From the 2026 FIFA World Cup to the 2026 Concacaf Women’s U-17 Qualifiers, this year has been full of tournament preparation for many teams across the U.S. Soccer ecosystem.
For the U.S. Women’s National Team, the next step is two matches against Brazil in one of its last FIFA windows before facing El Salvador in the 2026 Concacaf W Championship Quarterfinals in November. With a 2027 FIFA Women’s World Cup berth on the line, assistant coach Denise Reddy spoke with U.S. Soccer Assistant Sporting Director Oguchi Onyewu about the team’s process heading into major tournaments.
Oguchi Onyewu: What part of the World Cup cycle is the U.S. Women’s National Team currently in?
Denise Reddy: From the beginning, we do a countdown, so when we go to camp, we can see what’s coming and know how many days till we have qualifiers. [The 2027 FIFA Women’s World Cup is 406 days from the publication of this Q&A], but first of all, we need to qualify. It's not that far away, so we have to make the most of the days we have together and discuss how can we close the gaps, and that could be tactical, technical, mental performance, etc.
OO: What does the process entail building this timeline, and what are the priorities and challenges?
DR: We always look at the furthest point and then work backwards. We’ve come up with what we call a “Gold Print” that has eight different criteria which covers all the different areas of tournament preparation, and that's from the mental side, the physical side, the organizational side, the tactical side. The hard part is that we get injuries, there’s player turnover, but we have this plan, so when we get to where we're going, this is what we want to be able to do.
OO: What is a “Gold Print,” and what does it mean to the team?
DR: It’s pretty much the blueprint to winning. We just call it a “Gold Print” because winning gold is the standard. We, as a whole organization, started discussing what pillars are going to be so crucial in order to build a winning team. Now, we’re looking at how we’re going to use these criteria when we get to a World Cup. Where are we at right now, where do we need to be, and where do the players need to be as we go along?
OO: What goes into building a tournament roster?
DR: With us coming into the organization (in 2024) and then having to do the Olympics right off of that, as a staff, we didn't know all the players who were out there. So, we had to make sure that we went out to clubs. We were watching games every weekend, in order to just start to get an idea of what players might fit the game model. And pretty much up until the last camp, we had so many new players coming in and giving them caps and getting them experiences, because that's so important that we don't just always stick with the same group, especially when it's not a tournament year. We have an opportunity to see players in high pressure situations without the pressure of being a tournament. That was our starting point.
Then, we needed to put definitions on which players, as we start getting towards the World Cup, that our focus needs to be on, the core players. We have probably 30 players that are there right now. We want to start having them get their player connections, play together. We're trying to get as many players as we think will go to the World Cup in our next trip as we're going to Brazil. We want to be very intentional for them to get exposure to the environment that we're going to be in for the World Cup.
OO: Talking about the Olympics, you won gold coming off the team’s worst World Cup finish the year before. How did you turn this group around in such a short amount of time?
DR: The first thing we did was this “Start, Stop, Continue” process. What’s important for them to continue doing? What would they like to start doing? What have they been doing that they would like to stop? We did this with both the staff and the players. This is what they're asking for; it’s not us telling them. That was just the start of how we tried to change how we were going to do things without taking away the DNA of the U.S. It's not like we took over a team that wasn't still ranked high in the world. We didn't have to make world changes, and you couldn't make world changes going into the Olympics with 70-something days. So, it was just about minor things. How can we tweak these minor things, and how could we get them to understand the important things going into the tournament?
OO: How is providing playing experience to younger players going to pay dividends for future World Cups and Olympics?
DR: I think it's so important. One of our golden things is team composition. We were looking at how many players had tournament experience, how many players had so many caps or they've played in Youth National Team games or youth tournaments. We were seeing that a lot of the players that were coming (up the youth ranks) the next year didn't have tournament experience. They didn't have many (senior team) caps. It's a vicious cycle if you don't stop and actually give opportunities to young players to see where's the gap is. It's hard to see where the gap is until you actually put them in the WNT environment and then play them. Now, when we get to the tournament where there's injuries or there's things that come up, we have players. They might not be as developed, but they have experience. They've been in our environment. They know our language. So, from just that starting point, we feel we're ahead of the game.
