The 17-year-old U.S. women’s national team midfielder selected her words just as carefully from her Los Angeles hotel as she did from the Ajax training facility the first time she spoke with in Amsterdam just over a year ago.
Many things have changed since then, namely, Yohannes’ decision to represent the United States at the international level, and not the Netherlands. But her composed consideration is by design, a mechanism to keep her feet planted firmly in the present.
“I think just trying to stay as present as I can,” she said when asked how she manages the pace of her career. “I’ve been grateful to have experienced so many great moments in such a short career so far. I think just having a great support system around me with my family, coaches, teammates, and them all just helping me to stay grounded, stay on track.”
In Los Angeles, head coach Emma Hayes has made clear that the U.S. women’s national team is in very early World Cup-building mode, with a year until the team’s first qualifiers of the 2027 cycle. She is relinquishing a focus on chemistry to properly assess players. However, demands for excellence have always been part and parcel of this team, and Yohannes has already felt the impact of Hayes’ approach.
“I’ve already grown and learned so much from her in a year or so,” she said. “You can really feel how much she is invested in every player, every player’s development in this environment, and I think she just pushes the standard and has expectations of what she wants from us and how she wants us to play, and I think just trying to be intentional (with) every detail.”
Even as women’s soccer continues to mature, there remains a fixation on its youth, particularly in the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL), which boasts a hyper-competitive table of teams eager to bolster their rosters with fresh talent but lacks the culture and structure of Europe’s youth academy development system. That, combined with the lucrative opportunities of the American sports and entertainment market, intensifies the impulse to catapult teenage soccer phenoms into stardom.
Considering Yohannes’ unflappable style of play at the age of 17, it is less surprising that she has remained committed to steadiness as her professional world expands.
“I’ve gotten some advice of, ‘Don’t get too high on the highs and too low on the lows’ and just trying to stay steady through it all,” she said. “For me, I have so many more goals that I want to achieve and obviously I celebrate the great achievements, but also just know that there’s more that (I) want and more goals that (I) want to accomplish.”
Yohannes has already crossed some considerable goals off her list. She signed her first professional contract with Ajax when she was 15. A Champions League run with the club ...
