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I am so excited for the NextGen USWNT, and I agree that it will likely be led by Catarina Macario. Our young USMNT, as always, gets more coverage, but I'm expecting that a relatively fresh-faced US team will win the 2023 World Cup. Thanks for shining some light on Catarina's story. And seriously, José, give your girl some space; she'll need it to flourish going forward.

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NEW subscriber here, so I'm just reading this now. What an interesting story. I knew she was an up-and-comer for the USWNT, but I didn't fully know the family's story. I'll be rooting for her recovery (ACL) and *fingers crossed* appearance at the WWC next summer. Keep the USWNT content comin' Good work, Grant!

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now that I have a paid subscription, it is so amazing to read this thorough, well-rounded profile of a fascinating person. thank you, Grant

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Great story.

the thing i'd love to actually hear Vlatko talk about is what he feels he got wrong about the olympics upon reflection. There has been zero coverage or comments from him reflecting on his first tournament as USWNT manager since the end of that tournament. Hell, fans couldn't even watch his post match press conferences as they were geo-blocked in the US and just had to parse single sentence comments from match reports to try to understand what his thinking was in his first failure as the WNT manager.

His selections and decisions on substitutions were really baffling at times - including Cat's usage / lack thereof - but by the time US media had access to Vlatko again, so much time had passed that the only line of questions were all about the future of the team, nothing about his reflections and what he might have learned through the process of coming up short in Tokyo.

We will have to see if his loyalties to the older group have simmered at all going into this qualifying cycle. That it feels so unlikely that Cat will have multiple significant opportunities in her favored spot is a reflection on Vlatko's usage choices thus far as WNT manager, and it doesn't inspire much confidence coming off Tokyo and heading into a World Cup.

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