Mallory Pugh, the USWNT's Next Big Thing, has no use for your hype

JERSEY CITY, N.J. – After Mallory Pugh got the biggest call of her young life, she fell right asleep.

United States women’s national team head coach Jill Ellis had just told the then-17-year-old forward that she had made the tight 18-woman roster for the Rio Olympics and, in the same breath, reminded Mal – nobody actually calls her Mallory – that she was the second-youngest American Olympian in soccer ever.

Pugh had been involved with the senior national team for just six months, and making the Olympic squad is actually harder than making the Women’s World Cup team, as five fewer players get to go. Several established veterans like Heather O’Reilly didn’t make the cut for Rio. Pugh did, even though she hadn’t expected to be selected.

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But, while sitting on the tarmac for a flight home to Highlands Ranch, Colo., she was feeling sleepy. So after she hung up with Ellis, she casually informed her parents of her improbable milestone, put her headphones on and conked out.

Pugh, now 18, laughs at the memory. “I think it was after a game,” she recalls, “and I was just dead.”

In its storied history, the U.S. women’s national team has not had a talent of Pugh’s precociousness, flair, daring, speed and technique since, well, maybe ever. Labels quickly follow. Because in the direct line of succession from Michelle Akers to Mia Hamm to Abby Wambach, no evident successor as the dominant forward of her era has materialized now that Wambach is retired.

Alex Morgan’s ascent was slowed by injuries and she’s still more of an efficient forward than a game-altering weapon. Carli Lloyd is a natural two-way midfielder asked to focus on attacking and forever fighting her urge to drop deep to come get the ball.

So when a prodigy like Pugh comes along – and that word is not, as so very often, used lightly in this context – the hype doesn’t lag very far behind. Especially when you nonchalantly score from 80-yard dribbles against Brazil at the under-20 level.

Or when you score surprising senior team goals with a confidence and calm that so bely your age.

“Mal is so awesome,” says reigning national team player of the year Tobin Heath, on whom Pugh models her game. “I love that kid to death. She works her butt off. And she’s got something very unique in the game that we haven’t – well, I haven’t – seen on this team. So I’m excited about her future. She has just so much potential. And that’s encouraging for us, especially moving forward in these next few years.”

**********Pugh, for her part, is still just wrapping her head around the fact that she is on the USWNT at all. “It was just kind of surreal for me – and it still is,” she says. “A year ago, I was like, ‘This is crazy. I am eating lunch and going down the elevator with some of my idols that I looked up to growing up.’ ”

Yet her call-up to last year’s January camp was not her first taste of the national team. A few years earlier, she had twice practiced with the senior squad to make up the numbers while she was in a youth national team camp at the same facility in Los Angeles. Pugh, a high-school sophomore at the time, was so nervous that she shanked simple shots. The jitters haven’t yet entirely left her.

“They’re slowly getting out,” she says. “There’s still some inside.”

Ellis has become an avowed fan over the last year. “I saw a massive growth in Mal,” she says. “On the field, she’s still continuing to learn there, but because of her technique and her IQ, I think she’s adjusted very quickly. Now it’s just more and more experience against these top, top teams. She’s special.”

In 2016, her first year on the national team, Pugh collected seven assists – good for fourth on the team behind Lloyd, Heath and Crystal Dunn. However, the person least impressed by any of this is Pugh.

“I feel like I’m just taking it all in and just being relaxed and just kind of going day-by-day with it,” she says. “Not really thinking too much of it, too much of all the stuff I have done. It’s just kind of in the past. I look to the future.”

Pugh says she doesn’t read what’s written or said about her. “Not really,” she says with a shrug. “I don’t really care.”

Pugh could have turned pro out of high school, jumping straight to the National Women’s Soccer League or to Europe. She opted to go to UCLA instead, deferring until this past January to play in the Under-20 Women’s World Cup. Currently, the rule is that you have to exhaust your college eligibility before you can be drafted by the NWSL. That said, exceptions have historically been made for special players like Pugh and likely would be again.

But while in college, Pugh can’t be paid for her national team involvement. Most years, the typical regular draws a six-figure salary, which rises in Olympic and World Cup years, in addition to benefits. Between that and the missed endorsements, going to college for four years could easily cost Pugh a million dollars cumulatively, assuming her national team career stays on its current trajectory. She doesn’t even get the same per diem as her U.S. teammates, having to settle for half because of NCAA regulations.

Pugh seriously considered skipping college. “It was definitely an option that I looked at,” she says. “But I think for me the best option, or the best decision, was to go to college. I’m happy with my decision. When the time comes, it’ll come.”

Even though she has absolutely nothing to learn in college as a soccer player, Pugh, who missed out on a lot of high school, felt that she could enrich herself by continuing her education.

“I think it’s because of where I was, not just as a soccer player but off the field too – just maturity-wise,” she says. “I love learning things. I wasn’t really in high school a lot, and I just want to be in a school. It’s just an experience I want to have.”

Pugh is currently taking a music history class about the Beatles and another on diet and exercise, but she has no clue what she wants to major in. In that sense, she’s very 18.

“Some days I wake up and I’m like, ‘I want to be a doctor,’ ” she says, daydreaming out loud. “But then I’m like, that’s not realistic, for me. But that would be so fun and so cool. And some days I’m like, ‘I want to study art or something.’ I don’t know. I’m still trying to figure that out.”

Will she go all four years at UCLA? Pugh makes the international sound for “I don’t know.” Nemmm-mmmuh. For now, she’s happy to share a dorm room with two other girls and a bathroom with three more. So one day she’s staying at a good hotel with the national team, and the next, she has to await her turn to shower.

“It’s kind of fun,” she says, “you just have to embrace it and make the most of it.”

**********Meet Pugh off the field and you become acutely aware of how young she really is.

She’s so young that the 28-year-old Heath and the 27-year-old Morgan were some of her favorite players growing up. “And of course Mia Hamm,” she adds, before conceding that she never actually saw Hamm play live. “Well, I saw videos of it.” Pugh was six years old when Hamm retired in 2004.

She’s so young that, until recently, she traveled with a blanket. “I’d always bring it everywhere I went,” Pugh says. “It’s a safety blanket, comfort-type of thing.”

She’s so young that she’s never watched “Friends.”

She’s so young that she’s incapable of realizing how hard the things she’s doing really are.

She’s so young that she’s actually eligible to go to a third Under-20 World Cup in 2018. Last November, she starred on the U.S. Under-20s that nevertheless delivered a disappointing fourth place at the World Cup in Papua New Guinea. Pugh was the team captain.

And she was also the team ham.

Last Friday, a day before the USA’s SheBelieves Cup game with England, Pugh is speaking to a reporter in a hotel lobby chair – clutching a parka, clad in a red beanie and a grey hoodie, sipping tea. It’s cold out. After the interview, she is meeting teammates Morgan Brian and Lindsey Horan for coffee.

But she is interrupted by a father and his young daughter, slowly approaching her seat. “Can we just say hi?” the father finally asks. “You borrowed our sled one time. We come from Highlands Ranch, right up the street.”

Pugh is taken aback at first. But then this sort of thing happens with surprising regularity around the U.S. women’s national team, whose players are constantly approached by people with the most tenuous of connections.

“I remember that,” Pugh says after they leave. “There’s this sledding hill by my house that everybody goes to. Their sleds were so good and I had this crappy one.”

Mal Pugh is so young that it wasn’t very long ago that she borrowed her neighbors’ superior sled.

Leander Schaerlaeckens is a soccer columnist for Yahoo Sports. Follow him on Twitter @LeanderAlphabet.