Ann Carole Moylan was the backbone of the million dollar soccer company her sons built
What started as Michael Moylan’s high school project at Durham Academy blossomed into a multi-million dollar soccer retailer. Moylan and his brother Brendan still run it, 36 years after the first Eurosport catalog went out, 26 years after they bought the domain for Soccer.com, after expanding into rugby and lacrosse as well.
And none of it ever would have happened without another Moylan, the ultimate soccer mom.
Ann Carole Moylan, who died in May at age 82, was best known around Durham for her charitable endeavors. Along with her husband Joe, a Duke surgeon of some renown, she founded the tuition-free Durham Nativity School and was also involved with Meals on Wheels for decades.
She also mothered not only her six soccer-playing kids — and got to know pretty much everyone in the North Carolina soccer community in the process — but an entire generation of future players and coaches who would show up in Durham for camps or summer work at Eurosport and gather for meals at the Moylans’ home in Forest Hills. Some stayed overnight. Some stayed for a week. All left with her trademark benediction, “Go easy.”
Two of those kids, Michael and Brendan, launched a company that was the country’s first soccer-focused mail-order retailer and remains the leading soccer-specific online storefront for shoes, equipment, balls, jerseys and goalkeeper gloves, among other items. Eurosport just happened to launch at a moment when soccer was crossing over into the American mainstream, but there was no guarantee the company would be able to thrive and grow as the boys went off to college.
“We started it, and then we ultimately left it,” Michael Moylan said. “And my mom took over from there.”
“Considering our age and everything, the fact we were still in school, she really ran things day-to-day those first four years until Michael graduated,” Brendan Moylan said. “Certainly in the summertimes we were around.”
Ann Carole, trained as a nurse, made sure it survived. While Mike was at Georgetown and, a year later, Brendan went off to Duke, she did it all. She answered the phones. Filled orders and shipped them. Handled customer service. Made sure the catalogs got out. Made sure the vendors got paid. Met with sales reps. Bought a portable computer the size of a suitcase and brought it back and forth between the store and the house. The boys would pick the products they wanted to sell and come home in the summer, but during the school year, Ann Carole was in charge — and sales doubled every year, going from $90,000 in Year 1 to over $1 million by the time the brothers were home from school.
“From a cultural perspective, she laid the foundation for what the business would not only represent for the people that came every day but also the face and the voice of the business in the marketplace,” Michael Moylan said. “She had six kids that all played through both high school and many through college. She was very familiar with being on the sidelines, all the ins and outs of what was necessary. From a practical perspective, she never played the game, but knew everything that was required.”
In the early days, the Moylan brothers would spend the summer going from soccer camp to soccer camp, selling gear out of the back of a truck and begging camp directors for their mailing lists. The business tended to attract soccer fans and players, and there’s a long list of former employees who went on to distinguished careers (including Mia Hamm). All of them were welcome at the Moylan house, where Ann Carole refused to be called “ma’am” and cooked for crowds of 10s and 20s who knew her as “Mrs. M.” She’d run into kids who knew the family around town and hire them. She pulled one out of a Durham supermarket in 1985. He’s still with the company.
Those relationships sometimes extended to customers. Answering the phones, Ann Carole got to know the mother of a young goalkeeper in Mississippi who asked to pay for her son’s gear COD, back when that was a thing. When that goalkeeper went to Belmont Abbey and came to work at summer camps at Duke, she insisted he stay with them. So John Boa went to work at Eurosport in 1986, running around with the Moylan brothers all summer.
“She’d be there at 6 a.m. answering phones and packing boxes, and we’d roll in from about 9 to 4:30, then go out to Durham Academy and train,” Boa said. “The people there went on to amazing things. National coaches of the year. The head of Nike soccer. The head of Adidas soccer. It’s a really huge branch of the U.S. Soccer family tree. And she was always the last one to leave and the first one there the next day.”
The idea for the business seems so obvious now, but it took the vision of a soccer-mad high school kid to see it in 1984. European soccer was almost a rumor. Games were distributed on mail-order VHS tapes, traded like contraband among soccer fans. The really good gear was made in Europe — Adidas mostly, but other brands then unfamiliar to Americans as well — and impossible to get here. There were almost no games on TV, no soccer bars, no Manchester United jerseys on the racks at K-Mart.
When the Eurosport catalog arrived in the mail, it was not only a cornucopia of hard to find gear, it was like a newsletter, full of photos and news from Europe that was otherwise impossible to get. For soccer fans in the ‘80s, and even the early ‘90s, the catalog was an umbilical cord connecting American fans to the game. When the game did blossom here, after the World Cup in 1994 especially, the Moylans were uniquely positioned to take advantage.
That’s also when Ann Carole stepped aside from day-to-day operations, what Michael called “quasi-retirement,” but she never really left. As she might have said it was time to, “Go easy.”
“I don’t know if it was her or someone else put a sign at work: ‘Even if your mom does work here, clean up after yourself,’ ” Brendan Moylan said. “She brought a tremendous amount of humor to the business, but really the compassion of taking care of people, whether it’s the customers or the staff.”
