As the 2024 Summer Olympics get closer, Emma Hayes’ three most important jobs as new coach of the USWNT

Hayes will only have a short time to get ready for the Olympics.
Sarah Hayes is now the head coach of the U.S. women’s soccer team. Former head coach Vlatko Andonovski quit in August after the USWNT lost in the round of 16 at the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup. The search for a new head coach began, and the federation now has their top choice to lead the team to the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris and beyond.

Here are some of the first things Emma Hayes should do:

Tell people about the idea
After Andonovski quit, U.S. sporting director Matt Crocker made a plan of things he needed to do to find a new head coach in September. He made a list of things, like good speaking skills, that he wanted the next head coach of the USWNT to have.

Going forward, Hayes will definitely give that to her team and players. People have praised her in the past for being able to connect with her players and help them understand their jobs on teams with a lot of talented and interesting people. When she plays for her club, she is used to switching up players every once in a while. But when she plays for her country, most coaches have set lineups they use for international events, which will make it harder for her to do that.

Check out the player list again.
That being said, she can switch up the players, but leaders usually don’t make big changes to the team during the short time between the World Cup and the Olympics. That might happen even less often now that Hayes won’t be able to play until June. So the guys we have now are more likely to be regulars for the next eight months.

Even though new faces might not show up for another year, that doesn’t mean that new names don’t stay. Jaedyn Shaw or Mia Fishel won’t be part of the buildup to Paris, but their continued growth could be an extra part of getting ready for the Olympics. Hayes’s bigger plans will need to include players who could become stars in the future. In her new job, she will be able to use her skills to find and train these players.

Fishel and Catarina Macario are already on Hayes’ Chelsea team. Hayes is going to move to Chicago next year. The U.S. Soccer offices are already there, as well as Mal Swanson’s NWSL team, the Chicago Red Stars. Macario and Swanson are both players who are going through the rules for returning to play. As the Olympics get closer, their roles may need to be looked at again.

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Open up a real foreign window.
Hayes’s new national team will start later than she did before. She will join the team after Chelsea’s WSL season in 2023–24. That means she’ll be able to play in her first set of matches with the USWNT in June. She will play two foreign games before the Olympics, for a total of four friendlies with the team before the Games.

Interim Twila Kilgore will stay with the team until Hayes gets there, and then she will become a full-time assistant to Hayes. Kilgore has won all three of her games with the senior national team so far, and she will help get the team ready for the Olympics. Denise Reddy, who works for Hayes at Chelsea and is from New Jersey, will follow her back to the US to work for her on the USWNT team.

Along with all the moving parts, there will be doubts about how the camps, game plans, and player training programs will all work before the Olympics. Without a question, it will need careful planning, scheduling, and full support from both the players and the staff.

Teams really get to know each other before friendlies and big international events, and camps are often the only place where this can happen. The fact that Hayes isn’t always available is a unique situation for any national team with a big international event coming up quickly.