How Ashley Sanchez found the joy in soccer again, thrived in a new position and got back into USWNT picture

When you have a career year and match a single-season goal-scoring record of 20 goals in NWSL, the spotlight brightens quickly. Your skills end up in more social media clips, you earn more league recognition, and you gain overall honors. You also get way more media requests. 

North Carolina Courage forward Ashley Sanchez is having a personal-best season. Drafted in 2020, she's playing a new position as a winger and has become the first American player to score 20 goals in the NWSL regular season. While she still has a handful of games to set an even more impressive record, she found time for an interview with CBS Sports after a club training session while on her way home with a teammate in the car.

"I'm here with Ryan [Williams] too in the car, so don't say anything bad about her," she joked. 

For Sanchez, navigating the brighter spotlight means blocking most of it out altogether. She's on the verge of breaking a league goal-scoring record, recently engaged, and now back in national team camps for the first time since January 2025.

"I mean, definitely, [more attention] is a little bit different, but I think I just try not to care too much about outside noise or opinions, and just try to, like, control myself and the product that I have on the field. I think also part of it is, I feel like I have done a lot more than maybe I thought I was gonna do. So, now it's just all this other stuff is just kind of extra," she explained about the increased attention.

"I feel like I just keep setting the bar for myself, but a lot of that is definitely not listening to other people and their opinions and just not getting too high about all this extra stuff. We still have so many games left and so much more to do. So yeah, I guess I don't want to say I don't care, but I kind of guess I just don't care too much."

Finding the joy in soccer once again

Sanchez's previous career highs were back-to-back five-goal seasons -- her final year with the Washington Spirit in 2023, and her first season with North Carolina after being traded there in 2024. Her efforts in earlier seasons with the Spirit earned her more national team call-ups, where she was considered among the "next gen" core of players, and she even made the 2023 World Cup roster with the U.S. national team, though Sanchez was one of three players who didn't get to play a single minute in the tournament. 

The disappointment took some of the joy out of the sport for her, and with a new head coach and a smaller roster for the Olympics, she ultimately missed the gold medal run at the 2024 Summer Olympics. Then 2025 presented a new career low: two goals over 23 appearances and a season where staff and players couldn't find the chemistry with each other. She shifted her personal goals ahead of her 2026 club season to just find the joy again, have fun, and be a good teammate.

"The last couple years, I haven't had as much fun playing, and I felt like this year it definitely just took a turn, and I felt like I was really enjoying myself on and off the field, and just cherishing every moment. Going into a more of a leadership role. I mean, we have so many young players on there on my team, and I just feel like wanting to help them in any way that I can and be a good example of a leader and just a veteran on the team," Sanchez said.

The small, personal changes helped make her strides in 2026 all the more obvious. The 20 goals are no fluke. They're a combination of internal work and the product of a positional switch with deliberate individual planning for the player.

North Carolina Courage head coach Mak Lind is in year one with the club. He joined from BK Hacken, where he turned the team into annual UEFA Women's Champions League participants, and he was tasked with defining a style of play and getting the team back to sustainable success.

"Yeah, I mean, before I even signed my contract with the Courage, you could see a player in Ashley Sanchez being an incredible player with her attributes. I think this season she has found couple of keys in her game, which makes her so dangerous offensively. It is not a coincidence that she keeps scoring goals that are very important for us. She has to thank herself because she's an incredible player with attributes. We just helped her with a couple of keys and how to unlock that potential. That potential has already been there before, so I'm very happy for her. I'm proud of her," said Lind.

Positional switch that unlocked potential

There's a leap of faith and a layer of trust that's needed when approaching a switch in position. Part of Lind's eagerness to take the head coaching role with the Courage was the chance to coach in NWSL and work with a player like Sanchez. It was an immediate no-brainer for the coach to chat with his future player about his longer-term vision for her. His first priority was getting Sanchez into a role where she would thrive. 

"That was, for me, very clear. The first week already, when I was here. We talked about her position, and for me, Ashley Sanchez is a winger, and especially on the left-hand side, she shows again how good she can be. At the same time, she is so skilled that I think she can play in different positions," said Lind.

"But I think if you want to get the most out of Ashley Sanchez, you play her in a wing position where she has the freedom of playing wide, she has the freedom of inverting in pocket positioning, and be dangerous there. So, I'm very happy for her, and her performances in the season have been very consistent and helped us win games and score many goals," he said.

For Sanchez, it was a fairly easy conversation to have with Lind considering her light-hearted, no-pressure approach to this season. 

"Going into a new position this year, the goals that I had for myself were definitely more attacking-minded than maybe I did in the past. Just more like end-product assists and goals, and I didn't really have a number, but I definitely surpassed what I thought that number would be for sure," Sanchez said on her positional switch.

"Definitely feels pretty natural. As soon as preseason started, I pretty much went into that role, but I definitely think it's good for the qualities that I have as a player, and I think it just puts me in really good positions and being closer to goal and still being able to play make. Going into more one-on-one situations, which I definitely think is a strength of mine, but it's been really fun. I feel like I still have a lot more to learn, but definitely happy with the position I've been playing this year," she said.

The winger also credits her life off the pitch for keeping her grounded. Whether leaning on her faith, support from her fiancé Thomas Williamson, or their new dog Benny, they're all things that have aligned for Sanchez and helped with her success on the pitch this year.

"Having a good support system and home life makes it a lot easier to just have this job. But I also think a lot of it just comes with maybe me having just peace outside of soccer, and something else like an outlet. So I'm not as taken over by soccer and just all-consuming," she explained.

"It's nice to have the support, and my fiancé played soccer, so he understands, and it's nice being able to go over games, and someone who just understands what I'm doing and giving me pointers and stuff, but I definitely feel like I'm just really happy off the field, which also helps translate on the field."

It's also the leadership aspect that's changed for Sanchez. Once considered among the next wave of stars for the league, with future international potential, and drafted in 2020 alongside Sophia Wilson and in close proximity to Trinity Rodman (2021), and Naomi Girma (2022), Sanchez is now in her seventh year as an NWSL pro. 

While she's always open to being coached up, she's no longer the 20-year-old who left college early to play in the big leagues. Her maturity is a noticeable change for her and her teammates, and they're celebrating her success.

"It's been really, really fun to see. Obviously, we're really close friends, so I'm just really happy for Ash. I'm not surprised by it, just based off of what we get to see every day in training," said Williams.

"She works so hard, she puts in the work, she really pays her dues in a way where she does all these things in training, and everybody else gets to see like a really small portion of that in games. So it's just really nice to see that she's getting rewarded in games with so many goals and assists and breaking records and all these things. So we're really happy for her, and yeah, I'm not surprised by it."

Career year leads back to USWNT camps

With her club form finally taking off, it revived a familiar conversation about her inclusion around the national team. While she didn't play in the 2023 World Cup, senior caps also became scarcer between coaches, with her last cap in October 2024 -- after Hayes and the team won Olympic gold and she has mostly been outside of the larger pool of players ever since. Sanchez's last senior-level call-up under Emma Hayes was in January 2025. 

Sanchez's run of goal scoring started early this year; by June she had seven goals, but things like timing, schedules, and opportunities rarely align, and with one fewer international window this year due to the 2026 FIFA men's World Cup, there was a question whether or not a call-up would pan out for Sanchez.

Especially in the larger ecosystem that Hayes and her staff are developing for the program with U.S. Soccer. Previously, Hayes has said in media settings that she wants players to make decisions hard for her, and that for some players, it can take, on average, roughly six camps to truly get acclimated to the environment. But even for Hayes, what Sanchez is doing for club cannot be ignored, and while there are some overage players in the U23 camps, that's not where she wants to see Sanchez performing for now.

"We always think, of course, we want to get closer to the team that's going to play for us in qualifiers -- and it might not be those that are coming into their first ever cap with us, but it's a great moment to bring them in and see how well they have learned from the U23s," Hayes told CBS Sports.

"I think you know me well enough to know now, there's going to be minimal changes between game one and game two [against Spain], so there can be players that have not played, but they get the chance to. We get the chance to see how they can cope without the pressure of that. Our job is qualifying, but at the same time, if you want to win [future tournaments], there might be a player that enters into that,"  she said.

The USWNT manager is full steam ahead on preparing for World Cup qualifiers in November, with an eye on the 2027 FIFA Women's World Cup, but she's also thinking longer term. Developing players, utilizing the revamped U23 program as an extension of the player pool, so that longer-term planning for future competitions seems more natural. In Sanchez's case, with one less international window, the timing is now, even if Spain are clearly the USWNT's biggest test of the year. 

If the June window wasn't in the plans for a then seven-goals-scored Sanchez, the only real chance is now. Perhaps that's a little unfair, but with a league-record amount of goals, and only one window before qualifiers, and just three next year before the 2027 World Cup, time is running out for the coaching staff to see what Sanchez can bring to the squad, whether or not there are six camp windows available for a player to get re-acclimated.

"You have to think of it like that. It's too long [in between windows] if we say, 'Oh, we've already made it, didn't think Ashley Sanchez was part of our plan, stick with the group that we've been building towards it.' When's the next moment she's going to get it? November? No, we wouldn't do it then because we're going to qualify. January is pre-season. What are we going to see? Are we going to do it in February? She's still in pre-season. Is she going to [play] up? Okay, so we wait till April?" Hayes explained.

"So yes, changes have to happen sometimes. It's not because we're going to always experiment with the team and the lineup, but sometimes it's to give someone a look to say, 'do we actually think player X is further ahead than the player who might have gone to U23?' Yes or no? Let's have a look now, because I know what Jaedyn Shaw looks like, I know what Ally Sentnor looks like, for example."

While Hayes isn't outright revealing her starters for the games already, she's told reporters that no first-time camp players will start against Spain, though they should be prepared for minutes if their name is called. Sanchez fits into a unique scenario in that it's been nearly two years since her last appearance in a senior jersey, and now her next one could come against the world's No. 1-ranked team. 

While Sanchez is making the decisions harder for coaches and defenders on the pitch, the road she's traveled to return to the top of her game hasn't been easy. A welcome back to national team camps should be viewed as more than well-earned. For Sanchez, she's keeping things level and not letting other things define success after working through lows to get back to joy on the pitch.

"I think there's like a lot of things. I feel like there's a lot of people that go through, maybe what I've kind of been through, where I'm just kind of in a little bit of -- like not a slump, but you know, tough things are happening," said Sanchez.

"I think like just having the mindset of taking control of what I can and just like making sure I'm not giving up or throwing in the towel. I think a lot of times when hard things happen, we can kind of become a victim, and I really tried to just push through, and I felt like I knew that I was going to get rewarded at the end of the day, and I just kept my faith in that, and at the end of the day, that's all you can do."