The U.S. U17 Women’s National Team is in the early stages of the process in building and developing a squad for the 2016 U17 World Cup. Qualifying is still 16 months off, and there’s a lot of work to be done before then.
Over the course of the last week, the U.S. U17 WNT faced its first real challenge at the NTC Invitational with games against Mexico, Canada, and Japan. The U.S. won the event with a perfect 3-0 record and a very impressive performance against the defending world champions in the de-facto final on Sunday.
U17 head coach B.J. Snow chatted with TopDrawerSoccer after Sunday’s game about the performance, the quality in this age group, and the differences between this team and the last.
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TopDrawerSoccer (TDS): Your team’s approach today seemed different from how they played against Canada. What did you change with the group prior to this game against Japan?
B.J. Snow (BS): Each of these games in this tournament has significant importance in how we build layers in our philosophy, in our training ways. They all were completely different games. We threw a lot of stuff at the kids for them to build on.
Against Japan, you can’t back off of them. You can’t sit in. Otherwise, they are going to have the ball and they are going to pick you apart. We wanted to press them higher up the field. We knew that would take some exhaustive effort for 90 minutes, but you have to do it and that is what it takes at this level to do it.
