Inside the NWSL's first combine: Can the league create a more robust pathway for American talent development?

BRADENTON, Fla. – The politely remixed Christmas music on the IMG Academy's speakers was no match for the collegiate soccer players near the middle of the lacrosse field on Tuesday morning. The players only began convening in Florida two nights earlier, but they knew each other well enough to know that the best way to get through high performance drills at 10 a.m. was with a healthy dose of encouragement, their exuberant cheers for each other audible to the NWSL scouts watching in the distance and any other passerby.

It was an energetic start to the NWSL's first-ever combine, the league's method of making up a developmental gap after abolishing the college draft in a new collective bargaining agreement with the Players Association in August 2024, becoming the first major professional American sports league to do so. Forty-five players from across the NCAA landscape received an invitation to showcase their talents for the NWSL's clubs, 15 of which sent technical staff to gather information. The event was a year-plus in the making for Karla Thompson, a veteran youth coach and scout who joined the league as the head of player development just weeks after the college draft became a thing of the past, the planning process continuing even as players made their way to the Sarasota metropolitan area.

"We were adding players until probably 48 hours from [the start]," Thompson candidly admitted. "Literally."

The combine's main goal is an obvious one -- to provide prospective professionals an important avenue to make the leap and for their future clubs to have as much information as possible before offering those contracts. The tangential objectives, as Thompson laid them out, are almost too significant to be considered secondary -- the NWSL executive hopes the combine can act as an incubator for female athletes and coaches alike, an important accelerant in a rapidly evolving women's soccer landscape globally.

"We've got the men's World Cup in 2026, we've got the Women's World Cup in 2027," she noted. "We've got the Olympics in '28 [in Los Angeles]. We've got the Women's World Cup again in '31, here [in the U.S.], so the things that we do now is what's going to affect us in 2031 so I think that we're looking to try and be an impact in 2031."

Filling in the developmental gaps

The U.S. is a historic superpower in women's soccer, even amidst a real belief that the nation is still a sleeping giant in the world's most popular sport. Six to eight percent of U.S. children aged six to 17 play soccer according to recent data and make up a player pool of several million, but scouring every pocket of a vast nation has been much easier said than done. There are multiple youth soccer set-ups girls can enter, from the Elite Club National League to the Girls Academy and the Olympic Development Program, and a wide network of college soccer teams they can join after the fact. Thompson wanted the combine to be a centralized meeting point for a wide variety of players and for the technical staff members that can offer them a pathway to turning professional.

"Right now I feel like our scouting is very myopic, that we only look at one area," Thompson said. "I think most of our scouts are going to look at the Power Four, Division I [schools]. Can you look beyond that? There are some players -- and there's some players here – who play for mid-majors, who play for junior colleges, who play for smaller schools. There's talent all over this country but if we don't look to enhance that talent, we're going to continue doing the same thing we are and we're going to continue bringing in more and more international [players to the NWSL] that I think that we have here in this country so they can develop our domestic talent?"

The list of invitees changed as high profile college prospects landed professional contracts without the help of the combine but by the midway point of the three day event, there was already proof of concept.

"I think it just goes back to Karla's why of making sure that there is enough platforms for enough of these high-level players and we scoured DI, DII," Katie Ritchie, an ex-professional turned youth coach who helped facilitate things at the combine. "We weren't just scouting the Power Fours, put it that way, and it was important to us that we got kids that weren't necessarily the top ones that all of the clubs have identified. We brought in players that maybe were a little bit more under the radar, not playing in some of these quote-unquote top programs that now that we've seen them for two days, we're like, nobody looks out of place. Do you know what I mean? And that's what's been the coolest thing for me is that we've found some players that maybe wouldn't have had the opportunities and we're providing that landscape for them to still be able to go and show that they deserve to be in this environment."

The sentiment that valuable talent goes overlooked in the U.S. is pervasive, arguably the only thing stakeholders agree upon as they try to map out what exactly the solution to that issue is. Thompson and her colleagues are quick to admit that the combine is a fix, not the fix. There was some immediacy in the combine's proceedings, though – the 15 clubs at the IMG Academy had the chance to schedule interviews with any of the 45 athletes on-site, at least a handful likely to earn professional contracts in time for the new season.

"I've got a handful of kids that I think that, one, weren't on the radar at all and now should be on some radars, two or three that I know that some scouts are like, we would like you to come now," Thompson said. "Now it's just the decision of the kid, whether or not the player wants to come out of college early or fulfill their four years."

A focus on humility

While the combine kicked off with high performance drills, the most anticipated events were the scrimmages, the first of which came after lunch on Tuesday. The scouts' greatest learning opportunity came in settings that most resembled professional games, but there was just one issue as team news came in – the teammates had very little familiarity with one another.

Much like the first session of the day, the players were louder than any external noise. Shortly before kickoff, teammates stood in a circle introducing themselves one by one. The very first scrimmage was defined by a cacophony of instructions – players trying to work out their newly-formed team's press, building defensive organization on the fly, asking for the ball to ensure there was no silence. They settled in eventually but not entirely – the ball was at a goalkeeper's feet on Wednesday and just before play resumed, a very important question was clear for many to hear: "Who's my left back?"

Adding to the hilarious confusion was the fact that the scrimmages served as full-throttled auditions, players receiving instructions to change positions at different times. It may have felt like a departure from a professional game but the takeaways were plentiful for the combine coaches and the scouts alike.

"Actually, I brought that up to a couple individual players because I said you could tell that at the beginning, you were a little hesitant, but you could see yourself get played into the game," Thompson said. "We tried to do our best to put them into their primary positions but then we started moving players around and just kind of said, 'Look, it's just soccer. You dribble, you pass, you shoot, that's the game, no matter where you are,' and the willingness for them to just take that was fantastic, because we know when you go into the pro environment, you may be coming in as a winger, but you probably end up as a fullback so having that flexibility and that humility to say, 'Yes, I'm willing to go wherever you put me,' Is important, and it's important that we show them that."

Humility was a buzzword at the combine, one that was drilled into the prospective professionals by a batch of visitors. Retired player and current NWSLPA deputy executive director Tori Huster provided an introduction to the union, while current NWSL players Abby Smith and Messiah Bright hosted a question-and-answer session.

No query was off topic as combine participants asked about everything from the on-field transition to personal finances and managing free time, Bright and Smith especially offering a truthful and unvarnished outlook on a future that hopefully awaits some of the combine's participants. They appreciated the insight on the ups and downs of the professional experience, as well as dealing with agents not settling for the first contract offer they see. The one takeaway that had most of the combine participants scribbling in a notebook gifted to each of them by Thompson, though, was about what rookies should do to serve as the best colleagues possible to the veterans on their new teams. Smith and Bright were straightforward – an open-mindedness and willingness to ask questions. Smith referencing U.S. women's national team midfielder Sam Coffey as an example to follow, recalling with a laugh how Coffey always had a notebook with her during her rookie season with the Portland Thorns in 2022.

"Look at where she is now," Smith concluded.

A marker for the NWSL's evolution

The combine served as a crash course to professional soccer, especially when grouped with the youth combine that took place days earlier that served as a platform for high school-aged players. The jam-packed nature of the NWSL's convention at the IMG Academy was by design, in part because recruitment pathways in a post-draft reality are not the only gaps the league needs to fill in.

"If you compare girls and boys playing football, boys enter into academies and these types of really systemized development programs a lot earlier than girls do," Sarah Gregorius, a former New Zealand international and the NWSL's senior sporting director, said. "Someone like a Jude Bellingham or a Phil Foden, taking an England example, they spend a much longer period of time in an environment like a Manchester City academy, not only just learning how to play football and all of the technical and tactical and physical things that need to be developed to do that, but also just having access to nutritionists, sport scientists, understanding loading, having their loading being tracked over an extended period of time. Girls just don't have access to that at that same level just yet and I think what we're trying to do in the NWSL is reach further down, make sure that we are giving girls who are developing, going through those pubescant and pre-pubescant years access to more opportunities to learn what is to be a professional so that by the time they arrive on the NWSL stage, on the professional stage, they just more equipped."

The combine is merely one facet of a larger focus the NWSL has taken in the youth game, the league's leaders frequently honing in on the importance of a pipeline to maintain a high product quality. The investments include a forthcoming Division II league, currently slated for a 2027 start, as well as additional tools for clubs who have finally begun to create full-fledged scouting departments. For some of them, the youth and adult combines were a fact-finding mission first.

"Through the lens of Gotham specifically, we have a scouting department, we have resources allocated to scouting so we've been working across the calendar year in both these spaces, identifying college players that are looking to go professional and young players to identify them for future as they go through their college journey," Gotham scout Richard Gundy said. "For us, it's very much about just broadening our knowledge of players. We have specific needs right but we also are maybe looking at tracking players for the future, et cetera, so no specifics from our standpoint."

Thompson also used the combine as a pathway for female coaches at the early stages of their careers, hoping to provide clubs with a glimpse of their potential. Ritchie was joined by the likes of Gina Lewandowski and Sammy Jo Prudhomme, the pair formerly competing in the NWSL and now working as coaches at varying levels of the youth game. Creating that pipeline is vitally important – the NWSL will have 16 teams next season but there are just four female head coaches in the league, headlined by 2025 Coach of the Year Bev Yanez.

"My first priority was to make sure that we had a female staff," Thompson said. "It was very important because I just feel like there needs to be a better pathway and pipeline of female coaches that we can present to our clubs that they are capable of coaching at a high level, so that was my first priority. Then my priority was like, now I need to go and find high level coaches, coaches that either coach pro, played pro or coached for the national team and surprisingly, that list is very small. I really didn't have a big list. Luckily enough, I know a lot of them personally, so I reached out to them early, I think in June or July and said hey, can you put this on your schedule? And they were like, 'I'd like to be a part of this.' I think all of them were just like jumping at the chance because they understand the importance."

It calls back to Thompson's opening remarks the night before the combine began, anchored by a reminder to the players to have fun. That piece of advice may as well have been for everyone else on the premises, too.

"We're still losing a lot of players out of the game because the game's no longer fun," Thompson said. "It's just so structured and so [focused on] winning mentality that if you're not enjoying it, you're not going to continue doing it and whether or not they continue on in a professional life or career, or the length of the professional career, we still want to be fans of the game and still love the game so even if I get injured and I still love the game, then I'll still want to be part of the game so I have to have fun and then on top of that, when you're having fun, you play better."