Emma Hayes' ‘astronomical' year as USWNT head coach – but this is only the first step

New York Times

a day ago

COMMERCE CITY, Colo. — On June 1, 2024, as the U.S. women's national team prepared to take the field against South Korea in Colorado, head coach Emma Hayes stared down a stadium tunnel swirling with sound.
Staff were banging on the walls to hype up the players, and fans roared with similar anticipation. The heat and humidity, combined with the mile-high altitude, were brutal — especially for an Englishwoman who hadn't known how to properly hydrate for those conditions.
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It was Hayes' first game since accepting the position in November 2023, and she was nervous. She'd spent 12 years managing Chelsea and had no idea how an American crowd would respond to someone 'from the outside,' as she described it. Still healing from the disappointment of their earliest World Cup exit in USWNT history, her new side were also less than two months out from the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris. Hayes felt 'desperate to do well for the team.'
They beat South Korea 4-0, with two goals each from forward Mallory Swanson and defender Tierna Davidson. Seventy days later on August 10, the USWNT became Olympic gold medalists with a 1-0 victory over Brazil. And in the year since her nerve-wracking debut, Hayes has uprooted and overhauled the women's program in ways that feel revolutionary, inviting more new players to national team camp than any coach before her and revamping the U-23s to create a sustainable and cohesive pipeline of talent.
Now, with two more years to go until the 2027 World Cup in Brazil, Hayes remains a champion of development and deliberation, choosing process over perfection as she continues to build.
Thursday night offered a poetic checkpoint for what has changed and what has remained the same. Hayes and the USWNT were back at Dick's Sporting Goods Park, and the final score was again 4-0, this time against a depleted Republic of Ireland. Swanson is pregnant and Davidson is out with an anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury; this match instead featured goals from defender Avery Patterson, midfielders Sam Coffey and Rose Lavelle, and forward Alyssa Thompson.
Coffey and Lavelle, who just returned to USWNT camp after an ankle injury kept her away since December, are two of just four players on Hayes' first roster as head coach who also played against Ireland. It's a testament to Hayes' dedication to experimenting and implementing a new standard for who receives an invitation to camp.
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Though Coffey earned her first USWNT call up in September 2022 under former head coach Vlatko Andonovski, she did not make the 2023 World Cup roster. Since Hayes stepped in, she has been a consistent fixture for the national team at No. 6. Thursday's match against Ireland was her 36th cap and she scored her third goal for the United States.
'She's had such a profound impact on me as a person and a player,' Coffey said of Hayes after Thursday's match. 'I think she, in many ways, has just given me such confidence and belief in myself to know what I can do and to help the team in any way possible. I think the amount that she's done in a year is astronomical.'
Coffey added that she and her teammates 'still have so much that we want to do in so many ways.' 'We want to grow and every camp, every game we have is just another step that we get to take together,' she added, 'and so we're loving her.'
Thompson's journey with the national team has been similarly nonlinear, even under Hayes. While she made Andonovski's World Cup roster, she seldom played, and was not chosen by Hayes to compete for an Olympic medal in Paris. Her standout club performances since with Angel City in the NWSL earned her another invitation, and she has since solidified her spot on the USWNT.
'I feel like I've grown so much as a player,' Thompson said after the game Thursday night of Hayes' impact. 'I'm just understanding the game more. In the beginning, there was a lot of information that I wanted to take in, and now I'm really understanding it. I feel like it comes a little bit second nature. Just being able to keep implementing things and working on my game really helped and it came from Emma coming in and just helping our team in that way.'
Hayes was similarly effusive in her post-match press conference.
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'I know you're probably bored of me, but I just love them all,' she said. 'I said to them today, 'I don't want them to think that I take for granted the trust that they place in me to coach them'. I'm so grateful for how vulnerable they are to let me do that and, yeah, I just love them.'
One year into the job, Hayes has called up 27 players to the senior team — which, of course, required tough decisions and frank conversations with those who lost their spots. Hayes' first major decision came when she announced her 18-player roster for the Olympics, which did not include USWNT legend Alex Morgan. Her omission marked the first time since 2008 that Morgan would not compete with the U.S. in a major tournament.
It was a ripping off of a band-aid that sent shockwaves through the world of women's soccer and made clear the extent to which Hayes was willing to endure discomfort in order to manifest her vision. Morgan announced her second pregnancy and retirement last September, having played no part in the U.S.'s gold medal run.
And Hayes kept tinkering. Sometimes it was out of necessity as a result of injuries or pregnancies, but largely to ensure players were in the best environments for their growth. The Olympic group has not all played together since leaving France, and two of those gold medalists, Korbin Albert and Jaedyn Shaw, have recently been moved to the U-23s to continue learning.
'It's a reminder that you have to develop a playing pool that's capable, and when you're facing top opponents across the world that have Champions League experience, they have Nations League experience, they have cap accumulation (with the) Under 20s, Under 17s, we have a lot of catching up to do and to close that gap,' Hayes said. 'Our program has been really clear, especially with the introduction of our under-23 program.'
Hayes would have been justified in coasting after last summer's accomplishment, at least for a little while; winning medals in major international tournaments affords you that. But if anything, she's become more dogmatic about the changes she wants to implement, the gaps she seeks to close between starters and bench players on the senior year, and also between the senior team and U-23s.
'I feel like we're back on track, but I will urge caution with it — and I say that because I'm so respectful of what England and Spain and Germany and Brazil in particular are doing in the global game. There is no gap between one, two, three, four, five in the world,' Hayes said Wednesday.
'We have to make every moment count for us to put ourselves in the best place possible to compete.'