Jill Ellis had only 13 months to prepare for the last Women’s World Cup, so the U.S. national team the coach took to Canada in 2015 was one that had largely been chosen and developed by someone else.
Not that it made much of a difference; the U.S. dominated the competition, rolling to its third championship.
But in the three years since, Ellis has moved to put her stamp on the team, calling more than five dozen women in for at least one training camp and giving approximately half of those players their first international cap.
With the next World Cup less than a year away, Ellis is now beginning to harvest the fruit of that work.