Hanks hungry for the icing on the cake in decorated career
SOUTH BEND, Ind. -- Kerri Hanks thought it might be time to move on, but she has never been very good at walking away from losses. For someone who is pointedly a perfectionist, the chance to win the final game of her final season was too much to resist.
She's fast, but there are faster forwards. She's strong and possesses a powerful shot, but there are stronger strikers. She's nimble with the ball but not noticeably more so than some other elite technicians. Where Hanks stands alone is in her ability to harness all of those myriad physical abilities within a tactician's mindset.
"If you just watch Kerri in the game, she is the best soccer brain on our team," senior teammate Brittany Bock said. "She knows where to run, when to run, when to tell players -- when I played at forward the last few seasons, I would go to her for my questions, because I knew she knew what she was talking about. On the field, she makes perfect runs; she knows exactly where to play the ball. ... It's really fun to watch and fun to play with, because she's always in the right place at the right time."
But after three successive postseason disappointments for a program which Bock said enters each season measuring success almost solely in terms of championships, Hanks wasn't sure she wanted to come back for her final season of eligibility. First came a quarterfinal loss against eventual champion Portland in 2005, erasing Notre Dame's opportunity to become the first school other than North Carolina to win back-to-back national championships and negating Hanks' 28-goal rookie campaign. Then a loss to North Carolina in the title game in 2006, just a day after Hanks edged out Tar Heels cornerstone Heather O'Reilly for the Hermann. And finally a semifinal loss to Florida State last season after a 3-4-1 start that included a 7-1 loss against Santa Clara.
Talking about Mami Yamaguchi, the 2007 Hermann Trophy winner, Hanks sounded almost wistful when it came to the pressure on a returning winner. Yamaguchi left a year of eligibility on the table at Florida State to sign a professional contract with Umea in Sweden.
"She had a great season, an amazing season," Hanks said. "If there was a time to leave, that was the time for her. Having to repeat that season, I think, would have probably been really hard."
Hanks arrived at Notre Dame for the 2004-05 academic year but wasn't on campus that fall while competing for the United States team at the Under-19 Women's World Cup in Thailand (contested every two years, the tournament is now an Under-20 event). But despite admitting that school "isn't my thing," the former National Honor Society scholar earned her degree in sociology last spring in just 3½ years. With Women's Professional Soccer restoring a domestic league next spring -- including a franchise in Dallas in 2010, near Hanks' Plano home, -- earning her degree left her to mull a decision as to whether she should return to South Bend (and play out her eligibility while pursuing graduate studies) or train full time for the next soccer step at home in Texas.
Bock Talk
Brittany Bock speaks to Kerri Hanks' strengths for reasons beyond proximity on the field for the last four seasons.
Although her background is different as the daughter of a former college baseball player at the University of Illinois and a multi-sport athlete growing up, she has become a soccer addict happy to fall asleep on the couch watching Fox Soccer Channel.
"She's a great tandem with Kerri, because they both are soccer junkies, and they have an understanding of the game," coach Randy Waldrum explained. "They can really key off of each other, probably better than any other players we have, because they have such a good understanding."
Back at midfield, at least for now, after moving back and forth between midfield and forward throughout her first three seasons, Bock has scored 40 goals in 73 career games, placing her No. 14 all time in Notre Dame's long and storied history.
"She's an animal," Hanks laughed. "I don't know; she's just Bock. She's great in the air, physical; she'll go out there and give 110 percent, great with holding the ball, even posting up as a target player. She's great at seeing the field all over, good at switching.
She's a well-rounded player; she can play in the mid, up top. And I wouldn't want to play against her."
Expect her to have no choice next year in the WPS. -- Graham Hays
She sounds like a professional-in-waiting when discussing the various pros and cons she considered before making a decision. But one other significant factor weighed on her mind as she pondered this summer, and in talking about that, her typically dispassionate directness gave way to an intensity scarcely concealed in a few simple words.
"Also, I haven't won yet, and I kind of really want to win," Hanks said. "Not just for me, but for the team. For the four years, our senior class, we've gotten so close."
Wanting to win is something of an understatement when it comes to Hanks. As she herself admits, she may be the game's most ill-tempered soul in defeat. Notoriously demonstrative when showing displeasure on the field, she barks without hesitation at opponents, referees and even teammates who don't correctly assess a situation.
"I think maybe I don't come across verbally -- I'm really hard on my teammates, just because I expect the best out of them every day, day in and day out," Hanks admitted. "If it's an easy practice or if it's a game, I expect them to give 110 percent. So I'll ride my teammates, but I think I've done really well in the leadership of showing it on the field, of just going out there and giving my hardest every single chance I get. Hopefully the freshmen will get that out of me."
It wouldn't hurt the program's future if some of them also picked up her study habits.
Disappointed because she can't afford anything more than basic cable on a college student's budget, thus limiting her access to the likes of Fox Soccer Channel, Hanks watches soccer like many of her peers watch Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert -- religiously. A longtime Michael Owen fan, she only grudgingly admits to watching Chelsea matches in deference to the assortment of individual talent Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich continues to stockpile in London. She watches because she's a soccer junkie, but she also watches with the eye of a student eager to learn.
"I watch so much of it and I think that's one of the benefits I have over most girls, especially with my dad helping me," Hanks said. "Not only what they do on the ball, but I watch a lot of what they do off the ball. A lot of people, if they don't know the game, they're not going to look to see what you do off the ball, but I realized that, especially after my sophomore year, that I'm going to be a marked player. So I have to do a lot more off the ball. ... So the runs, the timing, even the placement of the ball whenever I have the ball is going to be so important. So I watch a lot, and I really look up to those players who create so many chances for themselves and for other people. And I think I just have a knack for that, knowing where to go and where to be. I thank my dad a lot for that."
It may be that Hanks will always be a player who is more easily applauded than embraced by a wider population not linked by rooting interest to her team. That may not be entirely, or even largely, her own doing. Searching for a way to describe both the skill and intensity of her teammate's game, Bock came to the conclusion that she "plays like a guy." From Bock, no shrinking violet herself on the field and a veteran of competition with and against male players, it was a complimentary assessment. But perhaps the flip side of that in women's college soccer, a sport in which rooting for players is a far more developed skill than rooting against players, is that Hanks opens herself up to the same sort of vitriol regularly directed toward a Wayne Rooney or Cristiano Ronaldo, players whose unique styles grate even as their skills amaze.
Of course, while her records make it easy to forget a time before she arrived on the scene, Hanks is still just 23. And even now, after considering a life beyond college soccer and opting instead to return, her perspective may be shifting and evolving.
"She's really seemed to enjoy it," Irish coach Randy Waldrum said of the early stages of her final season. "I think she struggled with the decision, like she said, not knowing what she really wanted to do. But I think once she made it, she was fully committed to it. And you're kind of seeing now with her this year, she seems to be relaxed and really not stressed and seems to be handling the pressure in a different way."
Hanks is immensely gifted on the field and frequently forthright off the field. Like many who possess a single-minded passion for something, she is a complex character.
But more than anything, she is a soccer junkie. And she wants a championship.
Graham Hays is a regular contributor to ESPN.com. E-mail him at Graham.Hays@espn3.com.
