USA U20 coach Kevins talks about path to final
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The U.S. U20 Women’s National Team qualified for the 2022 World Cup on Thursday with a commanding semifinal victory against Puerto Rico at the 2022 Concacaf U20 Championship in the Dominican Republic. USA will attempt to defend their crown at…
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Continue ReadingThe U.S. U20 Women’s National Team qualified for the 2022 World Cup on Thursday with a commanding semifinal victory against Puerto Rico at the 2022 Concacaf U20 Championship in the Dominican Republic.
USA will attempt to defend their crown at the regional championship on Saturday in the title game against Mexico, who defeated Canada 1-0 in the other semifinal on Thursday.
With 47 goals scored, 0 conceded through the six games, USA has been cruising to the final. But it hasn’t always been smooth sailing for the youth national team.
USA lost midfielder Sally Menti to an injury that forced her out of the rest of the tournament in the opening game. The rest of the roster pays tribute to her by holding her jersey in the starting 11 lineup picture before every game.
Then the unforeseeable rattled the locker room when players found out that Stanford goalkeeper and former U.S. Youth National Team player Katie Meyer died in her dorm room on March 1. Stanford teammate and U.S. U20 WNT forward Andrea Kitahata left the team after the Round of 16 victory over Suriname to return home.
“We had some adversity really early on in the tournament. We lost Sally Menti after the first game. She had to go back to the U.S. to have an operation on her wrist,” USA U20 WNT head coach Tracey Kevins told PrepSoccer in a telephone interview on Friday. “Obviously, the news of Katie Meyer really rocked the camp. It’s allowed the girls to be really vulnerable around each other. It’s one of the closest groups that I’ve worked with considering how little time they had together in the build-up to it.”
Kevins said that they gave all the players the option to return home after learning about Meyer.
“We gave her the option. We gave all the players the option. It really rocked us all,” Kevins said. “[Andrea Kitahata] returned home to be part of the grieving process with the Stanford community. We wanted that to be Dre’s decision and us to be completely supportive as a team and a coaching staff. We’re very sad she had to leave because she was having an excellent tournament. But there is a big path ahead for Andrea Kitahata because she’s a wonderful player. We know there is more to come from her in the future.”
While this is Kevins’ first international tournament in charge of the U.S. U20 WNT, she is not new to the youth national team or to this group of players, which likely helped navigate the team through a tournament while finding out about a tragedy back home.
Kevins was hired as the U.S. U15 Girls National Team head coach in June of 2017. Nearly five years later, she is still working with the same age group after being promoted along the way with the players. Six players on the U20 roster at the start of the tournament were part of Kevins’ first international trip with the U15 GNT: Alexis Missimo, Simone Jackson, Lilly Reale, Neeku Purcell Neeku Purcell GK WA , Ayo Oke, and Kitahta. She missed out on coaching them at the U17 World Cup due to Covid cancelling all events in 2021.
“That trip to Germany was a phenomenal event for those players,” Kevins said when asked about the first international experience with that group. “I’ve really seen them grow up. I’ve seen them go from teenagers to young women. I’ve been privileged to be part of that journey in some small way.”
Finally getting the chance to show on the international stage the quality of this group, they have lived up to the hype and then some. USA has scored at least three goals in every half except for one.
“For us, we’ve had really clear objectives with the team, very clear on our style of play and principles,” Kevins said. “All credit to the team, their ability to take on that information and express themselves as well as they have done. They’ve far exceeded my expectations on how quickly they’ve taken on that information.”
All smiles for the semi’s 😁 pic.twitter.com/wbFIGUMyZm
— U.S. Soccer YNT (@USYNT) March 10, 2022
Kevins gave a lot of credit to the form of the players that came into camp.
“Some of the players are coming off the back of exceptional performances in college,” the coach said. “Coming into this in-form helps your ability to adapt and take on new ideas for them that’s been one of the key things, I think. Some of these players have had youth national team experience so they’ve been introduced on the way with our style of play and principles. For us, we’ve just spent time in breaking it down and making it very clear whether that is delivering it in different modalities, whether that is doing it to a group as a whole, unit, or individual players. For each player to really understand their role was the biggest objective of the pre-camp we did in Miami.”
The buy-in from the players has been obvious with the level of play on the field. USA has not relied on a physical advantage in any of the victories so far. The team has been calculated in their approach.
“That is one of the things we wanted to implement on the group is to exhibit our best self,” Kevins said. “For it not to be a case of wearing teams down athletically, we wanted to wear them down soccer-wise first. That was a big plan for us to showcase our ability. This is probably the most technical group that we’ve had over the last few years within the group of players. We want them to be able to express themselves. We want them to dominate possession and looking at the numbers we produced on that side, we’ve very much done so. The goals have been equally shared out among the group.”
The balanced attack is led by captain Michelle Cooper, who is tied for the top scorer honors at the tournament with seven. Canada forward Olivia Smith and USA teammate Kitahata also scored seven goals so far with a game to play.
“Michelle came off an incredible season with Duke,” Kevins said when asked about Cooper. “She’s a well-known player. I’ve coached her with other youth national teams so I was well-aware of Michelle’s playing quality. As she has matured as a young woman, she’s developed these excellent leadership skills. She was able to bring a group close to together to develop connections because that is the hardest piece when you have so little time together. She was able to gel the group off the field. She has been instrumental. The way she plays is such a role model in how we want to play, so aggressive in her defending, and so positive in her attacking. We have some good leaders in this group, she was really a standout to me.”
One of the points of this team is that a lot of players have a starring role on their college team and are coming off brilliant seasons at that level, but there are only 11 spots on the field at the start of the game. Balancing the competitiveness and cohesion can be a challenge for a coach with a deep bench. Kevins embraced the role full-on.
“We made it competitive from minute one,” Kevins said. “Everything was competitive. We were running this scoring system through each day to develop that competitiveness. It was not competitive with each other, it is competitive with yourself where I want to be the best version of myself in this tournament. It isn’t about competing with the player to the left or right of you because that is trying to about eliminate that player. It’s about competing with yourself to become a better version of yourself. What you find is that if you have like-minded players who are also competitive, you gel this competitiveness with each other where you all want to win, but at the same time the team is at the heart of that decision.”
It has paid off. USA has accomplished two of the three tasks so far.
“Our first objective was to top the group,” Kevins said, which USA accomplished. “Our second objective was to punch our ticket to the U20 World Cup in August, which we’ve now done. The third objective was for all these players to return home with gold. So very quickly after the semifinal win, our thoughts went from excellent that we qualified for the World Cup to now let’s finish this tournament off on a high.”
Mexico is the final challenge for this group to defend the title at the U20 age group. The championship game has all the makings of a battle of two powerhouses. Mexico is 6-0 at the event with 28 goals scored and only one conceded.
Kevins said the staff as a whole has been involved in advanced scouting throughout the tournament.
“We’ve taken it on board as a staff,” the coach said when asked about scouting the upcoming opponents. “One coach works one game ahead while the other coach works two games ahead. We’ve tracked both Mexico and Canada throughout the tournament knowing that if we did our job on the field, we would meet one of them in the final. Obviously, we are well aware of the huge Concacaf rivalry. It is an opportunity for us to represent the USA in the best way on the field.”
USA goes for the regional crown on Saturday at 3:40 p.m. (ET) on Fox Soccer Plus and TUDN USA.