just a very talented and creative artist,” Dorrance said. “I joke with her all the time, and this is genuine, I consider her the greatest six-minute player, and sometimes I reduced it to six-second player, in UNC women's Soccer history, because the amount of goals and assists she had for the minutes that she played is probably the greatest points per minute.”

For all of Anson Dorrance’s success at North Carolina, coaching Brittani Bartok and countless others, it almost never happened. Dorrance went to law school after his own soccer playing career, but his former coach, Dr. Marvin Allen, recommended Dorrance to succeed him at North Carolina. The Athletic Director Mr. Bill Cobey went with Dr. Allen’s recommendation, and the rest is history. Despite never planning to coach, Dorrance fell in love with it. He coached the men’s team from 1977 to 1988, and he began the women’s program at North Carolina in 1979, where he stayed until he retired.

“I want to consider myself someone that's involved in human development, not just soccer development,” Dorrance said. “So teaching people how to live a principal-centered life, I think, has been critical for our success.”