The Soccer Tournament is adding a women’s field after debuting this summer, and Heather O’Reilly has even bigger plans for the players she wants to recruit to her team competing in the event.

The 7-on-7, winner-take-all event debuted in June with a grand prize of $1 million. Former U.S. women’s national team star O’Reilly entered an all-women team in the tournament, which was otherwise made up of all men.

Now, the event is introducing a women’s field thanks to the help of O’Reilly’s squad, which included former national team players, was coached by Mia Hamm and drew widespread support. The 2024 women’s tournament will award a separate $1 million prize to the winner in an effort to ensure equal pay.

“We were blown away last year [summer 2023] by the reception that Heather O’Reilly’s U.S. Women team got down in North Carolina,” Jon Mugar, the founder and CEO of The Tournaments, told ESPN. “There were a lot of people there cheering them on specifically and getting to know Heather throughout the process. We quickly got to talking about, ‘Hey, what would this look like if we were to break out a women’s bracket with a separate and equal million-dollar prize?'”

Even if the tournament hadn’t added a women’s bracket, O’Reilly and her team would have returned to competition. But now, more women will have the chance to play as part of an eight-team field, smaller than the men’s 48-team field.

“I’m thrilled to take part again in it this year, and I think it’s a huge statement that TST and the organizers have committed to equal prize money,” O’Reilly told ESPN. “The statement that it makes and the feeling around equality, I think is super special.”

O’Reilly, a three-time Olympic gold medalist and World Cup champion with the USWNT, says she’s going to be calling up some old U.S. teammates who recently retired. The tournament will return to Cary, N.C. and take place June 5-10.

“I’m a competitor and I like our chances,” O’Reilly said. “I’m definitely going to be calling a lot of the household names that everybody can imagine that just retired, like Ali Krieger, Julie Ertz, Carli Lloyd. I can promise that we’ll get some big names there. We’re four hours away from a million-dollar prize.”

Carli Lloyd has been famously critical of the U.S. women’s national team, and on the latest episode of Kickin’ It, Midge Purce responded.

While Purce has seen some clips, she admittedly did not see the clips of Lloyd talking about the team when she was on the show. When on the CBS Sports show, Lloyd echoed what she had said in Australia – that the team lacked focus, and instead was worried about their own individual branding.

She even went as far as saying that there is “so much fundamentally wrong” with the USWNT program, and that there aren’t any players on the team that possess a “champion mentality.”

When asked about Lloyd’s comments, Purce said that she “disagrees.”

“I don’t think she’s wrong, I just disagree,” she said. “I think that two things can exist at once. I think you can have a lot of joy and have the time of your life at the World Cup, this position that you worked so hard to be in and also turn it on on the field at the same time. I think that it’s really easy to point fingers and say, ‘oh this person’s behavior is a reflection of the lack of success they’re having.’ Whereas they’ve been successful and have done the same thing.”

Purce also points to what she calls a “generational shift” between players. One example she points out is the existence of TikTok – which wasn’t around when Lloyd was playing.

“She’s older,” Purce said when asked if Lloyd was “old.”

“She’s a U.S. OG for sure,” Purce continued. “She’s a veteran, she’s a legend. There is no controversy on whether or not that woman is a legend. And she’s a U.S. legend and there was no TikTok when she was playing and that is not controversial either.

“I would say that generationally the focus of media and how that interplays with the soccer world and the industry has changed. But I don’t think that it’s fair to say that’s the reason they didn’t perform when there are so many other issues. I think it’s comorbidity rather than just to blame the player.”

When asked whether or not Lloyd’s criticisms over the team’s culture ring true, and that the team isn’t as competitive as it used to be, Purce noted that it wasn’t her experience with the team.

“But again she’s been there for however long and that’s her experience,” she said. “So I don’t think my experience negates hers. But I felt like in my time with the national team I didn’t feel that anyone wanted to win any less.”

While Emma Hayes’ hiring as the new head coach of the U.S. women’s national team has yet to be made official, veteran forward-turned-pundit Carli Lloyd is excited by the prospect.

Lloyd, who has been an outspoken critic of the team as well as former manager Vlatko Andonovski since her retirement in 2021, gave her take on U.S. Soccer’s choice for Andonovski’s replacement. Lloyd played under Hayes in 2009, when both were with the Chicago Red Stars – Lloyd as the star player, Hayes as the head coach.

“While it’s not official… I’m excited. I like Emma a lot and she has proven herself at Chelsea,” Lloyd wrote on social media. “She seems to be able to manage many different personalities at Chelsea which would help her with the USWNT. They need someone that has a strong personality and can make tough decisions.”

Of course, Hayes isn’t quite the Deion Sanders-style personality for which Lloyd lobbied in a CBS Sports interview. (Whether or not she wanted every part of Sanders’ coaching philosophy, which includes marketing and self-promotion tendencies much reviled by Lloyd, is unclear.) But still, Hayes is a great get for the USWNT.

The U.S. Soccer Federation’s board of directors approved the hiring Saturday, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, with a formal announcement to follow. Hayes’ contract is set to be a record for women’s soccer, with the possibility of Hayes receiving equal pay to U.S. men’s national team manager Gregg Berhalter at least on the table. 

Hayes will leave her current position as head coach of Chelsea upon the conclusion of the Women’s Super League season in May 2024. She is expected to juggle both jobs in the interim.

Carli Lloyd called Megan Rapinoe’s racial justice protests “distracting” to the U.S. women’s national team.

The former USWNT star also defended her own decision not to kneel alongside her teammates at the bronze-medal match of the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, saying she “had enough of kneeling” in a new interview with “Kickin’ It” on CBS Sports.

In 2016, Rapinoe became one of the first athletes to join then-NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick in kneeling during the national anthem in protest of police brutality and racial injustice. At the time, Lloyd described Rapinoe’s choice as a “distraction,” and distance has not changed her perspective.

“I had conversations with Megan — like, this isn’t a personal thing. What she’s doing, it was distracting our team, it was distracting others to play,” Lloyd told CBS Sports. “And I was a captain at that time as well, so I said to her, ‘It’s not to dampen what you’re trying to achieve with it.’ It just became, everything was focused on Megan kneeling and nobody was talking about the reasoning why, is what I was trying to get at.

“And so I had conversations with Megan during that. And every game we rolled up to, it was the camera to her, but no one’s talking about actually what the messaging was about, it was just, she’s kneeling and no one else is kneeling.”

Lloyd also discussed her choice not to kneel before kickoff at the bronze-medal match at the Tokyo Olympics. Every other USWNT player took a knee to protest racism.

“In that moment, we were kneeling — it was right before kickoff, so it wasn’t necessarily like a a protest per se, but I guess everybody in the English Premier league was just taking a knee before kickoff. So we had done it every game, and I knew that was going to be my last world championship game, so I wanted to stand,” Lloyd said. “I had kneeled all the other times.”

She insisted that no other thought went into the decision than her desire to stand for her final match at an international tournament. And if given the chance, she “probably” would do it again.

“I’m sure, because I was the only one standing and everybody else was kneeling,” she said, when asked if if she believed her decision had communicated a different message to observers. “I just thought that, we had done enough of the kneeling, and I just wanted to stand at my last world championship game.”

CBS Sports analyst and former USMNT player Maurice Edu shared with Lloyd his disappointment over her decision not to kneel, and while she said she respected his opinion, she also pushed back.

“I’m in support of change, of actionable change, and I just felt like it was just a thing to do,” she said. “It was just beginning to feel like a thing to do.”

Carli Lloyd doesn’t believe any current player on the U.S. women’s national team roster possesses a championship mentality.

In an interview with “Kickin’ It” on CBS Sports, Lloyd, 41, spoke about her time with the national team, but she also addressed the current state of the team – as she has done often since her retirement in 2021.

Her latest critiques echoed those she has made before, both in the immediate aftermath of her retirement and in her role as a broadcast analyst for the 2023 World Cup. Her biggest gripes revolve around the mentality of the players rather than analysis of their play.

While such analysis could have a place, Lloyd wields it against the USWNT players, some of whom are her former teammates. Lloyd, though, sees even her harshest criticism as an “honest assessment,” sans “fluff.”

One of her honest assessments? There is “so much fundamentally wrong” with the USWNT program, and a fix will require more than a new head coach coming in and switching up the team’s tactics, she told CBS Sports.

“The champion mentality that we’ve had throughout the years, since the inception of this team, that dog mentality, you’ve got none of that,” she said. “The character, the respect — technically, tactically, you could be great and have a coach that comes in, but if you don’t have all those other things, there’s no winning … I look at the U.S. women’s national team, Julie Ertz just left, but aside from her, I don’t see one player that has that mindset.”

She later conceded that World Cup co-captain Lindsey Horan displays a similar mentality. Still, she said, there’s “not many of them that can.” For Lloyd, that reflects a stark contrast from her time on the team, when “a plethora” of players had that determination.

And Lloyd also doesn’t care how people respond when she does speak her truth, or so she claims.

“I lived and breathed it like I feel comfortable and confident to be able to sit here, to be able to be on TV and and say what I said, because I walked the walk,” she said. “I did it every single day from start to finish for 17 years straight. Whether I was a starter or whether I was, at one point in 2019 World Cup for a period of three years I was a sub, so it didn’t matter. I thought that that was my obligation from the previous generation of players to continue to pass that down.”

In reference to the 2023 World Cup, Lloyd called out U.S. Soccer for adjusting the hotel room thermostats to players’ desired temperature levels before they arrived. She also once again took issue with the players for wearing sunglasses and dancing before matches.

“If I saw that, if I was a part of that team, I would raise hell and I would go directly to the players and tell them to take their sunglasses off and stop dancing,” she said.

To her, those actions were a sign of players “taking every moment for granted,” rather than getting loose or remaining steadfast in one of the biggest moments of their careers. Instead, Lloyd questioned their toughness.

“It has to be hard,” she said about playing for the USWNT. “I think all these players want to come in, want to feel comfortable, want to express themselves. It doesn’t work like that. Just do your job, come in, put the work in.”