Ian Sawyers (born 2 May 1962) is an English

football Football is a family of team sports that involve, to varying degrees, kicking a ball to score a goal. Unqualified, the word ''football'' normally means the form of football that is the most popular where the word is used. Sports commonly c ...

manager Management (or managing) is the administration of an organization, whether it is a business, a nonprofit organization, or a government body. It is the art and science of managing resources of the business. Management includes the activities o ...

. Sawyers attended Carnegie College, a division of

Leeds Metropolitan University Leeds Beckett University (LBU), formerly known as Leeds Metropolitan University (LMU) and before that as Leeds Polytechnic, is a public university in Leeds, West Yorkshire, England. It has campuses in the city centre and Headingley. The univ ...

Leeds Leeds () is a city and the administrative centre of the City of Leeds district in West Yorkshire, England. It is built around the River Aire and is in the eastern foothills of the Pennines. It is also the third-largest settlement (by populati ...

, England. He played professional soccer for the

Rotherham United Rotherham United Football Club, nicknamed The Millers, is a professional football club based in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, England, which compete in the . The club's colours were initially yellow and black, but changed to red and white around 1 ...

club. Sawyers became Director of Soccer for the Mission Viejo Soccer Club, a youth soccer program based in

Laguna Hills Laguna Hills (; ''Laguna'', Spanish for "Lagoon") is a city in south Orange County, California, United States. Its name refers to its proximity to Laguna Canyon and the much older Laguna Beach. Other newer cities nearby—Laguna Niguel and Lagun ...

California California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...

, in the late 1980s. Sawyers then joined the staff of the

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

women's soccer program. He was promoted to acting head coach at Stanford in 1993 when former head coach Berhane Andeberhan stepped down. During Sawyers' first season of leadership, the Stanford Cardinal earned a program-record 18 wins and reached the Final Four of the NCAA Division I Championship. Over three seasons, Sawyers led the Cardinal to a 50-8-4 record. Sawyers also served as head coach of the Sacramento Storm, a W-League team, from 1993 to 1998. Sawyers was named head coach of the Bay Area CyberRays, later known as the San Jose CyberRays, one of the eight founding member teams in the

Women's United Soccer Association The Women's United Soccer Association (WUSA) was the world's first Women's association football, women's soccer league in which all the players were paid as professionals. Founded in February 2000 in sports, 2000, the league began its first se ...

. The CyberRays won the inaugural WUSA championship, and Sawyers was named WUSA Coach of the Year for 2001. Sawyers coached the CyberRays for two more seasons, until the WUSA suspended its operations in 2003. In 2008, Sawyers was named head coach of

Sky Blue FC NJ/NY Gotham FC is a professional women's soccer team based in Harrison, New Jersey. Founded in 2006 as Jersey Sky Blue, the team was known as Sky Blue FC from 2008 until 2020. A founding member of the National Women's Soccer League (NWSL) in 2013 ...

, a

Women's Professional Soccer Women's Professional Soccer (WPS) was the top-level professional women's soccer league in the United States. It began play on March 29, 2009. The league was composed of seven teams for its first two seasons and fielded six teams for the 2011 sea ...

team based in Somerset County in

New Jersey New Jersey is a state in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern regions of the United States. It is bordered on the north and east by the state of New York; on the east, southeast, and south by the Atlantic Ocean; on the west by the Delaware ...

and scheduled to play its first match in April 2009. On 23 May 2009,

announced that Sawyers had been suspended indefinitely due to differences with the organization's ownership.

Personal life

Julie Foudy Julie Maurine Foudy ( ; born January 23, 1971) is an American retired soccer midfielder, two-time FIFA Women's World Cup champion and two-time Olympic gold medalist. She played for the United States women's national soccer team from 1988 to 2004 ...

and Sawyers have been married since 1995. Their first child Isabel Ann was born in January 2007, and a son named Declan arrived in December 2008. Sawyers and Foudy have jointly conducted youth soccer camps and worked on other soccer-development projects through the Julie Foudy Sports Leadership Academy.

References

1962 births Living people Footballers from Sunderland English footballers Association football midfielders Rotherham United F.C. players English women's football managers Stanford Cardinal women's soccer coaches Women's United Soccer Association coaches USL W-League (1995–2015) coaches Alumni of Leeds Beckett University Women's Professional Soccer coaches {{US-footy-bio-stub