To celebrate 50 years of educating girls at Albuquerque Academy, Alumni Council member Ted Alcorn ’01 is telling the stories of women alumni.
By Ted Alcorn ’01
Catherine Gordon, Academy Class of 1977, the first woman ever to coach men’s professional soccer in the U.S., did not start coaching until she was nearly 40. And her first post was a humble one, with the Dragons – the middle-school basketball and softball squads at Kent Place girls school in Summit, New Jersey.
In hindsight, it’s readily apparent that a person with Catherine’s natural athletic talents might end up mentoring generations of younger players, but it took her decades to see it. And she’s uncertain she would have without her years at the Academy. “People could say ‘life-changing,’ but I think for me, it was life-saving, quite frankly.”
Catherine was admitted to the Academy as a 10th grader as part of the second coed class, where she made sports her unequivocal priority. She played basketball and field hockey, joined the softball program in its first season, and competed in high jump for the track team. (There was no women’s soccer team at that time.)
But academically, Catherine said, she was in over her head. She wouldn’t have graduated but for teachers who found unconventional means of bringing her along. When a summer school English class she was obliged to take with Mr. John O’Connor conflicted with a family vacation, he found another way for her to fulfill the requirements, by writing him letters, which he corrected and sent back. “The teachers worked with you and never quit on you,” she said.
She was struggling in chemistry when the instructor, Dr. Harry Herder, whose dog had recently given birth to a litter of puppies, joked that anybody who aced the next test could have one of them. “I took him at his word,” she said. “It might have been the only time I got an A in chemistry.”
Following graduation (“I was maybe not 100% sure my diploma was going to be signed, but it was”), Catherine headed to college in Colorado but wound up spending an “inordinate” amount of time skiing, instead, and dropped out to work in restaurants. “That was kind of the beginning of starting to maybe grow up,” she said. After a few years, she returned to the classroom, now putting herself through a restaurant business degree at Purdue University, where she made the dean’s list. “It’s amazing how much you learn when you’re actually paying the bills,” she laughed.
And she began noticing how skills – research and critical thinking – she’d honed, unknowingly, at the Academy began to serve her. “Sometimes you don’t realize the gifts you’re given until years later.”
For 15 years, Catherine thrived in the food service industry and her life seemed to be headed up the corporate ladder. But her true love of sports was always there. So, in 2006, in what she describes as “a complete lane change, kind of without a blinker,” she left the security of a predictable job to devote herself to coaching and her own business, employing video to help coach and recruit athletes.
Since then, her resume spans all tiers of soccer, from DI to DIII college to semi-professional and professional. In the USL Women’s League in 2013, she helped lead Dayton, Ohio’s Dutch Lions from the back of its division to its top. But women still weren’t coaching men at that time, and she decided she wanted in. “I just thought it was important, because it wasn’t being done.” So the following year Catherine joined the men’s team as an assistant coach with goalkeeping responsibilities, with few dramatics from “the boys,” as she calls them. “If you knew your stuff, if you could help them achieve their goals. They don’t care” about gender.
These days, Catherine has wound down her business and is easing into retirement, although at the behest of U.S. Soccer, she still teaches a course on coaching and is helping develop a curriculum for goalkeepers. She had to quit playing herself, having sustained too many concussions during her career, but a friend convinced her to take up pickleball, which has proven an outlet for her hyper-competitive streak. And she and her partner adopted a dog during the pandemic and have been enjoying long road trips in their RV.
As she reflects on the thread running through her own life — of consistently trying to be a better version of herself — Catherine recognizes how it helped make her an able mentor for young talents. Even those who are, like her, a bit of a handful. “Every now and then I run into a kid who is a challenge to coach or a challenge to teach, and I’m like, ‘well, this is karma.’”
