It’s been almost a year, but Trinity Rodman still can barely bring herself to say it out loud.

“Losing at the World Cup,” she says. “I hate saying that word.”

For the United States women’s national team, the L-word has always been something of taboo, if not a foreign concept entirely. A juggernaut in the order of Brazil on the men’s side, the USWNT has been a serial winner, dominating women’s soccer like few teams in any sport. The US has won gold at the Olympics four out of seven times, and in nine women’s World Cup tournaments, the team has claimed the top prize in four of them. The previous decade produced a truly storied run, with the likes of Megan Rapinoe and Alex Morgan leading the USWNT to Olympic gold in 2012 and consecutive World Cup titles in 2015 and 2019.

But last year’s World Cup in Australia and New Zealand marked a humbling end to that dynastic era. Under head coach Vlatko Andonovski, the team was an awkward mix of familiar mainstays and World Cup rookies like Rodman, lacking the venom in attack that American fans have come to expect. “Going into the World Cup, it was chaotic and there was a lot of adjustment,” Rodman adds. “I feel like it was kind of hard to know where you stood.”

In four matches at the tournament, the USWNT mustered only four goals––three of them coming against lowly Vietnam––before crashing out in the round of 16 against Sweden. It was the worst finish ever at a World Cup for the US, which had previously never finished lower than third at the competition. “Having a coach that’s experiencing the World Cup for the first time, with half the team that’s experiencing it for the first time,” she adds, “I think there was a lot of uncertainty and unknown factors.”

Andonovski resigned shortly after the World Cup and has since been replaced by the English coach Emma Hayes, who officially took the reins of the USWNT last month after a decorated 12-year run with Chelsea FC of the Women’s Super League. “The way she connects with players is so good,” Rodman says of Hayes. “The honesty and upfront meetings that she has with people, I think, helps a lot with people’s confidence and the way that they go into games.”

The changes have extended from the touchline to the pitch, with Rapinoe and other longtime USWNT anchors such as Julie Ertz and Kelley O’Hara announcing their retirement over the past year.

Ten months after the disappointment down under, Rodman believes there is more clarity within the national team. There is also decidedly more youth. The average age of the roster that Hayes selected for a pair of friendlies this month against South Korea was 26, underlining the generational shift in the squad. Within the current setup, Rodman says, “It’s a little bit more up-front and blunt about what your role is, what our new coach wants us to do.”

“I feel like we’re more connected as a team and we’re working for each other,” she says. “Not that we weren’t before, but I think recently it’s been more of a team effort and not just relying on certain people’s skill set and magic moments.”

As Rodman and her teammates have forged a new identity, they have started to look like the USWNT of old. After a shocking loss to Mexico in February, the team has rattled off seven wins in a row, building crucial momentum ahead of next month’s Olympics in Paris. Hayes hasn’t yet named her squad for the tournament, but barring an injury, Rodman is a virtual shoo-in.

She showed why against South Korea, dazzling alongside the other youngsters as the USWNT won both matches by a combined score of 7-0. In the second friendly, Rodman displayed the relentless energy and technical quality that have made her one of the team’s most complete attacking players. She tormented the Korean defense with menacing runs down the right side, helping to create two of the team’s goals––first setting up Sophia Smith before assisting the 17-year-old phenom Lily Yohannes on the other.

Rodman, 22, is in the vanguard of the USWNT’s youth movement, a front-facing star to lead the team into a new era. There is world-class athleticism in her bloodlines; her father, Dennis Rodman, is one of the greatest—and most eccentric—players in NBA history. He was not an active presence in her upbringing, as her mother, Michelle Moyer, raised both Trinity and her older brother. But there is no lingering resentment. “I have nothing but great things to say about him,” Trinity Rodman says of her father. “I’ve modeled a lot of my game after him and I think you can see that.”

Rodman’s career is still in its infancy, but she’s already made her own name. She is one of the best and highest-paid players in the National Women’s Soccer League, winning rookie of the year in 2021 as she helped guide the Washington Spirit to the title. And Rodman’s on-field accolades have earned her endorsements. She is sponsored by both Oakley and Red Bull. This month, Adidas made Rodman the face of a new cleat. She also appears poised to become the new face of the USWNT, a role she has learned to embrace.

“There's definitely pressure with it,” Rodman told me last week at an Adidas pop-up in Brooklyn, “but I think as time goes on and the more experience I have, the less it’s crippling.”

After last year’s World Cup flop, Rodman believes the USWNT is under more pressure heading into the Olympics. Oddsmakers have made the US slight favorites to win gold in Paris over reigning world champion Spain, but the American hegemony over the sport is fading. The team must now reckon with a more parity-filled women’s soccer landscape, with countries in Europe and South America posing a threat to the USWNT.

“In the past, obviously it’s been the US over everything, and that’s not a secret. But now, I like to give kudos to where the women’s game has progressed to and grown to,” Rodman says. “These teams are advancing with youth, with physicality, tactically, technically, everything. I think the game’s growing, which obviously makes it harder and harder for us to stay at the top.”

The United States women’s national team has long operated at the nexus of sports and activism, with players shouldering two sets of expectations––to win and, as Alex Morgan put it earlier this year, to “give attention to causes that are important to us.”

Such advocacy has made it nearly impossible to discuss the team strictly in athletic terms, its off-field legacy standing as towering as the one built on the pitch. “The adoration, the loyalty, the fervor they have inspired has more in common with political or cultural idols than it does with humdrum sports fandom,” The New York Times’s Rory Smith wrote last year.

Players such as Rapinoe have been outspoken champions of progressive causes, from equal pay to LGBTQ+ rights, and over the last several years, the team became fully entrenched in the culture war—revered on the left and reviled on the right. After the team lost in penalties to Sweden at last year’s World Cup, former president Donald Trump and his MAGA acolytes responded with glee, mocking Rapinoe for her miss in the shoot-out. “WOKE EQUALS FAILURE,” Trump wrote on Truth Social at the time. “Nice shot Megan, the USA is going to Hell!!! MAGA.”

When we met last week in Brooklyn, I asked Rodman about the reaction to the team’s loss. How did it feel to see a former president and many of his supporters essentially root against the United States national team?

“I can only speak so much, and it’s hard being a young player. I don’t know the extent of everything, but yeah, I don’t look at it in any type of way. I feel like everyone has their opinion and their right to have that opinion,” she says. “Being a team that wins for so long and then losing, I think it shocks the world, not in a good way, obviously. Fans aren’t going to be happy about that, but being in the team and being in the environment, you really understand the struggle and just how much you get tested in every possible way.”

More recently, the USWNT has confronted ideological tension within its own camp. Korbin Albert, a 20-year-old midfielder and one of the team’s promising new faces, came under fire in April after sharing anti-LGBTQ+ content on TikTok, earning a public reprimand from USWNT veterans. Lindsey Horan, the team’s captain, called it a “disappointing situation,” while Morgan said they remained committed to “a safe and respectful space, especially as allies and members of the LGBTQ+ community.”

“We’ve worked extremely hard to uphold the integrity of this national team through all of the generations, and we are extremely, extremely sad that this standard was not upheld,” Horan said at the time.

Albert publicly apologized, but many US fans have not been so forgiving. When she took the field in the first match against South Korea this month, Albert drew boos from the crowd in Colorado. She’s also drawn rebukes online.

“I like to say social media is a great place, but a dangerous place,” Rodman says. “Having strong opinions is difficult, especially when you are looked at a lot and you have a platform to do so. Obviously getting booed is horrible, but there’s people that have their opinions and have their beliefs and they’re not always going to match up with those. Even if you’re in the spotlight, it doesn’t mean you believe the same things as everybody else. But yeah, for us, she’s on the US women’s national team and we’re going to be her teammates and support her. When she comes on the field, she’s just like everybody else wearing that number and playing for our country, and she’s working her butt off to do so.”

The controversy, not unlike a humbling loss, might be a learning experience for the USWNT’s young players, who are still getting used to the weight of the badge. Rodman understands the social responsibility that accompanies the team, saying she is ready to take up the mantle left by her accomplished predecessors. Having a “big voice,” she told me, is “what makes the US women’s national team special.”

“I think for us it’s learning from the people that came before us and the players that have changed the world,” Rodman says. “I love saying that. It’s not just soccer, it’s so much more than that.”