The 2023 NWSL Draft is this week, and some teams have already made big moves to prepare for the next wave of talent entering the league.

Which players will be selected remain to be seen, but we do know that every NWSL team has needs to address. Let’s take a look in the lead-up to draft night on Thursday in Philadelphia.

Gotham FC

Midfield/winger

Gotham’s approach adjusted dramatically last Thursday when they acquired midfielder/forward hybrid Yazmeen Ryan in a deal with Angel City as part of a blockbuster four-team trade. Ryan fills one of the team’s obvious needs as a creative playmaker who can both run at goal and connect with players behind her.

The expected return of Allie Long from pregnancy should bolster Gotham’s holding midfield. The New Jersey club still needs to finalize McCall Zerboni’s contract extension, but they’ve already achieved greater balance than they had in 2022.

This might allow them to take a big swing on attacking talent with the No. 2 pick (Michelle Cooper, perhaps?) and fill out the front three with Midge Purce and Ifeoma Onumonu, especially since at least one of those players will miss midseason games for the World Cup. With a major hole filled, Gotham has the ability to take the best player available to them.

Orlando Pride

Defense, midfield

The Pride are sitting on a whole lot of allocation money after receiving $350,000 from Gotham for the No. 2 pick in the draft in last week’s trade, but they also have a chance to grab an important contributor at No. 3.

While the Pride could use a game-changer in the attack, they should also consider the defensive talent available. The Orlando defense struggled under pressure at times in 2022 and conceded 45 goals, the second-most in the league. Whether in central defense, outside back or defensive midfield, the Pride would do well to find someone who can add to the core supporting their playmakers up top.

Houston Dash

Attacking midfield

The Dash have a settled defense and an exciting focal point in the attack in Ebony Salmon. Now, new head coach Sam Laity might be looking for an attacking midfielder to bring a creative spark to Houston’s midfield.

Shea Groom has filled the role for the Dash in the past, but the team doesn’t have as much attacking midfield depth as other clubs, especially with Nichelle Prince out for an extended period of time with an Achilles injury. The Dash could also use a player in the midfield who can hold the ball and move it with speed. Between injuries and international absences, ball progression and playmaking depth are going to be keys for Houston in 2023.

Angel City FC

Midfield

Angel City already made a huge splash by trading for the No. 1 pick last Thursday. They reportedly plan to use that pick on talented teenage forward Alyssa Thompson, which will surely stabilize their frontline for years to come.

Picking up Thompson is something of a no-brainer, but Angel City arguably needs to shore up its midfield more than its attack. Every player in Los Angeles’ midfield had bright moments in 2022, but they’re lacking a possession-oriented cornerstone to make the whole system click. And since they effectively traded out of the rest of the first round, it will be interesting to see what other moves Angel City makes.

San Diego Wave FC

Center forward depth, outside back

The Wave addressed a significant need when they signed defensive midfielder Danny Colaprico through free agency, guaranteeing stability at the position and accounting for Emily van Egmond’s absence during the World Cup.

Entering the season with a more balanced midfield, the Wave can now turn to other points of need, though they currently don’t have a 2023 first-round pick. Alex Morgan scored the lion’s share of the team’s goals in 2022 with a variety of talent on either side of her. Shoring up secondary scoring will be key, with Morgan likely missing part of the season for the World Cup.

They could also use an elite crosser to maximize the quality they have in the air. That player could come in the form of a talented outside back, though the role might be better suited for the transfer market than the later rounds of the NWSL draft.

Kansas City Current

Center back

Kansas City restocked their midfield with a few sharp free agency pick-ups, made the biggest splash with the signing of Debinha on Monday and have top signing Lynn Williams finally 100 percent after her season-ending hamstring injury last year. Now, they have some space to fill in the defense.

Kristen Edmonds was a huge part of the defensive unit that powered Kansas City all the way to the 2022 NWSL Championship. She left in free agency to sign with Gotham. Last season, the Current played with a three-back system involving a rotation of center backs. If they’re planning to use a similar formation in 2023, they’ll need someone to complement Elizabeth Ball, Addisyn Merrick and Izzy Rodriguez.

Chicago Red Stars

Midfield

Chicago has a lot of needs right now, none more pressing than in their midfield. All of their midfield starters from the 2021 NWSL finalist team are gone, including both of their defensive midfielders who were their two best distributors.

At the moment, the Red Stars don’t have enough midfielders to fill out their preferred 3-4-3 formation. Even if they go back to a three-player midfield, they have to bring new talent in to make it work. Whether it’s a steady No. 6 or a creative playmaker, Chicago must make the position a top priority.

From there, the Red Stars need depth at center back and maybe one more attacker to alleviate the goal-scoring load from Mallory Swanson, who will surely miss time for the World Cup.

Portland Thorns

Depth for international absences

The Thorns roster that won last year’s NWSL Championship remains mostly intact, and the club can expect Lindsey Horan to return from her stint with Olympique Lyon after the World Cup.

Where they could find themselves in trouble is during the World Cup period, when they’ll be missing multiple players in the defense, midfield and attack. They can pick up a pro-ready contributor at a number of different positions with the fifth pick on Thursday night, with defense and attack being the obvious points of need.

Racing Louisville FC

Center back

Racing Louisville goalkeeper Katie Lund faced the most shots in the NWSL in 2022, and center-back captain Gemma Bonner left the league in the offseason to return to her home country of England. Louisville has exciting young playmakers in their midfield and quality goal-scoring talent on the frontline, but finding a sustainable partnership in the back will be critical to the team’s progress in 2023.

Emily Fox slotted into a three-back formation at times in 2022, but that move felt more like a necessity than a positive tactical tweak. Satara Murray needs a center-back partner who can help support the goalkeeping talent the club has in Lund.

Washington Spirit

Outside back

In the last two seasons, the Spirit have either traded or lost to free agency all three outside backs who played in their 2021 NWSL Championship win. Julia Roddar left the NWSL to return to Sweden, Tegan McGrady is now in Portland, and Kelley O’Hara indicated she is signing with Gotham FC through free agency.

The Spirit should be set in the central defense with Sam Staab, Emily Sonnett and Amber Brooks, but they badly need starter-quality outside backs. They don’t currently have a pick in the first round, but they may trade up with such big shoes to fill.

OL Reign

Depth for international absences

OL Reign are already stacked, with a starting XI that can contend for the NWSL Shield without making a single change from last year. As we know, though, having that many star players can be a double-edged sword during international tournament years.

The Reign don’t need much in this year’s draft, but they could target center-back and attacking midfield depth to bolster the squad for World Cup time.

North Carolina Courage

Midfield, outside back

The biggest hole in North Carolina’s 2023 starting XI has a distinctly Debinha-sized shape. You can’t necessarily replace a once-in-a-lifetime player in a single college draft, but it can serve as an opportunity to find a player to develop behind 22-year-old Brianna Pinto.

The Courage could also use depth in their defensive midfield, after the team struggled to hold up possession and lost their composure too often in 2022, leading to 33 goals against. The Courage’s formation in 2023 (if they move away from the box midfield) might determine whether they stack the midfield or target an outside back to pair consistently with Carson Pickett in their high-octane, defense-to-attack style of play.

Claire Watkins is a Staff Writer at Just Women’s Sports. Follow her on Twitter @ScoutRipley.

After an illustrious career for both club and country, Gotham FC and U.S. Women’s National Team defender Kelley O’Hara announced today via Kelley on the Street that she will be retiring from professional soccer at the end of this year, making the 2024 NWSL season her last.

"I have always said I would play under two conditions: that I still love playing soccer, and if my body would let me do it the way I wanted to," O’Hara told Just Women’s Sports in the lead-up to her retirement announcement. "I realized a while back that I was always going to love it, so it was the physical piece that was going to be the deciding factor."

The 35-year-old will retire as a two-time World Cup champion, an Olympic gold medalist, and at least a two-time NWSL champion, depending on where Gotham finishes this season. Her legacy as a player is hard to fully encapsulate, and will forever run through some of the biggest snapshots in USWNT and NWSL history. 

In 2012, O’Hara played every minute of the USWNT’s Olympic gold medal run, after having recently converted into a defender. Her soaring goal off the bench in the 2015 World Cup semifinal is the stuff of legend. And her return from lingering injury to play in every knockout match of the national team’s 2019 World Cup win cemented a storybook international career. 

It was O’Hara who scored the overtime goal in 2021 to earn the Washington Spirit their first-ever NWSL championship, and O’Hara who returned to help see Gotham earn a title in 2023 after years spent in the trenches with the club’s previous iteration, Sky Blue. Her 15-year career spanned two professional women’s soccer leagues in the U.S. (she earned her first professional title in 2010 with WPS’s FC Gold Pride), as well as sweeping changes to the sport both on and off the pitch.

On the field, O’Hara has always been known for a motor that never quits, making the right flank her domain in attacking possession and defensive transition. In recent years, she’s also been celebrated for a competitive fire that raises the level of her teammates, whether she’s in the starting XI or supporting from the bench.

But injuries take a toll, a reality not always seen by the fans watching from home. "I've never taken anything for granted, and I feel like I've never coasted either," O’Hara said of her late-career success in the NWSL despite battling injuries. "I've always been like, 'I gotta put my best foot forward every single day I step on this field' — which is honestly probably half the reason why I'm having to retire now as opposed to getting a couple more years out of it. I've just grinded hard."

Recently, O’Hara has been sidelined at Gotham with ankle and knee injuries, and the situation motivated her to really prioritize listening to her body. "To get injured and come back, and get injured and come back, and just keep doing it, it really takes a toll on you.

"People don't see the doubt that's associated with injury,” she continued. "As athletes we feel a certain way, we perform a certain way, our body feels a certain way, we're very in tune with our bodies. And there's always so much doubt surrounding injury. It’s like, 'Can I feel the way I felt before?' The reality is sometimes you don't."

O’Hara didn’t arrive at the decision to move on from her playing career lightly. But once she began seriously considering making 2024 her final year during the last NWSL offseason, it felt right. "Once I was like, 'Alright, you know what, this will be my last year,' I have had a lot of peace with it," she said. "Truly the only thing I felt was gratitude for everything that my career has been, all the things I've been able to do and the people I've been able to do it with."

She said she’ll miss daily interactions with her teammates and all the amazing memories they’ve created, though she feels lucky to have formed relationships that go beyond sharing a locker room. "You're basically getting to hang out and just shoot the shit with your best friends every day," she reflected. "Which is so unheard of, and I just feel very lucky to do it for so long."

The Stanford graduate also mentioned that the NWSL’s suspension of regular season play in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic made her realize how much playing allowed her the space to simply be creative every day. The tactical elements of soccer provided O’Hara an outlet for problem solving and made use of her naturally competitive edge.

She’s now gearing up to channel her on-field intensity into her post-playing career full time, which is a new chapter she’s excited to begin. "I don't know if the world's ready for it, like the fact that I'm not going to be putting all of my energy into football all the time," she said with a laugh. 

O’Hara said she would like to stay connected to the game in some fashion, whether it be as an owner, coach, or member of a front office. She’s also interested in the growing media space surrounding women’s sports, having provided on-camera analysis for broadcasters like CBS Sports in addition to starting a production company with her fiancée.

"I just feel like I have a lot of passions, and things that excite me," she says. "And I do want to stay as close as I can to the game, because I feel a responsibility — and I'm not sure in what capacity — to continue to grow it."

A sense of responsibility to grow the game has been a consistent refrain for the USWNT and NWSL players of O’Hara’s era, who ushered in a new age of equal pay for the national team and collectively bargained protections for those in the league. The landscape for new players looks different than it did 14 years ago, in large part due to this pivotal generation.

"I feel an immense sense of pride around that, because I don't know if any of us knew that was gonna happen," she said. "We kind of, as things unfolded, took the next step towards changing what women's football looks like in this country and around the world.

"I'm really grateful to have been part of this era with the players that I was [with], not backing down and pushing and knowing that was the right thing to do."

Whatever the future holds, O’Hara is going ahead full throttle. It’s a piece of advice she’d also give to the next generation of professionals looking to make their own impact.

"Whatever you do in life, do it because you love it, and the chips will fall in place," she said. "If you love something, you're willing to do what it takes. You're willing to make the sacrifices, you're willing to handle the roller coaster.

"To me, it's simple. Don't do it for any other reason but that, and I think you'll be alright."

The Phoenix Mercury center spoke with Robin Roberts about her 10-month incarceration, reflecting on her poor living conditions and shaky mental state ahead of her May 7th memoir.

"The mattress had a huge blood stain on it. I had no soap, no toilet paper," Griner told the ABC News anchor in last night’s 20/20 special. "That was the moment where I just felt less than a human." 

She also detailed some of her lowest moments during that time, saying with tears in her eyes that she went so far as to consider taking her own life on more than one occasion. However, the thought of Russian officials not releasing her body back to her family made her reconsider.

"I just didn't think I could get through what I needed to get through," said Griner.

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In February 2022, Griner was arrested and charged with drug possession and smuggling by a Russian court after Sheremetyevo International Airport police found vape cartridges containing hashish oil in her luggage. The cartridges were prescribed by Griner’s doctor for chronic pain back in Arizona, where medical marijuana is legal. In the interview, the two-time Olympic gold medalist said she had a "mental lapse" while packing, and never intended to bring the cannabis products with her when she returned to play for UMMC Ekaterinburg.

"It's just so easy to have a mental lapse," Griner said. "Granted, my mental lapse was on a more grand scale. But it doesn't take away from how that can happen." 

She was later sentenced to nine years behind bars after her Russian attorneys advised her to plead guilty the following July. Griner was then sent to a remote penal colony where she was forced to spend her days cutting cloth to make military uniforms. From there, it only got worse.

"Honestly, it just had to happen," she said when asked about her decision to cut off her signature long locks. "We had spiders above my bed making nests.

"My dreads started to freeze," she added. "They would just stay wet and cold and I was getting sick. You've gotta do what you've gotta do to survive."

Shortly after Griner’s initial arrest, the U.S. State Department classified her case as wrongfully detained, escalating its urgency within the government and calling even more attention to the situation. On December 8th, she was freed in a prisoner exchange negotiated by the Biden administration.

While she told Roberts she was "thrilled" when she got the news, she was also very upset about having to leave fellow wrongful detainee Paul Whelan behind. She also continues to carry guilt about her arrest, saying "At the end of the day, it's my fault. And I let everybody down."

Griner’s memoir, Coming Home, hits shelves on May 7th.

"Coming Home begins in a land where my roots developed and is the diary of my heartaches and regrets," Griner told ABC News in an exclusive statement. "But, ultimately, the book is also a story of how my family, my faith, and the support of millions who rallied for my rescue helped me endure a nightmare."

Longtime USWNT fixture Carli Lloyd took to Instagram Wednesday morning to announce that she’s pregnant with her first child. 

"Baby Hollins coming in October 2024!" she wrote. The caption framed a collaged image of baby clothes, an ultrasound photo, and syringes indicating what she described as a "rollercoaster" fertility journey.

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In a Women’s Health story published in tandem with Lloyd’s post, the Fox Sports analyst and correspondent opened up about her struggles with infertility and the lengthy IVF treatments she kept hidden from the public eye.

"Soccer taught me how to work hard, persevere, be resilient, and never give up. I would do whatever it took to prepare, and usually when I prepared, I got results," Lloyd told Women’s Health’s Amanda Lucci. "But I found out that I didn’t know much about this world. I was very naive to think that we wouldn’t have any issues getting pregnant. And so it began."

Lloyd went on to discuss her road to pregnancy in great detail, sharing the highs and lows of the process and expressing gratitude for the care and support her family and medical team provided along the way. She rounded out the piece with a nod toward others navigating the same challenges, encouraging people to share their own pregnancy journeys, painful as they may be.

"My story is currently a happy one, but I know there are other women who are facing challenges in their pregnancy journey. I see you and I understand your pain," she said. "My hope is that more and more women will speak up about this topic, because their stories helped me. I also wish for more resources, funding, and education around fertility treatments. There is much to be done, and I hope I can play a role in helping."

The 41-year-old New Jersey native retired from professional soccer in 2021, closing out her decorated career with 316 international appearances, the second-most in USWNT history, in addition to 134 international goals. A legend on the field, Lloyd walked away from the game with two World Cups, two Olympic gold medals, and two FIFA Player of the Year awards.

On Tuesday, FIFPRO announced the launch of Project ACL, a three-year research initiative designed to address a steep uptick in ACL injuries across women's professional football.

Project ACL is a joint venture between FIFPRO, England’s Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA), Nike, and Leeds Beckett University. While the central case study will focus on England’s top-flight Women's Super League, the findings will be distributed around the world.

ACL tears are between two- and six-times more likely to occur in women footballers than men, according to The Guardian. And with both domestic and international programming on the rise for the women’s game, we’ve seen some of the sport's biggest names moved to the season-ending injury list with ACL-related knocks.

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Soccer superstars like Vivianne Miedema, Beth Mead, Catarina Macario, Marta, and England captain Leah Williamson have all struggled with their ACLs in recent years, though all have since returned to the field. In January, Chelsea and Australia forward Sam Kerr was herself sidelined with the injury, kicking off a year of similar cases across women’s professional leagues. And just yesterday, the Spirit announced defender Anna Heilferty would miss the rest of the NWSL season with a torn ACL. The news comes less than two weeks after Bay FC captain Alex Loera went down with the same injury. 

Project ACL will closely study players in the WSL, monitoring travel, training, and recovery practices to look for trends that could be used to prevent the injury in the future. Availability of sports science and medical resources within individual clubs will be taken into account throughout the process.

ACL injuries in women's football have long outpaced the same injury in the men's game, but resources for specialized prevention and treatment still lag behind. Investment in achieving a deeper, more specialized understanding of the problem should hopefully alleviate the issue both on and off the field.