NEW YORK – Emma Hayes peered out the window of a third-floor conference room overlooking Madison Avenue, on the other side of the bustling city where her coaching career first blossomed, and suddenly memories came flooding back.
They swarmed her upon her arrival at Newark Liberty International Airport on Wednesday. They flowed again as Hayes navigated the crowded streets and strolled through Central Park, for the first time as boss of the U.S. women’s national team. “It’s my home,” she said.
She remembers coming to New York in her twenties, with $1,000 plus a backpack of clothes and a job at football camps on Long Island. She jumped from Port Washington to Manhattan, from the shadow of the Throgs Neck Bridge to Westchester. As an anonymous Brit, she traveled the region, even as far as Rhode Island, looking for a foothold in the sport she loved. She remembers “fighting to stay in the country on different visas.” She remembers worrying about rent. And she remembers dreaming, dreaming of climbing, perhaps all the way to the helm of the USWNT, which was atop women’s soccer at the time.
Some 23 years later, here she is – partly because the USWNT is no more.
It has fallen from the mountaintop and Hayes has been hired on a record-breaking contract to lift it again.
So there is very little time to reminisce. “We have work to do,” Hayes said Thursday, 40 minutes into a roundtable with reporters, when asked about immediate expectations. “The reality is that the rest of the world no longer fears the US as they once did. … Our job is to understand quite quickly what we need to do to get close again [championship] levels.”
Hayes has been doing that work “in the background” for months, speaking to interim USWNT coach Twila Kilgore “during many long late-night phone calls” in London. “I feel like I was able to learn the job quietly without having the job,” she said Thursday — “quietly” out of respect for Chelsea, who remained her full-time employer until Sunday.
But she has watched NWSL games and clips of individual players. She fed Kilgore “changes” and “ideas that I wanted to bring in.” When speaking about the USWNT’s evolution in recent months, she uses multiple first-person phrasing, such as “what we’ve done so far.”
However, the job really starts on Friday. Hayes flies to Colorado to meet with her staff, whom she has hand-picked and carefully shaped. At least five Chelsea assistants will follow her to America and join Kilgore. Bart Caubergh, Chelsea’s former head of performance, will step into a new position that Hayes wanted to create in talks with US Soccer sporting director Matt Crocker: USWNT ‘program director’.
“What I’ve learned over the years of doing this is that you have two different teams,” Hayes explains. “You have the team on the field, and you have the team off the field. And it’s extremely difficult for a head coach to manage both.”
Caubergh will be responsible for the latter. “He’ll be working with operations, performance, analytics, technical, even medical, all departments, just to make sure we coordinate,” Hayes said.
In many ways they have already coordinated. “All the preparation for camp in May is done,” Hayes said. “All the [training] sessions are planned. The whole schedule for June is planned, in terms of our meetings, our meeting points. July is planned.”
What she hasn’t been able to do, however, is actually coach.
“Now,” she said Thursday with a clap, “it’s about interacting with the players.”
“It’s a bit of an ass up,” she said later with a smile. “I know the staff, the team and the structure behind it. We all have that. Now the time has come: I have to be with the team.”
She’ll have to do what she couldn’t do from a distance, on and off the field, when her first training camp starts Monday. She has scheduled one-on-one meetings with players to get to know them as people. She is also looking forward to seeing, “feeling” and “getting a sense of” their skills and “tactical understanding.”
But she will have to do all that, in the midst of a whirlwind. She will have to live on the road until she eventually moves to Atlanta, where US Soccer is building a national training center that is not yet close to completion. Next week she will hold her first training camp in Denver and Minneapolis, and then what? “Preparing for the Olympics,” she said. Where? “Probably a combination of places. … To be determined.”
Of course, those Olympics are two months away. Hayes will have to announce her squad of eighteen women after just two friendlies and half a dozen training sessions. She will have another camp and two more friendlies in July. Then she flies to France, and as a reporter told her on Thursday: “the fan expectation for this team has always been” —
Hayes smiled and interrupted the reporter. “No,” she boomed, with every ounce of sarcasm she could muster. “It’s not that, is it!?”
The expectation is “of course” that the USWNT will win it all.
When asked whether that is realistic in 2024, Hayes was ambiguous. “I’m never going to tell anyone not to dream of winning,” she said. “But… we have to go step by step and focus on all the little processes that need to happen so that we can perform at our best level.”
She said she would use her first camp to analyze the state of the team and then ask herself, “What gap can I absolutely close between now and the Olympics?”
But she knows she has to “be realistic about it.”
Because she needs time, time that she won’t really have before Paris. For now, when asked about her tactical approach, she said, “I have to keep it simple. … Make sure we convey the right message. And over time we will evolve.”
She will also need energy, and her supply, she admitted, had been sapped at Chelsea, the club she built ‘from scratch’ into the five-time reigning English champions. It had “taken its toll,” she said on Saturday. She reiterated Thursday: “Working at Chelsea has been my entire life for the past 12 years.”
But leaving, she said, felt like “a huge boulder falling off my shoulders. Twelve years, one place, experiencing a lot of the women’s game in England, it’s liberating for me. I feel new energy, excited.”
So she only needed one day off: Sunday, when she hosted a Star Wars-themed birthday party for her 6-year-old son, Harry.
Now she’s inspired, “because dreams don’t often come true,” she said Thursday.
Now that it has, she said, “I will give absolutely everything I have to make sure I uphold the traditions of this team.”
