Emma Hayes won't let her USWNT coaching dream turn into a nightmare

"It's a process," she said. "We've got to go one step at a time."

The start of that journey was delayed by Chelsea, the club team Hayes has coached since 2012. It refused to let her out of the last six months of her contract, which kept Hayes in England through the middle of May. So while she tried, through interim coach Twila Kilgore, to manage the team from afar during that time, only now is she getting the chance to implement her strategy and vision in person.

Doing that, she said, starts with building a foundation of trust, which is why she met individually with each of the 27 players she called into her first training camp as coach.

Next comes the long and complex task of introducing her playing style, one that, at Chelsea, was robust in the attack yet emphasized tactical flexibility.

"A lot of what we've done in the past six or seven months with her at Chelsea, you don't get the on-the-field aspect," captain Lindsey Horan said. "That's the one big difference that you feel and you see. You finally get your coach out there on the field and the feeling you get, the leadership you get, that's exciting."

How long that honeymoon period will last is unknown, of course. The national team has historically included some of the biggest personalities in women's soccer and that has made it a minefield for coaches. A locker room revolt led to Tom Sermanni's ouster in 2014 and three years later another group of veterans reportedly went to U.S. Soccer president Sunil Gulati to try to get Jill Ellis fired.

Gulati backed Ellis, who led the U.S. to a second straight world championship in 2019, but that was the last time the Americans climbed to the top of the medal podium at a major tournament. That decline did little to change the power structure around the team, however, so when players complained about difficult training sessions under Ellis' successor, Vlatko Andonovski made the practices shorter.

The 16 trophies Hayes won at Chelsea plus her annual salary — reportedly $1.6 million, a record for a women's coach — probably will make her immune to any attempted coups. Plus the team she has been handed is one in transition.

In Paris, the U.S. will play in a major tournament without Megan Rapinoe, Carli Lloyd or Becky Sauerbrunn for the first time in two decades. If Alex Morgan, who has been battling an ankle injury, doesn't make the team, the U.S. would have no players with more than 150 international caps and no former Olympic gold medalists on its roster for the first time since the 1996 Olympics.

In their place will be a squad led by Horan, a week past her 30th birthday, and twenty-somethings Mallory Swanson, Naomi Girma, Catarina Macario and Sophia Smith. In fact, the lineup Hayes started in her debut averaged 25.5 years of age and 45 caps per player, making it the youngest starting 11 in more than two years.

"We've got a good combination in the group. There's more experienced, less experienced players," Hayes said. "This is, for us, a new beginning."

But is it the kind of beginning she dreamed about? Or the beginning of something else?

____