Emma Hayes made an impressive first impression by winning Olympic gold barely two months into the job, but her real work as the U.S. women’s national team head coach begins now with this year’s January camp.
Though the January camp is a regular fixture on the USWNT’s schedule, this year’s edition of the week-long training session comes with a unique twist. Hayes named a 26-player roster on Tuesday consisting of senior teams players but will host around 50 players in total by concurrently running a futures camp as she begins to lay out the roadmap to the 2027 Women’s World Cup and 2028 Olympics.
“[We’ll] have a week’s training to really deepen the very things that we haven’t actually had a lot of chances to do,” Hayes said in a press conference on Tuesday. “I’ve said this so many times to people – I’m doing the job the other way around, to have 75 days [in charge] and an Olympics and now I’m getting the opportunity to build the program and develop the playing pool.”
This camp marks Hayes’ most expansive attempt to explore the USWNT’s large player pool, and perhaps her final major endeavor to do so. The head coach said the team’s friendlies in the fall were opportunities to work with less experienced talent, while February’s SheBelieves Cup “will be the first camp where I can confidently say I have seen the vast majority of the players that I wanted to look at so I feel like we’re in a good position to really push on to the next phase,” according to Hayes.
That is not the only foundational element of this month’s camp, which will run from Jan. 14-21 at Dignity Health Sports Park in the Los Angeles suburb of Carson. Hayes will lay the ground rules for the next three-plus years as she begins to reenvision the way the USWNT runs in an increasingly competitive women’s soccer landscape.
One week, two camps
This month’s camp falls outside of a FIFA international window, so Hayes will not be working with any players based at European clubs this month and to some degree, will be running a preseason camp of sorts. Players will only take part in one session a day and will undergo fitness tests that are normal for the first week of the preseason, but that does not mean Hayes will be short on opportunities to learn about her players.
Certain absences on the senior national team meant Hayes had the chance to call up six uncapped players on that roster, while the futures roster will likely be made up exclusively of players who have limited experience at the senior international level. She will essentially be coaching two teams during one week, giving her a real chance to explore the wider player pool.
“The way that we will do it — [senior] national team will be training on one field,” Hayes said. “Let’s say we start at 11:30, finish at 1:00, then the futures will begin, so I’ll shift from one field to the other and coach across the other pitch. [I’ll] deliver sessions [on] both sides but I will be supported by so many staff from [the youth national teams] as well as WNT. For example, if the WNT have an off day, the futures will be training. Then I’ll be delivering some classroom sessions in both places so I am going to be extremely busy, probably significantly more busy than every camp.”
The concurrent camps will allow Hayes to introduce the practices of the senior national team to the less experienced players, providing a strong foundation for them as they target roster spots at the 2027 World Cup and the 2028 Olympics.
“We will train a single training session a day with all of the training sessions in and around the WNT methodology and our playing principles,” Hayes said. “January camp is, beyond week one of preseason, an opportunity to deepen the connections, the communication in our playing style and to do it in a way where we don’t have a pressured game come the end of the week.”
Introducing the 2027-28 strategy
Hayes will use her first January camp to present a project she is calling the 2027-28 strategy, which will take a broad look at new practices the USWNT should introduce in order to be successful at the major tournaments that await them in a few years. She will present the strategy to senior and youth national team staff on Saturday before showing the players at a conference once camp begins, and she teased that it has a heavy focus on developing young players.
“I think one of those things I’d like to see, going forward, is with the development of the U-23 program,” Hayes said. “I’ve already alluded to the fact that we have less U-23-year-olds playing on a regular basis amongst the top nations than anywhere else on top of the fact that we just haven’t had the camp program in at 23s, 20s, and below that the rest of the top nations have. Our first goal is, we need to bridge the gap with that. The second is, can we do it in such a way that we can create maximum exposure?”
In her first months on the job, Hayes has been a frequent critic of her predecessors’ excessive preference for experienced players, leaving very little room for younger players to earn valuable minutes at the international level and make a true impact on the USWNT.
“I always feel like we’ve had a little bit of a lost generation that might not have had some of the exposures that, as I said, some of the top nations have had,” Hayes said. “I’m desperate to look at ways to bridge that gap because we can’t wholeheartedly just rely on domestic play to do that. We have to give international experiences to players … You can’t simply expect that a player with zero caps or less than five caps is going to go from being a dominant youth player to a dominant senior national team player at the highest level.”
Hayes plans to make the concurrent camps an annual occurrence and hopes to sprinkle them in on other occasions during the year, but chiefly hopes the U-23 and U-20 national teams serve as a place for players to develop if they are not immediately ready to join the senior team.
“When you’re preparing for something in ’27, ’28 and beyond, you have to create the right situations, one where a group of players can build a way of playing together, but also side-by-side, you have to build another group beside that,” she said. “I really hope the 23s program will really, really play an integral part in what we’re doing in ’27 and ’28.”
Battle to be No. 1
With Alyssa Naeher’s international retirement last year, the USNWT are in search of a new first choice in goal. Casey Murphy is the most experienced player in the January camp but Hayes is using this month as a final opportunity to explore all of her options.
“Yes, I’ve seen Jane Campbell, Casey Murphy in great detail and Mandy Haught, but beyond that, I would like to see at least three others to be in a position to say, ‘Okay, where are we in that group of six?'” Hayes said.
She will begin to lock in her preferred choices as soon as next month but expects the battle to be the starter to last the rest of the year.
“[By] SheBelieves, I hope that I’ve whittled that down to three,” Hayes said. “I want to create opportunities, maybe not always for all three of them, but perhaps for two of them, to see how they fare against different opposition and then try and give them the exposures over the next couple of years, but always keeping the door ajar for players … It will probably take the rest of this year to figure that out.”
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