How USWNT's winning culture passes to next generation for 2023 World Cup

It’s true in sports, as in life, that nothing lasts forever. Great teams come and go, their dynasties felled by the persistence of both Mother Nature and the competition. No matter how impressive the wins or the records, eventually everyone has to take a step back to regroup and rebuild.

Everyone, that is, except the U.S. women.

The USWNT has made its seamless transitions from one generation to the next into something of an art form. Iconic players retire or wind down their careers, newcomers stake their claim, and the USWNT maintains its spot at the top of the global game as if nothing has changed.

That ability to adapt on the fly will be put to the test at this year’s World Cup, which begins July 20 in Australia and New Zealand. This was already a team in transition, likely the last World Cup for the much-decorated Megan Rapinoe, Kelley O’Hara and maybe Alex Morgan, and the first for players who will carry the team for the next decade, players like Sophia Smith, Naomi Girma, Trinity Rodman and Alyssa Thompson.

But untimely injuries to Mallory Swanson and captain Becky Sauerbrunn mean even more will be asked of the newcomers.

Meet the team: Get to know the 2023 World Cup roster

Of the 23 players on the U.S. roster, 12 will be playing in their first major international tournament. Only nine are holdovers from the 2019 World Cup team. Seven players are 25 or younger, and only 10 of the field players have made more than 50 appearances for the USWNT.

Yet the goal, the expectation, remains the same as it was four years ago, when the U.S. took a veteran-heavy team to France: To win.

“It’s getting harder and harder to stay at the top because teams are getting so much better and there’s so much talent across the world. But I look at our younger players and I don’t see other countries that have that influx of young talent,” Rose Lavelle, the Bronze Ball winner at the 2019 World Cup, told USA TODAY Sports.

Abundance of riches in young talent

This overhaul of the USWNT roster was to be expected. Of the 18 players on the initial roster for the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, only one wasn’t at the 2019 World Cup. Nine played on both the 2015 and 2019 World Cup champion teams, and six went all the way back to the squad that won gold at the 2012 Olympics.

Though the Americans won the bronze medal in Tokyo, it was clear they needed change. Specifically, an influx of speed and energy. So coach Vlatko Andonovski set about remaking the roster.

“We have to have players that are ready to play seven games consecutively for 90 minutes. Players that are going to be able to play at high tempo, high intensity,” Andonovski said. “But also, we’ve got to have players that have been in tough environments, that have been in stressful and pressure environments. Players that have won big games.

“The whole time, from the Olympics until now, we’ve tried to find the right mix of people.”

All without losing the USWNT’s edge on the competition. But how to do that?

Thanks to Title IX, as well as the size of the U.S. population, the USWNT has an abundance of riches when it comes to young talent. Smith, 22, was U.S. Soccer’s player of the year last year after being the youngest to lead the USWNT in scoring (11 goals) since Mia Hamm in 1993. She also was the NWSL’s youngest-ever MVP.

Meet Sophia Smith: She's the next face of the USWNT. And She knows it.

Rodman, at just 20, was a finalist for last year’s Ballon d’Or.

After being the No. 1 pick in the 2022 NWSL draft, Girma was named Rookie of the Year and Defender of the Year, the first player to win both awards.

The 18-year-old Thompson, Andonovski pointed out after the roster was released, was still playing at the youth level last fall.

“We have a lot of ceiling-raisers, those really special players that, given one chance, they can dribble a team and score a goal,” Sauerbrunn said before she was injured.

“The best advice is to be as free as possible and to do what makes you special when you’re here,” Sauerbrunn added. “I think people feel like they need to change when they make it to the national team. You make it to the national team because of the things you were doing in the league or in high school or college. Do those things.”

'We' greater than 'me'

But every player who comes into a USWNT camp is good. What sets those who earn a regular place with the team apart, what enables the USWNT to thrive amidst internal changes and external challenges, is its culture.

No one has to explain this to the newcomers. They aren’t pulled aside and given a tutorial on the USWNT’s culture. There’s no cheat sheet on how to stick with the national team. It’s just … there; felt from the moment a player walks into her first camp. At every training. At every meeting. At every recovery session. As omnipresent as the USA on the fronts of their shirts.

“It’s the mentality. It’s the players’ mentality and the competitiveness, the drive that does not allow them to take any moment as a rebuild moment or a moment where they can take it easy. Every time they come in the environment, the national team environment, they know it’s a go time,” Andonovski told USA TODAY Sports.

“You have no choice but to match that level of intensity. Because if you don’t do it, the environment kicks you out.”

There’s a want to do well personally, of course, because the better the individual, the better the team. More than that, though, a fierce resolve to uphold the legacy is the through-line from the team that won the very first World Cup in 1991 to the squad that will try and win its fifth title, second only to Brazil’s men, at this year’s tournament.

"The 'we’ is always greater than the ‘me,’ as we always said,” said Julie Foudy, a two-time World Cup champion and former USWNT captain who is now a color commentator for Warner Bros. Discovery.

Nothing exemplifies this attitude more than the role Rapinoe will play on this team.

Rapinoe happily adjusts to different role

Four years ago, Rapinoe won both the Golden Ball as the best player at the World Cup and the Golden Boot for most goals (six). She also won FIFA player of the year. Even as she approaches 38 (her birthday is July 5), she remains world class, able to create scoring opportunities both off set pieces and in the run of play.

Yet Rapinoe willingly accepted a reduced role with the USWNT, just as Abby Wambach did at the 2015 World Cup.

“I really do love my role. I love that I’m still able to do that,” Rapinoe said on the Snacks podcast with Tokyo Olympics teammates Lynn Williams and Samantha Mewis.

“I think it’s still useful. Hopefully.”

It is. Regardless of whether she scores any goals or has a single assist in Australia and New Zealand, Rapinoe’s leadership and her mentoring of young players are essential – at this World Cup and the ones that will follow.

Lavelle still heeds the advice she got from Wambach, even though they were only in one training camp together. When Swanson was on a goal-scoring tear earlier this year, before her season-ending knee injury, she noted how helpful Rapinoe’s insights from the bench were. Smith called Rapinoe “a legend,” and said, “she’s always going to step up when we need her.”

“It’s basically the passing of the baton,” Foudy said. “Those successful transitions happen because we have players willing to do that.”

Veteran players are always teaching

The beauty is this is all player-driven. Andonovski doesn’t dictate it, nor did Jill Ellis or Pia Sundhage before him. It’s the players who are holding each other accountable, the veterans letting the youngsters know, sometimes through words but more often through action, how things are done and what’s expected.

All of the veterans play a role, but it’s those “bridge players” like Rapinoe, Morgan and, before she was injured, Sauerbrunn, who take the lead, ensuring the players coming up now are getting the benefits of the lessons learned by all who came before them.

Even more than the trophies and the titles, this is the U.S. women’s legacy.

“One thing (Wambach) said that really stuck with me: She told the younger players, ‘This environment is really hard, and it’s not that it ever gets easier but the people who are here longest make it look easy,’ and I think that’s so true. You just learn how to deal with hard better,” Lavelle told USA TODAY Sports.

“It’s not that it’s gotten easier or more comfortable, but the longer you’re there, the higher threshold you have to deal with it. To deal with hard. You become more experienced managing the stress of it and dealing with the mental side of it, because it is a mental battle every day.

“The veteran players, it’s the mentality that separates them.”

Accepting your role, no matter what

And it is this dynamic that separates the USWNT from every other team, keeping the Americans on top long past the time when other dynasties would have ended.

Ellis, who led the USWNT to the last two World Cup titles, once said that other teams “will visit pressure, but I think we live there a lot.”

Andonovski prided himself on creating intense, competitive environments in his long, and successful, coaching career in the NWSL and the Major Indoor Soccer League, yet even he was taken aback at his first USWNT camp.

“From Day 1, the moment you walk in, it’s that feeling of, 'I absolutely have to do whatever it takes to be the best that I can be, every moment I spend in this environment,’ ” Andonovski said.

That includes being accepting of your role – even if it’s not one you really want.

The USWNT is a collection of supernovas, players around whom schemes and strategies are built in their club environment. But they cannot all be stars of the national team.

Players who’ve been starters since their U-13 days must accept their role as a substitute with the USWNT. Players who spend the majority of their time at one position with their clubs must play one that’s completely different when they wear the U.S. jersey. Players used to commanding the spotlight must learn to exist in the shadows.

“I’ve always tried to share that we’re all given a role. Whether you’re completely excited and happy about that role or not, it’s really about executing it to the best of your ability,” Crystal Dunn said, “because that’s how we become successful. That’s how we win championships.”

None of this is easy, and not every player can handle the pressure, the expectations and the sacrificing of oneself for the good of the USWNT. But it’s a formula that works, and the USWNT wouldn’t – couldn’t – have it any other way.

“You get to crave it,” Foudy said. “When you’re not around it, you crave what we used to call that wholesome discontent. It’s definitely why this group has been so successful.”

Lindsay Schnell contributed to this report. 

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: USWNT's winning culture passes to next generation for 2023 World Cup