New United States women’s coach Emma Hayes describes herself as a personality like no other. After six months of waiting for her to arrive, USWNT players are finally experiencing that at training camp for the first time this week.
“I think for me, it’s just [having] the leader again, and the voice and when you get on field it’s awesome,” USWNT captain Lindsey Horan said Thursday. “You get some jokes here and there but [she’s] just demanding a lot out of us and keeping the standard, but also the positive encouragement feedback as well and giving voices to us as well.”
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Horan and USWNT defender Naomi Girma spoke with media Thursday and chose to keep some of the finer details private, but the past few days have included individual and group meetings, along with team-building exercises for a group preparing for the Olympics in less than two months.
“They’re having individual meetings with everyone just to get to know them on a personal level,” Girma said on Thursday ahead of the first of two friendlies against South Korea on Saturday. “And I think when you have that personal relationship, it’s always better between staff and players and I think it’s going to help us moving forward a lot.”
Players arrived in camp on Monday and trained at the University of Colorado in Boulder on Tuesday, which led to an encounter with University of Colorado football coach and former NFL star Deion Sanders.
Hayes likes to collaborate with coaches outside of soccer to understand how they manage people and create high-performance environments. She counts University of South Carolina women’s basketball head coach Dawn Staley, who just led the team to a third national title with an unbeaten season, among her close coaching friends.
To Hayes, the principles of management are the same across sport and business.
“When you manage human beings, it’s pretty easy to get the best out of people you understand and you know — it’s a lot harder when you have to do that with people completely different,” Hayes told reporters last week.
Hayes was hired by U.S. Soccer in November, but the federation agreed to allow her to finish the European season with Chelsea, where she won 16 trophies in 12 years at the club and finished off the Women’s Super League season with a fifth-consecutive title.
She worked with USWNT interim coach Twila Kilgore, who is now Hayes’ assistant, in the background over the past six months to implement ideas ahead of this summer’s Olympics.
“I think Twila did a great job of trying to put it together as much as possible before this camp, but I think as we all know it’s different when someone is actually here and in the scenes and not behind the scenes,” Horan said. “The information you get in meetings and the words you get to hear.
“LIke I said before, it’s kind of the atmosphere and it’s really cool now trying to put all these pieces together that she’s been working on behind the scenes but now it’s all the final details and much, much more.”
