Emma Hayes is looking beyond USWNT’s World Cup preparations: ‘What do we want our program to stand for?’

U.S. women’s national team head coach Emma Hayes had only 75 days to build toward an Olympic gold medal. It would typically be considered an impossible task for some, but Hayes and the USWNT achieved what many thought they couldn’t. Now, she and the group have their sights set on the 2027-28 cycle already. This time, with a more traditional build-up and preparation for a manager, and while Hayes wants to compete for spots on the podium, she also wants to help refocus the entire ecosystem. 

Hayes is working on launching a strategy, “The WNT Way,” which is a vision that starts with an emphasis on “placing the female lens at the heart of everything we do,” she said during a virtual roundtable. 

Her goal comes alongside the U.S. Soccer Federation’s “The U.S. Way” strategy, with mechanisms already in effect, but which was recently unveiled at the United Soccer Coaches Convention by Sporting Director Matt Crocker in January. The U.S. Way will be the official multifaceted strategy for U.S. Soccer moving forward. It emphasizes player development and revamps the perspective that the U.S. Soccer Federation is in service to the growth of soccer across the nation.

“Preparing for an Olympics was far from challenging. It was extremely enjoyable. But what it meant was that I was taking on a program where — of course, I know a lot about the program — but thinking about the future for that program, both on and off the field has taken September up until the turn of the year, where we’ve really had the opportunity to just zoom out and say, ‘okay, beyond winning and beyond competing to win, what do we want our program to stand for? Beyond all the other extraordinary things it has done over a period of time,'” Hayes said.

The USWNT manager is set to present the philosophy to U.S. Soccer, which includes an overall mission and various goals:

The WNT Way Mission

As Hayes described it, is designed as a “female blueprint” to win and set the bar for the global game. The idea is to follow a handful of principles she laid out.

• Become a world leader in the “Female 360” approach
• Foster an interdisciplinary approach around the WNT/WYNT Way
• Innovate to push boundaries and evolve
• Create an inclusive environment where people feel valued and developed

Going beyond the strategy

For Hayes, the WNT Way takes much of what exists in current strategy and planning in soccer programs and tries to prioritize the system specifically for women. She recounts that so much of the general framework for women and girls was just copied and pasted from men’s programming and then applied to women. 

While it’s important for U.S. soccer to have an overarching philosophy that affects youth levels and the senior team, Hayes ultimately wants to impact players, staff, coaches, stakeholders, and leaders in their own development, and challenge them in the ways in which they view the game by putting women’s perspectives first.

“The U.S. Way and everything that the U.S. Way stands for … the players [are] at the center of everything, something that I believe in wholeheartedly … But for the WNT, it goes further than that,” said Hayes.

“Of course, consistently winning at the highest level with as many teams as possible is a standard for this country, along with maximizing the performance of our current playing pool while building the next generation of world-class talent. I definitely think I’m at the beginning stages of that, and that’s what the next two-and-a-half-year years will be. But with the WNT way, the most important thing is that we are placing the female lens at the heart of everything we do.”

She cites examples of the differences in physiology, science, anatomy, and even tactical differences between men’s and women’s soccer, and how girls drop off and out of sport at higher rates and earlier ages than boys. In an ideal world, she wants there to be a coach education director who functions specifically for girls from the women’s game so that everything within the course content of B licenses to Pro licenses is linked.

“We can’t talk about creating the best environments for our girls [and] women all over the country until we prioritize the systems that are there to support us. But we also want to raise the bar for the global game in many ways,” she said. “We all know that sports science research, only 5% of that is ever done on women, so we want to be in the driving space to be able to do that, but we also want to be a world leader in the female 360 approach.”

A hyper-focused 360 approach for the WNT Way is intended to impact the player and ecosystem through multiple channels and systems. Hayes’ ambitions are for U.S. Soccer and the WNT to help influence and lead the way in coaching education, research projects, partnering to develop university-level education, and the sports science fields.

She wants to sit with stakeholders to engage them in the overall approach and speak with members of the pro game to develop an advisory board in which she hopes will include USL, NWSL, and, in the future, include youth soccer programs, and potentially collegiate soccer with roles. 

“The point is that we’re organizing in a way to bring groups together. Youth soccer, it may not be best if they join in that stage yet, but I think creating women’s game advisory groups is something that’s integral to our strategy. The minutia of all of that? I think that the pro game is very clear, beyond that, it isn’t,” she said.

“We’re creating a system. So it’s a system that I think will be like a ticketed system and we’ll have to work through it. I hope that same system remains, no matter what, until we create the best possible place — for at least at the WNT level, YNT level — an environment not only where our girls and women are loving playing football for their country, but it’s done in a way where everything is understood and delivered for them as females.”

For future generations

Like most long-term strategies, they expand and evolve. Methodologies may shift and change, and even in dramatic circumstances, diminish or even be eliminated. For Hayes, she’s well aware that the scope of her ambitions may not be felt for some time, even beyond her tenure with the U.S. national team program. But she feels now is the right time to begin the first steps.

“I think I feel like I’ve worked on this my whole life. It just came together when I came into this job. That’s how it felt. Being given the right support around me, and the right maybe space and time to lean into the learnings over the years. Then, coupled with the expertise that’s being put around the team, to be able to define that as something. Why is that the single most important thing to do first? Why is seeing everything through a female lens the most important? Well, it is.”

The WNT Way could be a fully functioning shared environment for all things women’s soccer, an ecosystem that still keeps the player at the center of its philosophies, but also impacts everything around the sport and player. 

“I talk about, even with our commercial team, I’m like, ‘Listen, you go to a men’s game, you go to a women’s game, they’re two completely different experiences,’ and that’s okay, there’s a place for both of them. But whether the commercial partners we seek in the future, ideally, they could be female-centric, they could be something we can identify with too,” she explains.

“I think America has done a great job of like, creating atmospheres at games in a family-friendly, unique way, but maybe we have to be even more intentional at the next level to what that looks like, including our outreach to those communities, and how we take that up a notch. So, this isn’t just, like, what we’re doing on the pitch. This is about the whole thing.”

Implementation of a philosophy isn’t a simple undertaking. The concept of changing perspectives, and opinions, for some people, can take years, or worse possibly never shift. At some point, the WNT Way will also find its unique evolution as a system as well, especially in an era of the national team that has a collective bargaining agreement in place, a divisive and tense political climate, and no longer has an Alex Morgan, Megan Rapinoe, or Becky Sauerbrunn to guide them through difficult moments.

“I sort of feel like I’m in a position where I can influence as much as I possibly can from this position, from this vantage point. But I know that externally, everybody always looks towards the US in one way or the other.

“I think the most important thing I can do at the very beginning –and the thing that I can control — is at least just empowering some, if not all, to be able to say, ‘Actually, no. You haven’t even thought about this in a female lens to begin with. And I have to work to influence beyond just U.S. Soccer and USL and our partners at NWSL. We have to impact FIFA. We have to impact UEFA. We have to impact in the governmental level across the world, which isn’t going to be easy.

“We should have this whole set of different stipulations for the minimum standards for the women’s game. We always do this constant comparing to the men’s game. I don’t really care what they’re doing, what works for us? And it’s about creating that more than anything else.”