Decorated defender Tierna Davidson might be both the youngest and wisest veteran on the USWNT.
The Menlo Park, California native has been a fixture on the senior squad since 2018, picking up accolades during the team’s 2019 World Cup, 2021 Olympic bronze, and 2024 Olympic gold medal runs. Throughout her tenure, Davidson’s played under three different USWNT coaches — four counting two-time interim manager Twila Kilgore — underwent multiple roster and tactical shifts, fought her way back from serious injury, and witnessed a generation of her teammates pass the baton to a young and hungry new class.
Given all that, it’s almost impossible to believe she’s only 25.
“[It] was so exciting to see all of these young players grow into themselves in this tournament and really express themselves on the field — to see the personalities, to see the styles of play, to see the chemistry building — when I was first on this team, I was just so focused on playing,” Davidson told reporters last week during a promotional appearance at Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers in New York. “Being a little bit myopic about it, you don’t really see those growth patterns — perhaps I was the one doing that growth — but to see some of the younger players have such a fantastic tournament experience, I think it bodes really well for the future of the team.”
Davidson’s former myopathy is more than understandable. Six years ago, the then 20-year-old was the youngest player on former coach Jill Ellis’s 23-player World Cup roster. And with an average age of 28, more than half of that 2019 squad arrived in France with prior World Cup experience. Yet it was Davidson’s first major tournament at the senior level — and, ultimately, her first major tournament win.
Now closer in age to more recent additions like Trinity Rodman (22), Croix Bethune (23), and fellow Stanford Cardinal Naomi Girma (24) but with the same national team experience as players five to 10 years her senior, Davidson is able to serve as a bridge between the USWNTs of the past and today’s iteration. And it’s something she’s tapped into as she’s evolved her own style of play over the years.
“I’ve tried to take everything that I’ve learned from some of the older players and then also from myself over the past few years and commit that to my game,” she said. “Playing with different players brings out new and exciting things in your game, and as I’ve made connections with some of the players on the field that I haven’t gotten a chance to play with as much, different parts of my game come out.”
Ushering in the USWNT’s Emma Hayes Era
One person Davidson hadn’t played with much prior to the Olympics wasn’t exactly on the field, or at least not over the touch line. Current USWNT head coach Emma Hayes joined the USWNT in May from London’s Chelsea FC, bringing with her a shining record and high expectations, both from within US Soccer and from the greater public. As a player, Davidson approached the personnel shift with the same open-minded optimism she harnesses on the pitch.
“We all knew that she was a great coach — we’d seen what she had done with Chelsea and knew that she was going to be really great for our group,” she said of Hayes. “But we weren’t exactly sure, even just the basic things of how she wanted to run a training session or how she coached on the sideline. Those are the things that we had to build into and learn.”
The fact that Hayes landed in the States some two months shy of the USWNT kicking off in France wasn’t lost on the team — or on their incoming manager. “Coming into the Olympics, it was something we all recognized and acknowledged, herself included,” Davidson added. “I think that was so powerful to just get the elephant out of the room and say, ‘This is weird, it’s not normal that you have a brand new coach coming…
