Vanessa Gilles feels like she’s known Cari Roccaro for years, even though they just met two weeks ago. The Angel City FC teammates’ bond was evident as they bantered back and forth during their call with the media on Thursday.

​​Gilles, an Olympic gold medalist with Canada, will leave Los Angeles for a couple of weeks to participate in national team camp ahead of the Arnold Clark Cup that runs from Feb. 17-23. With Angel City already such a tight-knit team, she knows they’ll stay in constant communication while she’s gone.

“Hopefully they don’t forget about me, which I don’t think they will,” Gilles said, before turning to Roccaro. “Do you agree, Cari?”

“Yes.”

“OK, thank you.”

“I will not forget about you,” Roccaro added. “But don’t go bothering me when you’re at camp.”

Atta girl @cari_roccaro pic.twitter.com/LoElG0Sb88

— Jessa Braun (@jessabraun) February 11, 2022

Ali Riley and Did Haračić showed a similar bond during ACFC’s media call last week. The comfort Angel City players feel with each other is evident just two weeks into the NWSL preseason and the club’s on-field existence, and it appears to be a direct result of Freya Coombe’s small-roster philosophy.

The coach named 25 players to the preseason squad, fewer than almost every other NWSL team this year. For context, San Diego Wave FC, Angel City’s expansion club counterpart, invited 34 players to camp, while the reigning champion Washington Spirit brought in 38.

“We want players that are here to feel secure, and with us being a new team, we wanted to provide a really strong environment for them where it wasn’t a case of we’ve got 40 people and then we’re whittling down that group,” Coombe said last week.

“I wanted them to come in, start to form relationships with each other, start to get to know each other and really help harness the strength of that group and that unit to be able to move on and play through this season. So, that was our rationale for having less players.”

If the team needs a change halfway through the year, the former NJ/NY Gotham coach is open to adding new talent, but current players have been promised they won’t get traded away. Providing players with that sense of security has been a tenant of Angel City’s philosophy from the beginning.

Coombe has been in a similarly high-stakes position before, having turned NJ/NY Gotham FC from an NWSL bottom dweller into 2021 Challenge Cup runners-up as head coach. Now, she faces the task of building a team from scratch.

Coombe’s small-roster approach has raised questions from fans about potential injuries and a lack of competitiveness in training camp. The NWSL, after all, is a business and arguably the most talented women’s soccer league in the world. But Gilles, who joined Angel City after four years at Bordeaux to develop her game under high pressure, has found that she’s been consistently challenged in camp.

For Roccaro, the small-team environment is “lovely.” The defender, formerly with the Houston Dash and North Carolina Courage, has experienced preseasons with rosters that were double the size of Angel City’s. In 2018, she made it through an entire preseason with Houston before getting cut.

“I think the feelings you get of, ‘Am I going to make the team, are they going to cut me tomorrow, are they gonna trade me tomorrow?’ That can really affect how you play,” Roccaro said.

With the expansion team, there aren’t players who had starting positions with the group last year or coaches already familiar with players’ roles. Roccaro, 27, describes a collective feeling of nerves among the players, both on the field and off of it as they create new lives in Los Angeles. Having a tight-knit team and the security of being part of a small roster helps ease the transition.

We've been waiting for this moment for a long, long time. Hello from DAY 1 of team practice! 👋 pic.twitter.com/ahf7uVRs6U

— Angel City FC (@weareangelcity) February 2, 2022

Gilles, 25, especially appreciates Angel City’s atmosphere. Playing in her first NWSL season, she’s never been in a situation where it’s possible to get cut during preseason.

“When you’re secure in your position, you obviously play with more confidence and you trust your teammates more and you want to get to bond with your teammates more, so I think the small roster that we’ve had during this preseason has been great,” Gilles said.

On the field, Roccaro and Gilles have appreciated Coombe’s calm, detail-oriented coaching style. She’s been suggesting small technical and tactical changes to their individual games that neither of the defenders had thought about before.

“She is an amazing person,” said Roccaro. “She totally fits the mold of what the first Angel City coach should be, and I mean that wholeheartedly. I think she’s the perfect fit on the field, off the field, her goals, who she is as a person, how she’s going to push us, how she’s going to hold the standard high. I think it’s going to be really, really fun to play for her.”

Angel City’s first test comes in their Challenge Cup opener against San Diego on March 19.

Jessa Braun is a contributing writer at Just Women’s Sports covering the NWSL and USWNT. Follow her on Twitter @jessabraun.

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.

With recent transfers Talia von Oelhoffen and Kiki Iriafen joining first-team All-American JuJu Watkins and the nation’s No. 1 recruiting class at USC next season, the Trojans look to transition from an up-and-coming squad to a legitimate title contender. 

Former Oregon State graduate student von Oelhoffen is the latest collegiate talent to commit to the program, announcing her transfer Monday via ESPN. She follows ex-Stanford leading-scorer Iriafen in the jump to the pair’s one-time Pac-12 rival.

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The 5-foot-11 Washington native was a two-time All-Pac-12 guard during her time at Oregon State. But after the recent dissolution of the Pac-12, the Corvallis side found themselves without a permanent home conference going forward. Many big name players opted to take their skill elsewhere as a result, with von Oelhoffen’s fellow ex-Beaver Raegan Beers announcing her own departure to Oklahoma on Monday.

According to DraftKings, USC is now tied with UConn for the second-best betting odds to win the 2025 NCAA women’s tournament. Dawn Staley’s tested South Carolina side, poised for a repeat performance, holds down the number one spot.

Last year, LSU loaded up in the transfer portal after beating Iowa to win the 2023 national championship. The Tigers were clear favorites coming into the 2023-24 season, but were bounced in the Elite Eight by Caitlin Clark’s Hawkeyes. Shortly thereafter, star transfer Hailey Van Lith opted to transfer a second time, this time signing with TCU. 

Yet while history proves that an excess of star power doesn’t always translate to on-court chemistry, on paper, USC sure looks ready to hold their own — in 2025 and beyond.

The United States and Mexico have withdrawn their joint bid to host the 2027 Women’s World Cup, per a Monday afternoon release from U.S. Soccer and the Mexican Football Federation.

According to the statement, they will instead focus on developing a "more equitable" bid for the 2031 tournament, with the ultimate goal of "eliminating investment disparities" between the men’s and women’s tournaments.

The federations went on to cite the upcoming 2026 Men’s World Cup in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico as an opportunity to build support for local infrastructure, improve audience engagement, and scale up media and partnership deals in preparation to "host a record-breaking tournament in 2031."

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"Hosting a World Cup tournament is a huge undertaking — and having additional time to prepare allows us to maximize its impact across the globe," said U.S. Soccer President Cindy Parlow Cone. "Shifting our bid will enable us to host a record-breaking Women’s World Cup in 2031 that will help to grow and raise the level of the women’s game both here at home as well as across the globe."

The decision leaves just Brazil and a joint bid from Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands in the running for the 2027 host spot. Brazil — the rumored frontrunner — has never hosted a Women’s World Cup, while Germany hosted the 2011 tournament as a solo venture. 

Furthermore, this postponement doesn’t mean the U.S. is a shoo-in for 2031, as it's been previously reported that 2022 UEFA Women's EURO host England is considering their own Women's World Cup bid. FIFA is scheduled to confirm the winning bid after the FIFA Congress votes on May 17th.