How does that feel? And how do you lead players with so much more experience than you, players who are older than you?

Yeah, I mean, it's still like for me, I feel like I'm still processing it.

Um, and I feel like it's been really cool also growing in my relationship with Emma Hayes and like listening to see like what they want out of me.

And then even just alongside of that, like learning from the older players and more experienced players like Naomi, Lindsey, um, and like some of those other players who have worn the armband, Emily Sonnett even.

Um, and I've had like countless numbers of talks with Lindsey.

I actually was talking to her the other week about it as well and just like about expectations and how she grew into that role because like it's...

Obviously, I didn't experience the like entire captaincy background of it where she's going into all these different meetings and has to do stuff with the referees and the federation.

When the coach gives you so much belief and sees so much in you, what, what do you see in Emma and what makes her different from other coaches that you've played for?

Thank you.

Fabulous.

Thank you very much, Matt.

That was lovely.

Loads of things to say about the fictionalizing of real people and what's going on in that chapter nine.

And it continues a bit in chapter 10.

I think the fact that you've got real people in a fiction doesn't necessarily mean that you have to trust their reality or their historical, you know, I mean, the Joyce takes quite a lot of artistic license you know William Kirkpatrick McGee also who has the pseudonym of John Eglinton is not necessarily to be confused with the real person though interestingly he writes a memoir where he says when he read that chapter he he had a twinge of recollection of real things that

had actually been said which is kind of amazing.

Mm-hmm

... who I talked a ton about with that, and just the love of the ball, the love of ball mastery, and how good you can be on the ball is how good as you can be as a player, and it just makes you limitless.

So for me growing up, that was the biggest thing.

It was what can I do with it? What moves can I learn? Um, and then if it's just me, a ball, a wall, a friend, like it's endless, limitless what you can do.

Um, and then I think from there, just looking at my journey, I played for a small town in upstate New York called Alley Cats.

It wasn't in like a huge league.

It wasn't i- in ECNL or anything.

Yeah.

What have your conversations been like with the new head coach, Emma Coates?

The biggest thing is just, um, the looking forward to the development of me personally, but then also the team.

We have a very young team who's ambitious, as much as the club is ambitious.

So the biggest thing is being able to align everybody with the mission and the goal, that we wanna win championships, we wanna become a dynasty, we wanna keep growing, and about how we can make that happen, whether it be what we're doing every day in training, what we're doing in the film room, or even just what we're doing off the field to make this team a family.

Those are the conversations we've had, and, um, she was actually sitting behind me on the plane ride back from Coachella, watching the game.

I was just catching up on some texts that I had to [chuckles] do in the past week, and towards the end of the ride, she tapped me on the shoulder.

I turned around, and she just started talking about something that she noticed about my play, about just a habit I had, and was like, "Do you think...

Uh, what are your goals specifically for this year, to not only keep making the roster, but to make the roster for Brazil?