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It’s Friday, and United States ladies’s nationwide workforce head coach Vlatko Andonovski is at his house in Kansas Metropolis, catching up on calls forward of one other lengthy weekend.

This weekend was a doozy: a flight to Seattle to observe OL Reign host Portland Thorns on Saturday night time, adopted by a coast-to-coast crisscross for video games in New Jersey and Los Angeles on Sunday and Monday, respectively, earlier than returning house.

Three Nationwide Ladies’s Soccer League video games, three days, shut to eight,000 miles within the air by the point he lands again house. That is the acute model of what life has regarded like over the previous few months as Andonovski narrows down his record to call a 23-player World Cup roster later this summer time. He and his workers journey to video games in particular person to observe potential gamers intimately and meet with them round their membership matches.

“The variety of gamers that we really feel good with is getting nearer to the top,” Andonovski instructed The Equalizer final week. “Now, the final ones, we’ve acquired to verify we’ve thorough data on every participant earlier than we make the ultimate determination.”