Aspire in the World Fellows Book - 2022

77 76 trying different things. I think as a Coach you go through two periods; you go through a performance period where you’re trying to actually execute and win a major championship, and then you go through a development period. We went into this development period and it was telling my players it’s not going to look great, it’s going to be stressful and some of your roles might change and when players hear that, they are initially with you, but the reality is when you’re in it and you’re losing and it’s stressful then the noise starts, and it’s about how you manage that and take a team through that. That was an incredibly challenging time for me as a coach. When you were coaching, was it the technical/tactical aspect of the game that you gave prominence to or the physical side of it was equal? I think you need to look at where the game is trending because again you have to look at problem solving not just tomorrow but for the future. My staff and I sat down and that included the high-performance staff, and we said what are going to be the super factors they are going to help us win in 2019? What are the elements of our game that we really need to tap into, and we knew that at the highest international football level, transition is a massive part of our game. I also knew we wanted to be a 360-degree pressing team, meaning I wanted to know everybody was responsible for joining the press. I knew physically we had to be a speed endurance team, we had to sustain high intensity for longer periods of time. I met with my sports scientist to work out how do we build that out, how do we get our dream to be the fittest in the world to be able to do this. Another element that we looked at as a super factor, and it is when you go into world championships is set pieces. You know the difference sometimes in those tightest of moments. So, we developed set pieces and identified our free kick takers so we really built in strategies for that and then the other part of it is we want it to be the best transition team. On both sides of the ball, defending to attacking, attacking to defending, we wanted to be the best transition team in the world. I think one of things that I realized as a coach when you look at what you’re training all the time, because it’s fun, you want to train in that in possession attacking moment as much as possible. When you look at how many minutes in the game you’re in that area, we decide to really make sure we were very good in the moments we were going to play in the most. That was our transition and we scored early because we were just in the press transition quickly and hit them on the counter and hit them hard. I think those were important components for us to identify. The final thing that relates to personnel was how deep our roster was. You win a World Cup because you have players available to select from and that’s the reality. Players’ availability and really layering in how important it was for our players to be professional in our recovery strategies, that was key as well. How about team spirit? It’s critical. It was three elements for me, we had to have athleticism, technique, and mentality. That was the trifecta. As the US team we had all three. Some countries have one or two I think now where we are in the women’s game there are more and more countries with all three. You look at England, they’ve got mentality and they know what it takes to win, they’ve got athleticism, they’ve got technique, but I think for us, we needed all those elements. You also need holistically to look at your team and you have to have an energy, a synergy, a love almost within the group. They’re not always going to love the coach; trust me that goes with the territory. I have this saying you can love them, but they might not always love you back. You need to create this environment where they are not going to be each other’s best friends but they understand that the greater purpose here is to serve the whole and you need to have that synergy or that chemistry. I don’t think it’s enough just to have pure talent, I think there has to be that other element and I used to see it in how our team played because you can see there’s a selflessness in how we played. There was pleasure in setting the player up rather than just trying to take a shot from a poor angle, there was a willingness. Our mantra for 2019 as a team was “Mission Matters Most.” It was not about your own personal gain; it was not about your own baggage but it was the mission of the team to get on top of the podium that was the most important thing. Everybody bought in and we obviously had a great team culture to help create that. You had to be quite clever then because you created a team spirit that won you the World Cup, then you had to recreate it so that you almost had to destroy it by bringing in new people. I think one of the things that I learned is when you get close to a major event, a coach that says everybody gets treated the same, I would disagree and say I treated my players fairly but not equally. You have to have a hierarchy when you are about six months out from a World Cup. Players don’t live in grey areas, if players don’t understand their roles and the responsibilities of their expectations they are constantly going to be asking and checking with each other and they are going to create this sort of unsettling feeling. If players truly know this is my role, this is my responsibility whether they like it or not, they understand what they have to do, to execute and that was something that I was very big on. For example, when I would put up the starting 11, I would then also list our substitutes or our reserves and part of creating this idea that players need clarity, they also need to feel valued to have a healthy team environment. One of the ways I showed value to the players that maybe didn’t play a minute instead of calling them substitutes or reserves, I call them game changers. This was eight years ago now but it’s a pretty common word because I wanted those substitutes to not feel like they were just going to fill in, they were actually going in to change the game, there was value to what they were bringing. Simply changing that name of how you valued it sent a message to those players you’re important to us every time. I was in front of the media and they would say: ‘’Jill, how are you going to win the World Cup?’’ I would say ‘’Our depth is going to help us win the World Cup.’’ When you beat that drum enough and you show value to those players, when our players were asked after the World Cup what helped them win? ‘’Our depth helped us win.’’ So those are ways that you can psychologically help grow that togetherness. We had a really good chance of winning the World Cup because ultimately, we had a team that trusts each other. When I first started with the US team, I put up a video of us conceding a goal and you could physically see the players thinking ‘’Oh I don’t look at that.’’ It was hard to see but as we worked on it and we grew, they understand these were teachable moments, these weren’t to call someone out or to embarrass someone, these were ways for us to get better. By the time March of 2019 rolled around, I would put up a clip of a goal we conceded, and I would make sure that the clip was in its entirety. I would suddenly have a forward put up her hand, Alex Morgan would say “What if I had stepped earlier there, they wouldn’t have been able to play the long ball.” Then my midfielder would say ‘’What if I would have dropped earlier and read the long ball, I would have picked up the second ball.’’ What it created was this accountability that everybody in that room on that team owned something in that goal and that built trust. On the same flip side is when we scored a goal, I usually started it with the goalkeeper, so that you create this trust that the way we are going to get better is the way we can hold each other and be accountable on the pitch. I knew when I had a player say, ‘’Hey you should have probably done that’’ and instead of her getting defensive she would say, ‘’Yeah, you’re probably right.’’ That’s when you know you’ve got a team that trusts each other and that can hold each other accountable. It sounds like your methodology here leads into the mental psychological side of the game and the preparation? I think certainly you can have phenomenal players and phenomenal talent but if they are stressed, anxious or nervous they are not going to perform their job. A coach’s job is to maximize and enhance performance by creating an environment where they feel that there are players out there that have their back. I certainly think the psychological piece is a massive part of performance, it’s a massive part of the game. I’ve seen incredibly talented players that don’t have that ability to manage the pressure cooker, and they are not as effective. I think with the psychological piece, how I started to help bring in a young player to our team, I would say to them as they were very nervous, ‘’Listen, I’m not looking for perfection, I’m just looking for some progress.’’ Just how can we get one day better, take the pressure off them and lean into the qualities that got you here. ‘’Don’t try and be something different.” These were messages that tried to help build their confidence and the other thing I would say to the young players is ‘’I want you to sit with some of the older players and listen to their scars.’’ When a young player comes into your environment, they are playing with their heroes, and they see that these heroes are on the top of the mountain. What they don’t see is that Megan Rapinoe had three torn ACL injuries that she had to come back from. They don’t see that Carli Lloyd was a bench player many years before she was a star. It helps create this idea that you are not going to come in and be at this level right away, but also when I would be in public to the media, I would always say talent doesn’t have an age to really reinforce that if you’re good enough, you’re good enough. I think the psychological component I look at now, our team that I have at San Diego, we have a full-time mental health coach. I think in today’s society and modern age you have to provide that resource whether people use it or not. It’s entirely up to them but I think having that resource is critical as a leader. It’s lovely to hear you talking about bringing in young players, when you do that, you often get criticized because people are not sure what’s coming. Arsène Wenger talked about when he was manager of Arsenal looking for young talent, it takes guts to do it, to follow it through and to get it right. Oh no doubt, I think when you bring in a young player, the hardest test they have is that the older players can gobble them up. Suddenly they are checking their shoulder. I think as a coach what you recognize is that if a player is good enough, they will be accepted. Rose Lavelle was a young player that I brought into our team, and she ends up scoring the game winner in the World Cup final and so I think as a coach, our job and this is what is so unique, our job is to constantly find players that are going to push you on and evolve. It’s a natural part of progress and when I go out and talk to corporations and businesses, the idea of constantly bringing in new people it’s unsettling for many but that’s the nature of what we do. I think as the game changes and the demands of the game evolve, you have to make sure you are bringing in players that can meet those and sometimes that’s going younger in terms of personnel. Rose Lavelle was a unique player because she was suddenly that player that could play between the lines like nobody else we have ever seen in our country. She gave us an incredible different dynamic with which we were now able to beat more organized teams defensively. With 30 years plus experience as a coach, you have seen many changes in the game. What do you think are the biggest facing players today? For players and coaches, I think it’s this thing called ‘’Twitter’’ this thing called ‘’Instagram.” I think social media is a very hard thing to navigate with your young players that suddenly see their value on how many likes they get. I think this is a dynamic that we are crazy if we are not addressing it because it is such a massive