AUSTIN, Texas -- On Thursday, the United States women's national team picked up where it left off in August: on the podium. Two hours before kickoff of the team's first game since winning the 2024 Olympics, the 18 players present from that squad filed out onto the field to face Iceland at the Q2 Stadium and stood on an elevated platform to record a prematch TV interview.
Gold was omnipresent around the arena, from the medal around captain Lindsey Horan's neck during the interview, to special "champions edition" aluminum water bottles and spiked seltzer cans. Thursday was, first and foremost, a celebration of the USWNT's fifth Olympic gold medal.
"Just being back with each other is celebration in itself," USWNT forward Sophia Smith said later, after scoring in her team's 3-1 win.
A few minutes after the smoke had cleared from the prematch fireworks, the whistle blew to start the match and midfielder Rose Lavelle touched the ball into play. With that, the page turned toward the 2027 Women's World Cup.
When Emma Hayes met reporters for the first time as head coach of the USWNT in May she used a common coaching refrain to describe the changing landscape of women's soccer: "What got you here won't get you there."
She was discussing how the USWNT could bounce back from a poor 2023 World Cup at this year's Olympics, but the phrase rang even more true on Thursday as the USWNT kicked off a three-game victory tour with a goal from a player who wasn't even at the Olympics.
Nineteen-year-old forward Alyssa Thompson, playing in her first international match in nearly a year after regaining form with Angel City FC, smashed a shot off the underside of the crossbar in the 39th minute to give the Americans the lead. It was the first goal of her USWNT career.
Forward Yazmeen Ryan and midfielder Hal Hershfelt came off the bench for their international debuts in the second half. Hayes had promised debuts during this three-game victory tour over the next week, and there are likely more to come given there are six uncapped players in camp.
Thompson, Ryan, Hershfelt and dozens of other young players are hoping to break into the USWNT as Hayes maps out her strategy to win the 2027 World Cup. That work has already begun. Hayes plans to use this international window, which includes a rematch against Iceland on Sunday and a game against Argentina on Wednesday, to test new players. But all that experimentation might result in some "choppy" performances, the coach admitted earlier this week.
"One of the hardest things to do at the international level is we always want to see more players, but the more changes you make, the more broken up the play becomes," she said. "Football, like any sport, is about building connections and building relationships, and you can't do that if the relationships change game in, game out."
Hayes said the team looked "a little rusty" on Thursday, noting that most players are at the end of a long NWSL season. Ten of the USWNT's 11 starters on Thursday were from the Olympic gold medal-winning team, but the 3-1 win over Iceland would certainly qualify as imperfect from the USWNT's perspective.
Key passes in the final third were lacking in the first half and players were too slow to recognize when to switch play across field, Hayes said. She also suggested that the Americans lost the physical battle to a compact and defensively disciplined Iceland team.
"It was a physical team," Hayes said of Iceland, ranked No. 13 in the world. "Sometimes I want us to win the fight first, and there's parts of that I didn't particularly like from us, and I'll address that."
Iceland scored an equalizer early in the second half as the USWNT's midfield was beaten in one quick sequence, and it took superb finishes from Smith and Jaedyn Shaw off the bench to break the deadlock in the final minutes of the game.
Shaw and Smith were both part of the Olympic team -- although Shaw didn't play due to injury -- and at 19 and 24 years old, respectively, they will be major parts of Hayes' plan going forward. The USWNT coach said after the match that Shaw's "ability to create and score goals is second to none in this country," and that Smith "is becoming the prolific striker that I want her to become."
Hayes has the core of the team that she will develop to compete at the 2027 World Cup, but she is still catching up on studying the player pool. The gold medal match was only Hayes' 10th in charge of the team after taking over in June. Players spoke this week about how they are still getting to know their new coach, and that their development as a group is only beginning, with Horan claiming: "There's going to be a huge evolution of this team."
Ryan is one of three players in her first USWNT camp; Hershfelt, who was an alternate on the Olympic team despite being uncapped, was never called into youth national team camps. Neither was forward Emma Sears, who is training with the USWNT for the first time this week. An entire roster of new players will train alongside the senior team in January as Hayes conducts an identification camp. It will take time for such a large volume of new faces to adapt to what is known as the most cut-throat environment in the sport -- and incumbent players will need to adjust, too.
"One is the conversations, communication off the field," Horan said. "Making players feel comfortable but also knowing that they are new; that they have to figure out the level and the standard. It's different coming from the club environment to this team, and it's hard. We've all been there and we have to adjust.
"I think that's the reality of it: You have to let these players know that that is the job at hand, but again, they're all here for a reason. I'm sure they are going to do great. We've had only one training session in this camp so far. We'll do whatever we can to make them feel welcome."
The USWNT saw off a valiant Iceland in Austin, their first game since clinching Olympic gold in Paris.
Hayes said her "biggest goal is broadening the player pool." A deeper pool of players will bring competition and more diversity of skills, which Hayes claims will lead to a wider variety of ways to beat teams.
The margins are thinner than ever in women's soccer. The USWNT won all three knockout games at the Olympics by a 1-0 score -- two of those after extra time. The team "suffered" through winning at the tournament, as Hayes said at the time, grinding out results and riding the peak form of an unstoppable forward line.
It was only a year ago that Spain won its first World Cup and the Americans endured a different kind of suffering with their worst finish at a major tournament in history: a Round of 16 exit after losing a penalty shootout to Sweden on a shot that crossed the line by a millimeter. The 2023 World Cup exposed the USWNT as too predictable, and showed how much other teams had improved.
"The realities are that it's extremely difficult to create some of the more traditional advantages, whether that be numerical superiority, whether that be technical advantages, for example," Hayes said this week. "You have to find a different way to be able to do that."
What got the Americans to the podium at the Olympics won't get them there at the next World Cup. The next three years require evolution, and that process began on Thursday.