The U.S. Women's National Team is back in action this week, and I have identified three

players I would love to seek a significant time on the pitch because I really think they have a

shot to wedge themselves into the roster as things get serious as the year goes on.

Welcome to this week's edition of The Late Sub. I am your host, Claire Watkins. It is Tuesday,

January 20th. And we're going to do a little preview, a little roster breakdown, just a little bit of a hybrid show here talking about the players who are in January camp with the US and as national team right now, who I would like to see get some significant playing time in their two friendlies, one against Paraguay and one against Chile, and kind of the implications of what this last sort of experimental group will be as, like I said,

things get a little bit tougher as the year goes on. Let's jump in.

The U.S. women's national team is back. It is 2026. It is a World Cup qualifying year. And we are beginning kind of

the slow walk to November when all of that will occur. They're still looking at different

kind of player pools, figuring out what players are going to want to bring to that to know to

the big stuff once we get to the later part of the year. Starting out, classic US women's national

team situation, January camp. They're going to play two friendlies, one against Paraguay and once

against Chile as part of sort of this larger training camp that they like to do in January,

a longstanding U.S. tradition to bring everybody in. Some of this is just for fitness testing and

kind of figuring out where everyone is at physically, getting them into a good kind of competitive

caldron before they go to do preseason with their NWSL teams or anything like that. It is outside

the realm of an official international window, which as we know impacted the roster itself.

This is kind of, you know,

in that way, sort of left over from those years where so many of the US women's national team played in the NWSL that you could actually schedule this camp during specifically the NWSL

offseason, even though it's not the European calendar offseason. But I think now, even with so many players in Europe who are not able to participate in

this camp, it's kind of taken on a new shifting level of importance in that it's to get

some NWSL players that maybe haven't spent that much time in the environment.

It's again to get those NWSL players fit and get them in with the U.S. doctors, U.S. trainers,

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