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AUCKLAND, New Zealand — Naomi Girma can’t help herself.
She watches a lot of soccer. Like, a lot a lot. No surprise, given it’s both her job and her passion. But try as she might, she can’t just “watch” a game. She finds herself breaking it down, thinking about what she would do if she was out on the field rather than on the couch.
“I watch soccer as a defender. Just thinking, ‘Oh, how would I defend that? What spaces are they leaving for me to attack into?’ I try to watch passively, but I can’t help but kind of analyze it myself,” she said Monday, laughing.
The U.S. women are happy to be the beneficiaries of Girma’s active mind. Despite making her first appearance with the USWNT just 15 months ago, she’s become indispensable to the defense, and her poise and vision make it seem as if she’s been with the team forever.
“She looked like she had three World Cups behind her,” coach Vlatko Andonovski marveled after Saturday’s World Cup opener, which Girma started and played all 90 minutes. “She was so comfortable.”
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Girma disputes that, saying she was nervous before the game began. It was her World Cup debut, after all.
Once the opening whistle blew, however, she felt a calm and confidence come over her. The setting might be the World Cup, but it’s still the same game she’s been playing since she was a little girl.
“My Mom always told me, just be yourself and have fun,” Girma said.
Girma’s parents are originally from Ethiopia – her dad fled the civil war there while her mom came to the United States for school – and her father organized a soccer club for the Ethiopian community in the San Francisco Bay Area. It was a way both to pass on his love for the game and maintain connections within the immigrant community, and Naomi began playing when she was just 5.
She was initially a midfielder but played center back when she got called up to the youth national teams. She shifted back and forth until she went to Stanford, where she was the Pac-12’s defender of the year her senior year. Two years earlier, she was a captain on the team that won the 2019 NCAA title.
“(The two positions) kind of went hand in hand and helped me develop in both,” Girma said. “I think being a midfielder helped me feel comfortable on the ball when I started playing in the back and we had to build out more.”
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Being a defender also makes the most of her very above-average intelligence.
Girma got her degree from Stanford in symbolic systems, which brings together science, artificial intelligence and psychology (among other things) for multi-faceted problem solving. She’s currently working on a master’s degree in management science and engineering.
The angles of the game, the way a play develops and the different options there are to change the course of what’s happening on the field – it’s one big puzzle to solve. And Girma does it better than most.
“I like playing defense,” said Girma, who was the NWSL’s defender of the year and rookie of the year in 2022. “I like shutting down the attack. And I like starting the attack. I think just having that responsibility back there, it’s something that I don’t take lightly and I know it’s a massive honor. Especially on this team.”
Girma got her first call-up to the USWNT for an October 2020 camp, only to tear her ACL shortly after. But that brief introduction to the national team helped motivate her during her recovery. She got her next call-up in January 2022 and has been a regular on the USWNT roster ever since.
“I had already played a full college season,” she said of that first call-up after her injury, “so I felt like myself and I felt good going into it.”
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Girma is part of the USWNT’s next generation – six players made their World Cup debuts Saturday – and she’s likely to be a cornerstone of the squad for the next decade. It’s an accomplishment for her personally but also one she knows will have ripple effects for years to come.
She is the daughter of immigrants and a woman of color. There are young girls who’ve never before seen themselves on the USWNT and now do, because of Girma.
“As an athlete, playing at the highest level is something you always dream of. So for me, it’s a dream come true,” she said. “Then for my parents, seeing their daughter play for the U.S., the country they chose, it fills them with a lot of pride. They’re so happy. We all feel so grateful.
“It wasn’t just me playing and working hard. It was them sacrificing, too, for me to get here,” Girma added. “So I think we all feel like we got here together. It makes it feel really special.”
Follow USA TODAY Sports columnist Nancy Armour on Twitter @nrarmour.
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