There is a story that Anson Dorrance loves telling.

This is not unusual. Anson Dorrance is one of the greatest storytellers in the history of Carolina athletics. That he, himself, happens to be the author of one of the greatest stories in Tar Heel history—how he oversaw the construction of one of the most dominant dynasties in sports history with UNC women’s soccer—is mostly a happy coincidence.

This particular story, though, has nothing to do with soccer. We’re going to let Anson tell it, because when you’re in the room with him, you can’t help but let him direct the conversation. Within ten minutes of sitting down with him recently, he touched on the following topics without prompting and in response to a simple question about parenting:

The architectural background of he and wife M’Liss’s home in Chapel Hill, 1960s music, famed ballet choreographer Eliot Feld, leadership, his 70th birthday celebration and pickleball.

That’s a normal conversational arc with one of the greatest coaches in the history of American team sports. So, yes, we’re going to let him tell his story.

But as you’re listening to this story, keep this in mind: it may not have happened exactly this way. We’ll get to that. Here’s Anson:

“The most impactful book I have ever read is Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. That led to what in my opinion is the most important of my 13 core values. In the book, Frankl writes, ‘The last of the human freedoms is to choose your attitude in any given set of circumstances and to choose your own way.’ So one of my core values is that we choose to be positive.

“I was down in Florida with my family on a cruise. We’re in one of the ports, and one of the activities is snorkeling. You have to put on the masks and flippers, and of course they’ve already been used by several other people that day, so there is still sand in the mask from the previous user.

“As our family puts our stuff on, there’s a family next to us, and every single one of them is whining about something. And all of a sudden, my daughter, Michelle, looks over at me and says, ‘The last of the human freedoms.’”

This is the perfect Dorrance family story, right? It is the real-world application of the values that have driven Anson—and the Tar Heel women’s soccer program—to greatness. It is the elder Dorrance passing down those lessons to the next generation, and the next generation applying them to real world situations. It is…

Probably not true.

“I know he loves that story,” says daughter Michelle, now the founder and artistic director of Dorrance Dance. “But that’s not how it happened. We were on a vacation, which was rare for our family to have everyone together. And we were snorkeling. And I was sitting next to him, and that other family was complaining a lot.”

But?

“But it was him who leaned over to me. He looked at me and said, ‘The last of the human freedoms.’ I didn’t say it to him. It was him, even in that moment, making sure we took a lesson from the situation. And that was definitely part of my core belief system. I knew he valued toughness and never whining. I remember falling down in our side yard and not wanting to stop because I wanted to be tough. A few minutes later, he looked at me and said, ‘You should do something about that,’ because I had blood coming down my leg.

“I completely knew about his values. But that story didn’t happen that way, even though I love that he wants it to have happened that way.”

It’s a great story no matter how it actually unfolded. And it’s very much a Dorrance family story. For almost five decades now, we have known Anson Dorrance as a Carolina soccer coach, as a champion, and as an institutional Tar Heel.

We have very rarely known him as a father, as just a regular old dad to son Donovan and daughters Natalie and Michelle. Is that even possible? It is realistic for The Anson Dorrance to be a regular old dad?

How does someone who has shaped the lives of so many of our country’s best women’s soccer players—including Mia Hamm, the most iconic female athlete in Carolina and women’s sports history—shape the lives of his kids?

Exactly the same way.

All three of his children immediately reference Man’s Search for Meaning as an important part of their childhood, and all three can quote verbatim from the book. But life as a Dorrance wasn’t just repeating life lessons from a book.

“He is,” says Donovan, “a wonderful father. He was very loving and supportive.”

The Dorrance kids have gotten to know their father in multiple seasons of his life. When they were young, he admittedly wasn’t physically present very often. There wasn’t time. There was his job as the head coach at the University of North Carolina, and his job as the head coach of the United States Women’s National Team, and his side gig as a worldwide and constantly in-demand soccer icon.

There were still plenty of perks, of course. Hamm and multiple other Tar Heels were Dorrance family babysitters (Natalie, who by coronation from all involved receives the coveted honor of most competitive Dorrance, was known as “Mad Dog Dorrance”), and they remain close with numerous players from that era of Carolina soccer. But the reality is there was a time period when their father was always working. He jokes—or maybe it’s not really a joke—that there was one 365-day period when he had one specific Thursday afternoon off. That was it.

Natalie played high school soccer. On one occasion, he attended one of her games strictly because he was recruiting a player on the opposing team. “And I had to mark her!” she says now with a laugh.

“To some extent, they may have resented soccer,” Anson says. “And maybe right now I’m trying to make up for that period. I know the time I spent building my career was an incredible investment, and hopefully my kids could sense the love through that.”

But when he was present, he was completely present. He has attended countless dance performances and chorus concerts—M’Liss owns a ballet studio in Chapel Hill, Michelle has long been one of the world’s foremost tap dancers and Donovan is a musician who often collaborates with Michelle. Anson would tell you he knows nothing about dance; the other members of his family would say he frequently makes incisive observations even if he doesn’t know every technical detail. M’Liss and Michelle constantly tell him the best seats are center section, about two-thirds of the way back in the orchestra. That allows the viewer to have the full view of the stage and the artistry the dancer is trying to project.

Anson, needless to say, is not a typical viewer. He would rather sit as close to the front as possible, off to one side. That enables him to see into the wings, where he can see the dancers before and after they enter or leave the stage. In the same way he’d rather watch a team train than play a game, he wants to know what’s happening that isn’t part of the show.

He was, in many ways, the model parent when any of his children played a sport. Michelle played a year of soccer at NYU; any time during her soccer career that he watched her play, he sat quietly, observing. “I think her coaches usually liked it when I came,” he says, “because the other parents would usually be quiet if I was quiet.”

His kids knew he was extremely unlikely to yell at them. But he was frustratingly, agonizingly, extraordinarily difficult to argue against.

Around the age of 14, Michelle decided she wanted a nose ring. This was still startling in the Chapel Hill of that era. M’Liss was vehemently against it, and told her, simply, “Talk to your father.” To Michelle, this was great news. She perceived her father as being—as most teenage daughters do—more openminded than her mother. Surely he would understand.

The resulting interaction was so impactful that Michelle remembers every detail of it
today. Where it happened, what was on the walls in the family home where it happened… everything. They were passing in a hallway and she made a passionate case to her father about why she needed a nose ring. He would get this. He would understand her.

“I knew you would understand,” she told him.

He stopped in the hallway and listened. He paused for a moment…then another moment. “Huh,” he said. “I never thought you were the kind of person that would need something like that to feel different.”

Michelle just laughs. “I was like, ‘Damn it!’” she says. “He trapped me. There was no way I could get it at that point. It was terrible.”

“I had a former player tell me one time, ‘Anson, I thought after I played for you, I could play for anyone. But through your criticism I could feel your love,’” he says. “That went right to the middle of my soul. That was the nicest thing anyone could have said to me. I am a harsh critic. I know the standard of the highest level, and if you want to get there, I will tell you if it’s not good enough. But through that, hopefully you’re sensing my genuine care as a human being. All of us can benefit from a critic. The one who helps you the most is a loving critic. The reason they’re criticizing you isn’t to win an argument or put you down but to make you better. All of us have to find our loving critics. Hopefully, our kids felt the love.”

As those kids grew older, sometimes they were the ones teaching their father how to show the love. All family members point to the pandemic as a way the entire family reconnected. With no one to spend time with other than each other, they learned something that might be surprising for many families—they actually liked spending time together.

Anson and Donovan are frequent pickleball partners in Chapel Hill. Sometimes they plan their games, sometimes they just run into each other on a local court and immediately team up. Being Anson Dorrance’s pickleball partner is not easy. He is playing for fun—but for him, the fun is in the competition. And the winning.

So being his partner requires meeting a very high standard. Maybe that’s putting it too nicely.

“He is bloodthirsty,” Donovan says.

His father’s competitiveness required a quick coaching session from the son.

“When we were first getting into pickleball, he was being too much of a coach and not enough of a dad,” Donovan says. “There was a car ride home when I told him I needed him to be my dad and not Coach Dorrance. When I was playing soccer, he was great about giving me tips but never overstepping. In pickleball, he really wanted me to make the correct decisions and anytime I didn’t, it disappointed him. I was hearing some sighs.

“We talked and I told him, ‘Dude, it’s just pickleball.’ It doesn’t have to be a high quality performance competition. And since then, it’s been so much fun to play.”

But this is how you know Donovan is definitely a Dorrance. He simply can’t resist adding, “And at this point, I’ve surpassed him as a player.”

That sound you hear is probably Anson going out to the pickleball court to practice.

Anson and M’Liss have three grandchildren—Natalie has four-year-old twins and a 14-year-old son, Finley. Anson is currently teaching the grandkids how to play chess…the Dorrance way.

“It’s funny to watch them,” Natalie says. “It’s a hard game to learn, with all the strategy and thinking ahead. What’s nice about it is that he teaches them as he beats them to a pulp. He’ll show them something about the game, and then destroy them using that strategy.”

The source of many of the family’s favorite Anson stories come from the annual beach week. In most families, this is the time for rest and relaxation.

And it’s true that during that week at North Topsail Beach, it wasn’t unusual to find Anson out on the deck, serenely surveying the beach.

It was the picture of your average beachgoer, relaxing by washing the waves crash against the sand. Except…

“He was trying to decide which of the neighbors to recruit for beach soccer,” Michelle says. “He’d look at a neighboring house and say, ‘That looks like an athletic kid, let’s ask them if they want to play.’

He is always competitive. But it has also empowered me to seek out things that are challenging, and it’s one of the reasons I love to try things I can barely do in my dancing. It’s a thrill. The trial and failure and success just because you believed you could is insane.”

Those beach trips featured more than just soccer.

“As a competitor, he had total disregard for his body,” says Donovan, who still sees that competitiveness as his father’s frequent pickleball partner. “One time at family beach week, he was playing pickup basketball with some other dads. Of course it turned all macho with lots of contact. Dad was guarding this guy heavily, and somehow Dad’s tooth went into this guy’s head. Here we are at the beach, the place everyone goes to supposedly relax, and Dad gets his teeth
knocked out playing basketball.”

Not much has changed. On a recent spring weekend, the family was gathering to celebrate Finley’s 14th birthday

“How do we sharks-with-blood-in-the-water Dorrances celebrate this?” Anson asks. “We’re having a paintball war.”

The original plan was that the adults were not going to participate in the paintball war, leaving it for the younger attendees. But, well, it looked like fun…and there was competition…and one team had to win and one team had to lose…and before you knew it, there was Anson Dorrance strapping on a paintball mask and proudly displaying the welt on his neck from taking enemy fire.

The teams ended up being—much like pickleball—Anson and Donovan against the world. In one of the games, Donovan’s strategy was simple: sprint immediately to get the flag and try to surprise the other team with aggressiveness.

Anson loved it. He immediately referenced the 1981 Australian war movie “Gallipoli,” because one of the less appreciated of his characteristics is of a great curator—he has a story or reference for almost everything. As he and his son went through the postgame summary immediately after the battle, Anson was beaming.

“I was being completely reckless,” Donovan says, “and he loved it. He loves that kind of energy and aggressiveness to try and win.”

It is not always easy to be a Dorrance. Anson is…well, Anson. M’Liss is a fixture in the Chapel Hill and dance communities. Michelle and Donovan have performed on a national and international level. When they are together, there are a lot of big personalities in the
room.

But it is Natalie who prompts the biggest smile from Anson on this day. He has talked for an hour about a wide range of topics. It comes back, as it always does, to competition. He is excited that Natalie has recently taken up tennis.

“She has completely run through her entire set of friends,” he says. “They can’t play tennis anymore with her because she is too good.”

Last month, Natalie pointed out to him that her combined tennis winning percentage is higher than his career winning percentage. This galls him, of course. And you can be certain that he will quietly keep track of those respective percentages and will let her know if he passes her.

But it also makes him exceedingly proud. So proud, in fact, that he delivers the ultimate Dorrance compliment, one that only his family would truly understand the meaning behind.

“Natalie,” he says with the pride of a conventional parent telling you about a child’s job promotion, “is my little ass-kicker.”