Emma Hayes realistic about USWNT work needed to get back on top of world. What she said

• Emma Hayes says there's been a lack of development of younger players over the years.
• She also thinks the team was overthinking things and robotic at the last World Cup.
• Under Hayes, learning and finding joy again are key to success.

HARRISON, New Jersey — Emma Hayes is one of the most successful coaches in the game, with the titles, player endorsements and hefty paycheck to prove it.

That doesn’t mean the new coach of the U.S. women’s national team has stopped learning and trying to get better, however.

“I have an executive coach that works with me while I'm in camp. So I'm being coached the whole time. That same coach is coaching (U.S. captain Lindsey Horan), too,” Hayes said before the USWNT’s first send-off game ahead of the Paris Olympics, where the women begin play Thursday.

“For me, leadership — you're not just born with it. It has to be learned,” Hayes said. “There's skills you have to develop to be able to bring the best out in people, and that is a job in and of itself.”

That openness to learning, and commitment to ensuring she’s passing on her knowledge, is what several players mentioned when asked what’s struck them about Hayes in her short time so far with the USWNT.

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“We have a coach who is willing to coach. There’s no reluctancy in having players learn,” Horan said. “We just want to be coached. We want to keep growing and grow as a team, as well. That’s the biggest thing right now, is we’re getting information. We want that.

“Every single day, you’re learning something new,” Horan added. “That’s the most important thing for this team right now.”

For the better part of three decades, the USWNT was the standard by which all programs measured themselves. The Americans won four World Cup titles, second only to Brazil’s men, and four Olympic gold medals. They spent year after year atop the FIFA rankings, and would often go months without losing a game.

For most of that time, the Americans had a built-in advantage thanks largely to Title IX. They had the best players and a college system that kept the pipeline pumping, as well as legal protections that allowed the game to flourish when it was still being stymied in most other countries.

As the world caught up, however, athleticism and depth weren’t enough. Running and gunning wouldn’t cut it against teams like Spain, whose fluid and effortless-looking style of play was the result of a club and country development system in perfect alignment. The pay-to-play system that produces most of the top talent in the United States is more geared toward winning than perfecting skills and tactics.

First at the Tokyo Olympics, where they were bronze medalists, and then at last year’s World Cup, where they were dumped out in the round of 16, their earliest exit ever at a major international tournament, it was clear the rest of the world was passing the USWNT by. The entire USWNT program needed a reboot, one that went beyond simply bringing in new players or tweaking things here and there.

And Hayes’ background made her perhaps the ideal coach for the job.

She has experience at every level of the American soccer ecosystem, coaching in the youth system, college and at the professional level, major and minor leagues both. She also had a stint running Arsenal’s academy program, giving her an up-close look at how differently — some would say superiorly — young players are taught and developed in many other countries.

Hayes returned to England after the demise of the Women’s Professional Soccer league, the precursor to the NWSL, and was hired at Chelsea in 2012. In her dozen years at Chelsea, she won seven Women’s Super League titles, including the last five. She also won the FA Cup five times and took Chelsea to the Champions League final three years ago.

She’s known as a great tactician but also someone who gets the most out of her players, in part because she cares about them as people as much as she does players.

When she arrived for her first USWNT camp — she was hired by U.S. Soccer in November but didn’t take over until Chelsea’s season was finished in May — Hayes set up 30-minute meetings with every player on the roster so she could get to know them beyond what she saw on game film. When she called Lynn Williams in to tell her she was being elevated from alternate to the Olympic roster, they spent 30 minutes talking before Hayes told her the reason for their meeting. They then spent another 30 minutes chatting.

“What’s really cool about her is she’s trying to get to know people on an individual level, on a personal level. Like what makes people tick, why do people want to be here,” Williams said.

Anyone who has studied business or personnel management will recognize what Hayes is doing. If your employees feel you’re interested in them as people, if you learn who they are and what drives them, you’ll get far more out of them. Make them more receptive to instruction, too.

Hayes is well aware of the lofty expectations on the USWNT and knows there won’t be much appetite among fans for a rebuild. But she does not style herself as a miracle worker, emphasizing process and the necessity of not skipping steps. If the U.S. women are again going to be among the best teams in the world, these changes need to be done right.

Which will take as much time as it takes.

“The reality is, it’s going to take a lot of work for us to get to that top level again,” Hayes said after the Olympic roster was announced. “There’s been a lack of development of putting players, some of the less-experienced players, in positions where they can develop that experience. We have to do that to take the next step.

“I’m not looking backwards. We have to look forward with a group of players that have put that World Cup behind them,” she added. “This is an opportunity for us to show (the work we’re doing) will take us much further than it did last time. But there’s no guarantee of anything in life.”

While teaching is the cornerstone of Hayes’ remake of the USWNT, she isn’t throwing all her knowledge at her players at once. She talks of layering, of working on one concept and then adding elements to it until you are comfortable with it all.

The idea is in keeping with something else she talks of often: playing with joy. A player can be the most astute tactician in the game but if she’s not enjoying it, if she’s running through a catalog of instructions in her head with every step she takes, she won’t be joyful.

Won’t be effective, either.

“Sometimes we overcomplicate it. She’s kind of gone back to the basics, which I think is something some coaches skip over because they assume that we have those nailed down,” Sophia Smith said. “She’s come in and just reminded us of the basics and, from there, to trust in our abilities to be creative and do what we need to do on the field.

“At the World Cup, it was a lot of overthinking and felt robotic at times,” Smith added. “With Emma, I feel really free to be myself and I feel like she believes in me and believes in every player on this team to bring what they have to this team.”

Hayes wasn’t the coach she is now when she started, but she was open to new ideas along the way and learned from her all experiences. The USWNT won’t be the team in Paris that it will be at the next World Cup, in 2027, or at the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028.

But they’ll get there. If you've learned anything about Hayes, it's that her teams always do.

Follow USA TODAY Sports columnist Nancy Armour on social media @nrarmour.