The United States Youth Women’s and Girls’ National Teams have several primary responsibilities.
First and foremost, to provide educational, competitive, fun and nurturing environments that will accelerate the development of talented players to their maximum potential, while setting them on a path to one day potentially represent the U.S. Women’s National Team.
Watching players grow through the YNT programs to represent the USA in World Cups and Olympic games – a path that almost every current U.S. WNT player has followed – is extremely satisfying for all the coaches and staff members who are involved in the process.
Along the way, winning games and tournaments is also a ton of fun.
And even though the USA’s Youth National Teams have been wildly successful during their long history, the past two years have been especially fruitful. Of course, the youth club teams of all the players in the YNT pools play a critical and invaluable role in developing players away from the National Team environment, which leads to another responsibility of the YNTs: liaising with the clubs to make sure they have a concrete understanding of what it takes for players to play internationally.
Over the past two years, when those players assemble and put on the U.S. Soccer crest, the results have been especially stellar.
From the start of 2017 to date, the USA’s six youngest Women’s and Girls’ Youth National Teams – the U-15s, U-16s, U-17s, U-18s, U-19s and U-20s – have played 84 international matches and have a lot to show for it. The entire program has gone 59-11-14 during that period while winning eight different tournaments. That’s a 78 percent win percentage and eight trophy lifts. Some of these competitions have come while “playing up” against older competition, especially for the U-18s and U-19s.
Combined 2017 & 2018 U.S. Women’s and Girls YNT Records
Team |
Record (W-L-T) |
GF |
GA |
U-15 GNT |
3-0-1 |
13 |
6 |
U-16 GNT |
11-1-0 |
44 |
8 |
U-17 WNT |
21-1-4 |
96 |
18 |
U-18 WNT |
5-2-4 |
22 |
18 |
U-19 WNT |
3-3-0 |
11 |
9 |
U-20 WNT |
16-4-5 |
66 |
26 |
“Our coaches are extremely focused on coaching age-appropriately, teaching our style of play in attacking and defending, and playing older opponents as often as possible,” U.S. Women’s Youth National Team Director April Heinrichs said. “Quite honestly, we’re less focused on results than in the past and more focused on selecting good soccer players and how to teach how we want to play.”
Quality players playing against strong teams is a formula that helps breed success. Those 84 matches have come against 30 different countries, from women’s soccer powers France, Germany, Japan, Brazil, England, Australia, Canada, Spain, the Netherlands and China, to developing women’s soccer nations such as Mexico, Switzerland, Italy, Haiti, Argentina, Belgium, Portugal, Chile and Venezuela.
The U-17 WNT, whose only loss of this cycle came in a wild 5-4 contest away to China in July of 2017, beat Japan three times this year, and recently downed Mexico to win the 2018 Concacaf Women’s U-17 Championship. The U-20 WNT has yet to lose in 2018, and even picked up wins against the U-23 sides of Sweden and Italy. Although the U-20s were edged by Mexico in penalty kicks in its Concacaf championship game, they’ve beaten the U-20s from France, England and Germany over the past four months which shows that both the U-17s and the U-20s are rounding into fine form ahead of their respective World Cups later this year.
A sign of the health of the USA’s Youth WNT programs, which is even more important than wins and losses, is the number of Under-20 aged players who have already seen time with the full National Team.