A fifth Olympic gold medal restored the mojo – Soccer

© Peter van den Berg-Imagn Photographs

‘Tis the season for reflection, and it’s OK to be blunt: The previous 18 months have felt like whiplash for followers of the US girls’s nationwide workforce.

Your entire way forward for this system was ostensibly in an existential disaster following a Spherical-of-16 exit on the 2023 FIFA World Cup, the People’ worst end at a serious match.

A terrific hope adopted the nadir, nonetheless. U.S. Soccer satisfied Emma Hayes, the most effective coaches on the planet, to take the top teaching job and lead the workforce again to the highest of the world. That plan was (and nonetheless is) in regards to the 2027 World Cup – however success got here far sooner.

The People gained the gold medal on the 2024 Olympics, defeating Brazil in simply the tenth sport in cost for Hayes. An all-world ahead line stole headlines whereas a generational centerback anchored the workforce’s protection and — most enlightening of all after the previous years — there was each a tactical flexibility and grittiness in regards to the workforce. This, in some ways, was the US of outdated — the workforce that gained 4 World Cups and 4 Olympics previous to this summer time.

A method or one other, historical past will present 2024 as a comeback yr for the US.

This yr was about answering questions. May Hayes actually flip across the complete program? And will the U.S. actually succeed on the Olympics with Hayes solely arriving within the job full-time in late Might? Each questions seem to have been answered with an emphatic, ‘yes’ — the latter being factually irrefutable.  

This yr was additionally about generational shifts. Megan Rapinoe retired on the finish of 2023, and Alex Morgan adopted by the tip of 2024, after being left off the Olympic squad. A brand new ahead line of Trinity Rodman, Sophia Smith and Mallory Swanson firmly established itself because the workforce’s future, whereas Naomi Girma assumed the function of defensive anchor.

This yr was awkward, too, don’t overlook. There was the lengthy await Hayes, and there was uncertainty round simply how a lot she was engaged on the U.S. from afar whereas she completed teaching Chelsea. There have been typically encouraging outcomes blended with a historic loss to Mexico on the Gold Cup that ushered in some PTSD from the World Cup.

Maybe most of all, this yr was about outcomes. All of the above — from a universally lauded teaching rent to dominant particular person performances on the Olympics — mattered for the U.S. re-establishing its mojo on the world stage. The sentiment after the 2023 World Cup was that no one is scared to play the People anymore. That, too, is probably going nonetheless true: No one is scared, per se, however the days have been quick lived for opponents to really feel just like the People are weak.

Successful an Olympics will try this.

Hayes already had the inexperienced mild from U.S. Soccer sporting director Matt Crocker to make the adjustments that she, in her uniquely professional opinion, felt essential to safe a powerful future for the U.S. girls’s nationwide workforce program. Successful the Olympics offers Hayes much more freedom to be daring, a bit like (granting that they’re distinctive and customarily completely different circumstances) Jill Ellis had in 2016 after profitable the 2015 World Cup.

In January, Hayes will name a senior workforce camp and run it alongside a “Futures Camp” of gamers she desires to check within the surroundings to see if they need to be referred to as in once more. She can even collect the whole girls’s nationwide workforce workers, together with youth personnel, to current her long-term imaginative and prescient for the 2027 World Cup and 2028 Olympics.

All that rests on the muse laid in 2024, when the U.S. turned the web page from being as soon as a world large unsure of itself and its future, to a trophy-winning workforce that totally launched the core of its subsequent technology. In 2024, the U.S. girls’s nationwide workforce introduced it was again – and possibly it had by no means totally left.

“It was one of the most honorable and grateful moments I’ve ever had.”

The plan is to maintain the reminiscence of the second, and the objectives of the longer term, high of thoughts. pic.twitter.com/0Ef1q7ENQ9

— U.S. Ladies’s Nationwide Soccer Staff (@USWNT) December 19, 2024