One year after missing a crucial penalty kick at the 2023 World Cup, Sophia Smith found redemption.
Five minutes into extra time of Tuesday's Olympic semifinal against Germany, Smith scored her third goal of the tournament, and in the process sent the U.S. women’s national team to the Gold Medal match.
As coach Emma Hayes put it postgame, she’s “just f***ing gone on another level in this tournament.”
“I saw like a little opening of net and I was just like, ‘I’ve got to put it there. Just put it there,’” Smith told reporters after the USWNT’s statement win over Germany. “It was a good feeling. I know I had a few other chances in this game that I should have put away. But sometimes one is all it takes.”
Getty ImagesFlash back to the 2023 World Cup, missing that penalty kick was a crucial moment in Smith’s career. She told the Women’s Game that in the months after that she learned “a lot about myself.” On Tuesday, Smith more than proved that she had put last summer’s World Cup behind her.
Next Match
While the team has been adamant that they aren’t thinking about last year's forgettable exit, and that they’ve put the past where it belongs, the fact that such a crucial moment came on the anniversary of another cannot be understated. Nor can it be that this team appears to be digging deeper.
There’s no quit, particularly amongst the front three which includes Smith, Mallory Swanson and Trinity Rodman. Together, the trio has accounted for 10 of the team’s 11 goals in this tournament. And perhaps that World Cup disappointment has lent itself to the determination that we’ve seen out of players such as Smith.
The things learned in moments of anguish seemed to have turned into moments of triumph later on. Some of it Smith learned as a kid growing up in Fort Collins, Colorado.
As a high schooler, she would make a three-to-four-hour daily trek to Denver for soccer practice, which often meant doing homework and eating dinner in the car. But even at that age, Smith knew that playing soccer was “what I was meant to do.” Even if it meant missing out on a lot of things that normal high schoolers tend to do.
“I didn’t want to do anything else,” she told “The Journey” in 2022. Her hard work turned into a senior national team call-up by the age of 16, and a national title with Stanford in 2019. She then went on to become the No. 1 overall pick by the Portland Thorns in 2020. By November of that year, she had earned her first international appearance with the USWNT.
Smith wasn’t named to the team’s roster at the Tokyo Olympics, which meant the 2023 World Cup was her first major international tournament. After a standout 2022 that included 11 goals in 17 national team appearances, Smith entered 2023 poised for a breakout tournament at the World Cup. In the team’s first game against Vietnam, she had a brace while also providing an assist in the 3-0 win. But those were her first two goals of the year, and she wouldn’t score again in that tournament.
Following the disappointing World Cup, Smith didn’t score again until December. She finished the year with just three goals, and looked to be lacking a bit of the same confidence that she’d carried with her a year prior. But she entered 2024 looking like a different player. She got her first three goals of the year against Canada, scoring in the W Gold Cup and the SheBelieves Cup to begin the year. Smith entered the Olympics with four goals.
"A lot of us individually have our own lessons, as a team we have lessons that we took from it," she told ESPN’s Futbol Americas, referring to the 2023 World Cup disappointment. “But me personally, I moved on from that. It's part of life. It's part of being an athlete and it was a great experience to feel those feelings look back but you don't want to feel that again and I think now it's just about looking forward. We have the Olympics coming up and not dwelling too much on the past."
So far at the Olympics, Smith has proven that the past is in the past.
And while Tuesday’s match may have come in the shadow of a bigger narrative, Smith’s game-winning goal was pure instinct.
“I don’t remember anything that just happened,” Smith told NBC after the match. “I just saw an open net in front of me and knew that I had to step up in a big moment. I feel I had to do that for this team, we’ve been working so hard and I found a way to put it away.”
Of course, the earliest exit in USWNT history at the World Cup has still been on the minds of players, particularly as a young group has continued to forge its identity.
“It means absolutely everything,” Smith said of making the Olympic final, the first for the USWNT since London 2012. “We had a hard year last year. Things didn’t go how we wanted to at all [in the World Cup]. We knew we were better than that, we know we have so much potential in this group. We’re a young group but we can be so good and we showed that and we’ve been showing that every single game.”
According to Smith, the team entered the tournament with a chip on its shoulder. And they’ve continued to chip away as the Olympics have progressed, showing the world they are true contenders. They just look a little different than years past.
Smith, for her part, has shown that she’s still the threat for opposing defenses. And she's particularly motivated to perform against Brazil in Saturday's in the Gold Medal match.
Why? Because it’s her birthday. And what better way to celebrate than with a gold medal?