Washington Spirit midfielder Chloe Ricketts, who is just 16 years, two months, and six days old, scored in a 4-2 Challenge Cup win over NJ/NY Gotham FC, making her the youngest player to ever notch a goal in a competitive NWSL match.
“My little sister told me I had to score, so that’s what was going through my mind the whole time,” a grinning Ricketts told reporters at Audi Field. [Ashley] Hatch played a beautiful ball straight to my feet, so I could finish it easily.”
The goal capped off a wild game, with the Spirit falling 2-0 behind after just eight minutes, a 70-odd minute lightning delay, the return of veteran Tori Huster after a 629-day battle to come back from a torn Achilles, and Washington scoring three times in 15 second-half minutes to break out of a four-game winless streak in all competitions.
Ricketts shot home from an angle in the 70th minute after Hatch dished the ball her way, capping off a stunning Spirit comeback following the oddity of a long weather delay, a very abbreviated return to play before halftime, and then a second half played in rainy conditions on a sweltering night in the District.
“I don’t think she was good last week,” began Spirit head coach Mark Parsons when asked about Ricketts’ goal and overall play. “This week has been much better, and I think tonight’s performance was very good… She received one ball in the first half, and [Ali] Krieger was right there trying to steal it, and Chloe was like ‘I don’t care.'”
Ricketts’ goal came as the latest development in the NWSL’s youth movement. She was very briefly the league’s youngest-ever player before the San Diego Wave signed Melanie Barcenas, and her debut goal came around 11 hours after the North Carolina Courage announced the signing of U.S. Under-17 captain Riley Jackson.
NWSL introduced the Under-18 Entry List this winter, a mechanism which allows teams — provided they meet certain safeguarding requirements set by the league — to sign players who are under the age of 18 without having to pick them in the draft. Ricketts was the first player signed under those new rules, with Barcenas going pro less than two weeks later.
With the Spirit, Ricketts has seen her role increase as the season has gone on, starting four of the team’s five Challenge Cup matches. Earlier in July, she got her first regular season start in a 2-2 draw opposite Barcenas and San Diego.
“She can dribble and wriggle out of everything, and then, I mean she crushed some big players for Gotham tonight [in duels],” added Parsons. “Bravery in possession, she’s a menace out of possession. It was a good performance.”
The youngest player to score in NWSL league play remains another youngster, Portland Thorns playmaker Olivia Moultrie. In June 2022, Moultrie (aged 16 years, 8 months, 28 days) scored against the Houston Dash.
The USWNT’s future is promising as tomorrow’s stars are already emerging
The U.S. women’s national team has its focus firmly on this summer’s World Cup, but the team’s future is looking good.
While several veterans may be looking at their last tournament this summer in Australia and New Zealand, the USWNT should be able to go from strength to strength based on the depth of young talent coming through.
In particular, NWSL’s recent rule changes allowing players under the age of 18 to sign pro deals will mean better development environments than the U.S. youth scene has ever offered girls before.
Below are some of the USWNT’s best young players. For the purposes of this list, the player must be born in 2002 or later.
What does it take for a teenager to shine in NWSL? We tried to find out
NWSL’s history with truly young players is, thanks to under-supported clubs and a lack of guardrails, a messy one.
As with many situations pertaining to the NWSL during its early years, teams — and the league itself — were unprepared to take on the challenge involved, but also simply lacked a clear plan on how to incorporate players outside of the draft system.
While teams seemed to grasp what it could mean for them on the competitive side — both the Portland Thorns and Washington Spirit moved mountains specifically to be in position to acquire Mallory Swanson, for example — the league was far less prepared for how much the non-soccer side matters.
Swanson’s experience is instructive. Then 19, Swanson, née Pugh, would lead the 2017 Spirit with six goals, but was largely left to her own devices two time zones away from home. Between injuries and little club-level support at a team running on a minor-league financial plan, Swanson’s development path seemed to plateau at a moment when she was largely expected to be U.S. Soccer’s Next Big Thing.
In retrospect, Swanson’s growth being hampered was hardly a surprise given the Spirit’s multipleoff-fieldissues during her time with the club.
Considering the state of the entire league, the series of public missteps, and the multiple investigations involved, it’s safe to say this wasn’t one bad environment. Frankly, it’s not clear that any NWSL club in this time frame was an appropriate environment for a player like Swanson to walk into. The entire league simply was not ready to provide what was required of it.
As Swanson approaches 25 years old, she has reached the level of being one of the best attackers on the planet. Things eventually worked out. However, her path here wasn’t easy, and a major factor was an NWSL club whose on-field ambitions surpassed what their off-field capabilities would actually allow for.
To be sure, there are success stories: Ellie Carpenter’s time with the Thorns — who for all their failings in player safety still had a much more substantial infrastructure than any other NWSL club in that era — became a near-instant starter and is now a fixture for Lyon and Australia.
Back with the Spirit, Trinity Rodman declared for the draft and was immediately one of the NWSL’s best players. The Spirit took some lessons from how they had failed Swanson, having a more robust plan in place to give her a better situation away from the training field. Rodman ended up winning a title and making the NWSL Best XI in 2021, and has broken through with the USWNT over the last year-plus.
Still, with no NWSL rules on how these situations worked, the process is different every time. Swanson’s path to the NWSL was convoluted: the Spirit made multiple trades to obtain the top spot in the Distribution Ranking Order, a mechanism which no longer exists, and she missed the first five games of the season because the league simply didn’t have the wherewithal to come up with a more timely method to get her on a team.
The complications for players just trying to get into the league continued: Olivia Moultrie getting a contract from Portland involved a public pressure campaign and a court case that saw NWSL on one side and one of its clubs (as well as a player who wanted to be in the league) on the other. Even after a judge ruled in Moultrie’s favor, NWSL rules still ended up putting her into an ad hoc discovery process that saw OL Reign acquire her rights before trading them to Portland (for far below market value).
(Photo by Amanda Loman/Getty Images)
The outcome was what the player, her family, and the club wanted. Moultrie has proven her mettle, and even for the defending champions, the 17-year-old gets regular playing time as the team’s attacking midfielder. She’s a serious contributor (three goals and four assists in 17 games last year) for a powerhouse. It’s just that, as with Swanson, she faced plainly unnecessary obstacles that seemed rooted in a lack of preparedness and infrastructure.
Jaedyn Shaw’s path into the league was only slightly less rocky. The Texan, then 17, joined the Spirit in the 2022 preseason and trained with them for months while Washington tried to pursue some backchannel diplomacy aimed at a new method for young players to enter the league.
The campaign didn’t change enough minds, and once again NWSL held a mid-season discovery process to sort the situation out. Sources at the time told Pro Soccer Wire that at least six NWSL clubs submitted bids — Washington and San Diego being the only two ever publicly revealed — and that a weighted lottery placed the Wave atop the discovery list. Another potential star player’s career course was charted by a confusing, opaque method.
In a call with Pro Soccer Wire from San Diego, Shaw took a moment to choose her words before discussing how much of a problem it would have been if she had been denied entry into the league last year.
“It would have been definitely really hard for me,” said Shaw. “I would have been basically with the Spirit for a whole year, and being in that environment, knowing that I can handle it, knowing that I can do it every single day and play at that level, and then just being told no…that definitely would have been hard for me to deal with.”
It’s hard to dispute Shaw’s read on her ability to compete. She scored in her professional debut, and has been a regular starter for a San Diego side that competed for the NWSL Shield last season. In the Wave’s 2023 opener, Shaw scored a splendid goal, while coach Casey Stoney experimented with a formation change designed to make the 18-year-old more of an attacking centerpiece.
With multiple clubs now well-staffed enough to both scout the youth ranks more thoroughly and able to create an infrastructure to truly support teenage players, the situation was only going to repeat itself with more frequency. Shortly after the 2022 season ended, NWSL announced that it had created a new way for young players to join teams. The Under-18 Entry List specified both how young players could end up with a specific team, and installed some common-sense safeguards to prevent teams from choosing short-term competitive needs over a player’s well-being.
For example, the new rules prevent teams from trading or waiving a player before they turn 18 without the consent of both the player and their legal guardian. Under-18 Entry List players can’t be selected in expansion drafts, and their initial contract must run through the season in which they turn 18. If a team wants to make the commitment, the rules oblige them to truly take a longer view, in exchange for removing the bizarre paths to entry players in this age group have had to endure.
So far, the new rules have been applied twice, both for 15-year-old prospects: Washington signed Chloe Ricketts, while the Wave followed shortly thereafter in signing Melanie Barcenas. Both clubs had these players on their radar well before the establishment of the league’s rules, meaning that clubs have essentially been waiting for NWSL rules to catch up.
The time appears to be now, and the league — as it emerges from numerous debacles — has entered a new era.
Resources have changed the game
That era contains a need to balance multiple thoughts: player safety, development, the attention that comes when a younger player signs with a pro team, and the day-to-day process of trying to win games in an endlessly competitive league.
Speaking to Pro Soccer Wire just a couple of weeks before Barcenas signed with the club, Stoney said that when the opportunity to sign Shaw arrived, “as a club, we were like, ‘we need to make it happen,’ because she was such a talented young player.”
What followed was both pursuing the nuts-and-bolts of signing a player, but also showing that they could meet the requirements NWSL said had to be in place: housing for Shaw and her family, “a separate locker room, making sure that every player and every member of staff was qualified for SafeSport to make sure we could bring minors into the environment,” said Stoney. “Making sure we had all the policies and procedures in place, making sure that we were looking after the California law side of things as well.”
(Photo by Tim Nwachukwu/Getty Images)
Shaw said that the team brought her in for meetings with Stoney, club president Jill Ellis, and general manager Molly Downtain to talk through the normal things a player wants to know about when signing with a new club (team philosophy, training ground, etc.) and also go over how things would be for her in specific circumstances.
“It was just what to expect, basically. They didn’t want me to just come here not knowing exactly what’s going on, and just being completely new to this to the area and everything,” said Shaw, who added that the major offseason change for her was limited to moving to a “more permanent” home in San Diego after the team had set up something more short-term last year.
A major difference between San Diego and NWSL teams circa six or seven years ago? Ownership groups that can afford to create a larger club infrastructure. Shaw said that upon arrival, the Wave had everything in place, rather than trying to build the plane while mid-air.
“I think that the Wave have a lot of resources,” said Shaw, listing off the team’s coaching staff, trainers, and a mental well-being coach the club has made available for the entire squad. “I’m comfortable having that relationship with them and being able to express what I need as an athlete, and what I need as a person from them.”
Spirit president of soccer operations Mark Krikorian told Pro Soccer Wire that a club’s commitment when signing such young players has to start with safety, and that teams should be aiming to surpass league rules when they can.
“I think that we’re all committed to protecting [Ricketts], first and foremost, and any other young player that’s here,” said Krikorian. “The league has done a good job in putting together protocols to protect the players, the states all have different rules, laws, and so on to protect [minors], but hopefully we’re going above and beyond those.”
Speaking to reporters before the season kicked off, Spirit midfielder Andi Sullivan said that in her view, Washington is a good place for a player like Ricketts because of both the infrastructure Krikorian, owner Michele Kang, and others have assembled, and because the players themselves are well-tuned towards helping a youngster out as a teammate.
“I do think we have a lot more ability to support her and hopefully that continues to grow, that we would be able to support her and people her age more,” said Sullivan. “I also think — not to toot our own horn — but I think she stepped into the perfect team to do that, because we’re taking good care of her in terms of the team aspect.”
In Washington, that means so many things: light-hearted ribbing during a rondo, a new coaching staff that has prioritized internal standards and culture, player-to-player communication in training and elsewhere, but also continuing education. Krikorian says that Ricketts will continue the same remote education program she was on in Michigan, and that the Spirit have longer-term plans to link up with regional universities to allow young players an avenue to get their degree while playing for Washington.
“I think that they all realize that they can make a positive impact in this young woman’s life, and help her and help to guide her and mentor her,” explained Krikorian. “It’s not their job. Their job is to go out into play and so on, but I do think that they are sensitive women and I do think that they do want what’s best for Chloe and what’s best for the club and they recognize they can be a positive piece of this.”
The soccer side is the easy part
On one front, the game tells the truth: if a young player brings it on the soccer side, getting acclimated tends to go very quickly.
Stoney said that Shaw got “the respect of the group immediately” with what she showed in training. “She shows what she’s capable of, and the players want her on there because they know that she can make a difference.”
With Ricketts, Sullivan and Ashley Sanchez — no strangers to the cauldron that is the USWNT environment — took note of how she’s got confidence and skill, but is also not timid when it comes to challenges.
“I think Chloe stepped in and was like, decking people,” Sullivan said. “I think [it] shows that she’s not afraid of anything. And I think that fearless mindset will carry her a long way.”
“She came in with the energy, she was hitting people immediately,” added Sanchez. “I was respecting it.”
Sullivan noted that Ricketts is “young, but she doesn’t want to be treated like she’s young,” adding that the Michigan native “is very thoughtful. You [can] tell that in conversations with her: she is very considerate of, and aware of, how things work, and she knows herself really well,” all of which help a player who has to handle a new phenomenon: being hugely talented, but also not being her team’s star attraction from day one.
Young players, eager to show their best stuff, can often make a big impact on arrival. Consistency is harder to come by, and those outsized expectations can pose a problem over time. In San Diego, Stoney is quick to caution that no one is expecting Shaw to carry on without any issues or tough patches. “Are there ups and downs for a young player? Yeah. They’re gonna go for a bit of a bumpy road because they’re not always going to be on a trajectory like this,” she said, tracing a diagonal line heading towards the heavens. “That’s not real life. No one does. They go up, and then they might have a little dip, and then they’ll go up again.”
Stoney said that it’s a coach’s job to sort out when a player needs to push through those down moments to build resolve, and when they’re no longer progressing. However, she adds, “[being] honest about what I’m doing and why I’m doing it” is just as vital.
According to Stoney, the vagaries of the U.S. development system — players remaining stars in their club teams and then doing the same collegiately — can deprive those youngsters of the chance to develop resilience. They get to the NWSL level, and it might be the first time in their lives where they’ve not just walked right into a given lineup.
“They’ve played every game, they’ve been a starter, then all of a sudden they step into a professional environment and they might not even be on the [gameday] roster,” said Stoney. “It’s a massive adjustment for them in terms of their mentality and emotional responses to that, and they haven’t built the resilience to be able to cope with it because they’ve never faced it before. So we try and get ahead of it. We know that it’s going to happen. We put on workshops for those players that have come into professional environment for the first time. We look at the challenges they might be facing and we tackle them head on.”
Still, the task Stoney describes is a next-level problem, one that is normal for a functioning and healthy soccer environment. For the NWSL, “functioning” and “healthy” have been qualities to aspire to, rather than the day-to-day truth. The new system of rules and guidelines, combined with major advances at clubs and player-driven demands for raised standards, has finally put the league in a position to answer that kind of challenge.
NWSL’s new Under-18 Entry Mechanism is already being used
The times are definitely changing in the NWSL, and few things make that more clear than the burgeoning youth movement around the league.
The latest move on that front has seen the Washington Spirit signing 15-year-old forward Chloe Ricketts to a three-year contract (the deal includes an option year in 2026). Per the Spirit, Ricketts signed her contract on Thursday aged 15 years and 283 days, making her three days younger than Portland Thorns midfielder Olivia Moultrie was when she signed her first professional contract in 2021.
“We remain very focused on building a roster that can help us succeed now while also investing in the future,” said head coach Mark Parsons in a team release announcing the move. “Chloe has shown great quality with and without the ball and has an incredible intensity in everything she does. The vision and infrastructure of our club make this signing possible, and we are look forward to Chloe developing and becoming an important player and teammate for our team.”
Spirit signs youngest-ever player to NWSL contract!
“The opportunity to join the Washington Spirit on a professional contract is a dream come true,” added Ricketts. “I’m looking forward to continuing my development as a player and individual with the great resources here in the District.”
Ricketts, who hails from Michigan, played for AFC Ann Arbor in the USL W-League in 2022, scoring two goals and adding two assists as one of the two 14-year-olds in the entire pre-professional league. In 2021, she played on an Ann Arbor Tigers boys team that won the Michigan State Cup and on a girls team that went to the ECNL national final.
The Spirit’s initial preseason roster included Ricketts and another teenager, U.S. Under-17 midfielder Melina Rebimbas, as the club has made youth development a clear priority. In 2022, Washington brought USYNT attacker Jaedyn Shaw in during their preseason, keeping the then-17-year-old around to train with the team while hoping for a path to sign her.
NWSL, with no mechanism in place to allow for a youth player to sign without waiting for the next college draft, ruled that Shaw had to go through the league’s discovery process. The San Diego Wave were atop the priority list for that mechanism, and despite overtures from the Spirit — sources told Pro Soccer Wire that Washington offered $250,000 in allocation money, or $150,000 and a first-round draft pick — they opted to offer Shaw a deal.
That proved to be a smart choice, as Shaw scored on her professional debut and has already emerged as a consistent starter for a playoff-caliber team.
NWSL Under-18 Entry Mechanism in action
Ricketts’ signing is far less of an ordeal than previous teenagers have experienced when trying to join a team in the league. Portland tried to move mountains to sign Mallory Swanson in 2016, only for NWSL to leave no avenue to do so. Swanson ended up signing with the league in 2017, ending up with the Spirit via a convoluted distribution ranking order process.
Moultrie, meanwhile, ended up taking the league to court after her attempts to sign with Portland were initially rebuffed by NWSL rules. Even after the league relented, it still required a discovery process akin to the one Shaw went through in 2022, with OL Reign claiming her league rights. The Reign then traded those rights to the Thorns for a third-round pick so Moultrie could play where she’d wanted to all along.
Commissioner Jessica Berman was asked about these stumbling blocks at a press conference before the league’s 2022 championship game, and said that sorting out its policy for players in Ricketts’ situation was a priority.
“Virtually every policy and rule, at the league office, is being reviewed,” said Berman. “We are taking a closer look at everything and figuring out what are the most important things we need to address, and [youth player entry] is definitely one of the areas that we’re focused on, to try to make sure we balance all different interests — and there’s a lot of competing interests — and get the most right for the future of the league.”
Ricketts is the first player to put those changes into practice. NWSL announced a new Under-18 Entry Mechanism in November 2022, detailing what standards had to be met for a team and player to qualify.
Among the requirements are provisions that require teams to offer a guaranteed contract once they place a player on their Under-18 Entry List, and must have the consent of both the player and their parent or legal guardian to do so. Players entering the league this way can’t be waived or traded until after turning 18 unless the player and their guardian have given consent, and are ineligible to be selected in any expansion draft while under 18 years old.
Teams are limited to two players per season between both their Under-18 Entry List and players signed via that mechanism. So for the Spirit, signing Ricketts and having Rebimbas on their list means they are currently maxed out within the parameters of the new process for the 2023 season. Under-18 Entry Mechanism spots cannot be traded, so a team can’t hoard them as with other tradable assets.
Washington’s press release noted that Ricketts “will continue her education virtually throughout the season,” though there are no publicly-stated requirements on that front from the league.
