Caitlin Carducci doesn't do things halfway.
When the Orlando Pride officially hired her in January for their open position of Vice President of Soccer Operations and General Manager, she had roughly ten weeks before the regular season kicked off. After meeting with all the staff in the front office and on the technical side, the first thing she did was book meetings with every single player on the roster.
Not to evaluate them or set expectations, but simply to get to know them.
"Building relationships was one of the key things that I knew would be the most important part of coming into this job," she told Orlando-Pride.com. "So I made a point of meeting individually with all the players and just getting to know them as people."
It was an important first step in building those relationships, a few weeks before the start of a long and arduous NWSL season. But coming into a new club with high expectations, building on the past few years of success, it was something she felt she needed to do to set the tone for the year to come.
"Good, bad, indifferent, we're gonna go through it all together," she said, "and it's always better when you know the person when you're going through those things, rather than just a name on a piece of paper."
Now, Carducci sits three months into her new role with her new team. She's started to feel a bit more at home, but still realizes that she's been in Orlando for barely 10 weeks.
"Real, real quick turn around," she laughed.
The biggest structural shift from her previous stop has been the nature of the role itself. In Kansas City, Carducci worked alongside former Head Coach and current GM Vlatko Andonovski in a shared leadership model, one she credits deeply. Now in Orlando, she's the one making those final decisions on her own.
"I was definitely part of a two-headed monster in Kansas City," she said. "Vlatko, I still consider him a fantastic mentor, wonderful person, dear friend, but it was him and I tackling things together. I think the biggest difference is understanding that the buck stops with me. It really is a collaborative thing, but at the end of the day, you're the one who's making the final calls."
That collaboration extends first and foremost to Pride Head Coach Seb Hines.
"Seb's name is on the lineup sheet. At the end of the day, he decides what the lineup is, he's determining playing time," she said. "I will ask questions, I will consult, I will provide my thoughts if and when he asks for them. But generally speaking, his name is on the bottom of that sheet. I always joke that my name is the one that makes the final decision on contracts, so therefore, that's final say there. But I don't envision there's ever a world in which he and I are not aligned on those things. There should never be a world in which we're bringing in a player that I'm dead set against, or that he is."
What she's been upfront about from the very beginning is knowing where she excels and where she needs support. It's the same honesty that shaped her decision-making before she even said "yes" to the job.
"From day one, kid you not, the first time someone called and asked if I was interested, I said, 'absolutely, would love to have a phone call,'" she said. "This is what I can do, this is what I can't do. So if you don't have someone there that can do that, I'm not the right fit.'"
That candid self-assessment is what led directly to one of her most significant moves since arriving: the hiring of Technical Director Mark Wilson, a position the Pride had never had before.
"Where Mark is really going to help us a lot is to have that day-to-day focus on how we do things on the field, and how we do things off the field that impact things on the field," Carducci said.
Wilson brings a playing background that mirrors Hines' own path in some ways. Both have ties to Middlesbrough in England, both made the journey across the Atlantic that shaped their understanding of the women's game here in a specific way. But what Carducci values most is the way Wilson operates as a translator between ideas and execution, between the training field and the weekend game model, and between what she and Hines envision and what actually gets put into practice.
"The way that he is able to take a brainstorming session, an idea, a thought, and then put it together is like a masterpiece," she said. "And then at the end of the day, you have exactly what you were thinking in some type of written, logical form. It blows my mind. And it's the same way with the coaches. It's how he can look at something and say, in this match, we saw that we could have exploited this; we can probably do the same thing against this team. How do we put that into play on the training field to then see it in the game model on the weekend?"
Wilson emerged as the right choice after an extensive search.
"It wasn't an easy pick, because we did go through a very thorough search process," she said. "But it was very clear that he was the right pick."
Three months in and five games into the 30-game season, Carducci's focus is now squarely on building the infrastructure to keep the Pride's ambitions going forward and building on what's already established over the past few seasons.
"I'm really looking forward to creating our system and processes, the three of us leading the way with the rest of our staff highly involved, and then how we put those processes into place to really watch this team take a giant leap forward as far as how we do things," she said. "The goal at the end of the day is always to win as many trophies as you can. Trying to keep climbing up those standings, and see ourselves holding a trophy here later in the year."
