The teenager has had a whirlwind year, breaking records in Australia, securing a deal with Nike and signing for NWSL side Angel City
When Casey Phair was a young girl, she wanted to play soccer for one of the best colleges in the United States. Even at eight years old, that was her dream. Little did she know then that she would develop into a player so talented that she would skip that step altogether and, after becoming the youngest player in Women’s World Cup history, she’d sign for a team in the NWSL, the top-flight of U.S. women’s soccer, at just 16 years old.
It's not the only dramatic difference between Phair’s childhood ambitions and her reality today. One of the starkest will be reflected on June 1, when the U.S. women’s national team takes on South Korea in the first instalment of a friendly double-header. After growing up with aspirations of representing the USWNT, the teenager will be on the opposing side, having chosen to explore the option of declaring for the nation of her mother – and loved what she found down that path.
In a way, it is fitting that Phair has seen her soccer journey evolve in this manner because her route to this point has required a lot of that on her behalf. Be it a change of position, the adaptation needed to address a period of injuries or how she has had to embrace the quite remarkable milestones that have come her way at such a young age, every facet of her career to date is truly fascinating. Yet, what lays ahead promises to be even more so.
Shane PhairDreaming big
David Richard laughs when GOAL asks what made Phair stand out at a young age. “Just thinking about it just gave me chills,” he replies. Phair was eight years old when she started to attend training sessions for his Seacoast United team and he would be her first club coach when she joined the Massachusetts side. At that time, she was playing for an Under-11s team and yet, she knew what her goals were.
‘I’m going to play Division 1,’ she would say. ‘I'm going to go to college, I'm going to play D1 soccer.’ And that was coming from her, not her folks,” Richard explains. “I can recall conversations with her dad and he's like, 'Casey wants to play D1 soccer'. She had it in her head. She always was focused on the bigger, the better, ‘What do I need to do to get there? Lay it out for me and I'm going to get it done’.”
To showcase that sort of drive and determination as a young girl is not common, to be aware of the path to the top at that point isn’t either. “And that's why that stood out to me,” Richard adds. “I've coached Seacoast teams from U10 to U21, I coached at the college level, and that determination and call out is very, very rare. It was quite refreshing and surprising.”
AdvertisementGettySwitching positions
At that point, Phair was actually a defender, not the electrifying forward she is today. “She had the physical qualities that made her super difficult to get around,” Richard recalls. “She was fast, she was strong, age-wise, and focused. That trifecta of capabilities made her a stud on the field. She was a force to be reckoned with.
“It was later that we started moving her more into an attacking position. It left a big hole defensively, but I think once she started scoring goals, that was like, 'Oh my, I like this'. She was scoring but she was passing as well. There's that delicate line for a striker where they're either too selfish or not enough and I don't think she mastered it, but she was aware of that challenge. How much do I try to do versus making the pass? It was good to see.”
It's in that role that Phair has developed into one of the most promising young talents on the planet, her attention to detail and incredible drive helping her make the transition easily. “My style of coaching is, we're working on whatever theme, playing out of the back for example, that's our focus for this session,” Richard explains. “Everything that we did in the session was always focused on that theme and my message to the players has always been, 'If you can't see how this helps you in the game, I want to know about it'. Casey held me true to that. There are times she would be like, 'Why are we doing this? How does this relate to a game?' Again, it was almost like she was playing at a maturity level much higher than she was age-wise, which is all we want.”
Shane PhairOut to impress
It was a few years later, at U12 level, when Phair’s awareness of the path to the top paid dividends again. The Tennessee team she was playing for was heading to Virginia for the Jefferson Cup, and it was going to face a team representing the Players Development Academy (PDA), a renowned soccer program in New Jersey which played a role in the rise of USWNT stars such as Tobin Heath, Heather O’Reilly and Casey Murphy. Phair wanted that opportunity. She wanted to play against the PDA team – and she did.
“We go into the game and we have all the ball and all the territory and we're up two goals,” Larry Hart, who was coaching the PDA team that day, tells GOAL. “There was this kid up top, though. I saw her and she was a pretty good size, athletically. All of a sudden, she gets the ball, turns, runs at our four backs, ran by them and scored a goal. We get the ball back, we have 90 percent of the ball, we score a third, we score a fourth. She got the ball again, did the same thing. I turn to my assistant coach, I go, ‘Okay, this kid is interesting’, because not only was she really athletic and really fast, but she had a skillset. She was clever and she was tricky.”
After the game, Hart couldn’t resist going up to Phair and praising her performance. Having learned that she previously lived in the area where PDA operates, he added, jokingly, “If you ever go back to the northeast, let me know.” Within weeks, he had an email from Shane, Casey’s father, explaining that he worked remotely and could indeed move. Hart jumped on the phone to talk to him and, when the summer came around, Phair was on the PDA roster. “I've never recruited a kid from that kind of method,” he laughs.
Shane PhairBumps in the road
Though that drive was proving to be a real asset for Phair, it would also hinder her for a spell. The youngster was always keen to train as hard as possible, with Richard remembering times at Seacoast United when her father would email him asking if there were extra sessions, “doesn’t matter the team”, that she could get involved with, because that is what his daughter wanted.
But when she turned 14, as her body was changing, that attitude started to become a slight issue. “All of sudden, you have to do recovery and you have to take a day off,” Hart says. “She couldn't do it because she was so driven, so she had a year that was riddled with injuries. Tweaked hamstring, tweaked quad, tweaked groin, just things like that, constantly, because she was always pushing herself. What we had found out was that – and her dad didn't even know this – before we had a session at night, she was in her house working out with weights, because she was just so driven.
“We said, ‘Look, if you really want to be that player, if you really want to be a big time D1, if you have dreams of being professional, you have to surrender to a training regimen now’. She was physically more developed than half the team. Some of the girls could play twice a day and get away with it. The girls that have [developed], they’re muscular and faster, they have to be more mindful of how they train. They have to train differently. When she surrendered to that, going from 14 to 15, she got better. She made a different jump, she made more of an impact, she got stronger, she got faster, she recognised that.”