Five months before the World Cup, the USWNT is gambling at a key position

Taylor Kornieck isn't naturally a defensive midfielder. But she's being shoehorned into the role as an experiment to find the heirs to Sam Mewis and Julie Ertz.

Taylor Kornieck (center) runs in a drill during a U.S. women's national soccer team practice in Orlando this past Saturday.Read moreJonathan Tannenwald / Staff

by Jonathan Tannenwald

Published Feb. 13, 2023, 3:11 p.m. ET

ORLANDO — When Taylor Kornieck is in action, she’s hard to miss. The 6-foot-1, 24-year-old midfielder is the tallest field player in U.S. women’s soccer team history, and even relative to goalkeepers she’s tied with record-holder Casey Murphy.

If you watched the Americans’ games in New Zealand last month, you likely noticed her. Certainly when she scored a goal off a corner kick so easily that she barely had to jump. It was Kornieck’s second national team goal, after a header of a free kick in her national team debut last summer.

But you might have noticed her for less positive reasons, too. With Sam Mewis and Julie Ertz out of contention for the World Cup, U.S. manager Vlatko Andonovski tried to shoehorn Kornieck into a more defensive role than she usually plays.

If you only looked at the shutout scorelines, you might think the experiment succeeded. But the play on the field showed otherwise. And if world No. 24-ranked New Zealand was able to get down the middle of the park as easily as it did, the SheBelieves Cup that starts this week could be even tougher: star-studded Canada (No. 6), Brazil (No. 9), and Japan (No. 11).

The Kornieck experiment is happening mainly because while starting defensive midfielder Andi Sullivan is a very good player, she hasn’t been able to patrol that part of the field solo in the way Ertz did.

Granted, the bar set by Ertz could end up Hall-of-Fame level high. But it took a historic three-game U.S. losing streak last fall for Andonovski to tweak his preferred midfield triangle, pulling Lindsey Horan deeper to play next to Sullivan instead of in front of her.

It may not have been a coincidence that when Andonovski did that in the 2022 finale against Germany, the U.S. came back from 1-0 down to win 2-1. And there’s no shame in wanting to build depth at any position, which Kornieck would be. No one’s assuming she’d be a starter, just a depth piece who could be a big-time weapon for crucial late-game set pieces.

Still, experimenting with a position this key five months before the World Cup is a gamble.

Even more so when someone who plays defensive midfield more naturally, Sam Coffey, wasn’t named to the SheBelieves Cup squad, after spending the last three U.S. games on the bench.

After the tournament ends, the Americans will have just three more games before the World Cup kicks off — two in April and one in early July ahead of leaving for New Zealand.

To Kornieck’s credit, she wants to learn the new job. She knows it could be her ticket to the World Cup later this year, and when that’s the prize, many players would do what it takes. Just ask Crystal Dunn, a left back who used to be a winger (and could be again). Or Sofia Huerta, a right back who used to be an attacking midfielder.

“Yeah, it’s pretty different — it’s my first time kind of playing there, but I’m learning from the best,” Kornieck said in a news conference earlier this month, praising Andonovski and Sullivan for their teaching. “It’s pretty nerve wracking, but I’m taking it day by day and I feel like I’m progressing really well.

Asked how specific the instructions have been, Kornieck answered: “Very specific.”

If such honesty was appreciated by the listening media, it also raised enough eyebrows across the Zoom screen’s grid to draw a winning bingo card.

“I’m really used to getting forward and getting into boxes as play [goes] further up the field,” Kornieck said. “I think the [defensive] positioning itself is just a really difficult task, as in any position … I think holding back and making sure that I don’t get ahead of myself — I need to obviously protect the back line, and that’s the most important role.”

A moment later, she called the defensive positioning “a big task to learn.”

The bingo-callers played another round with that line.

No one’s saying Kornieck can’t learn the position. The bigger scrutiny is on Andonovski for his gamble, and he made it clear when he announced the SheBelieves Cup roster that he’d keep at it.

“We’ve tried different names, different players, in these positions,” he said. “And we’re going to continue to try in this camp until we solidify the players that we believe will give us the best chance to be successful.”

Notably, there’s one combination we’ve barely seen that could prove a winner. In Kornieck’s nine U.S. games so far, she and Sullivan have been on the field at the same time just once: when Kornieck was a 92nd-minute substitute in last July’s Concacaf women’s championship final. On five occasions, Kornieck entered a game at the same time Sullivan left.

“I know we’re going to try different things,” Andonovski said of the SheBelieves Cup, “and test different combination of players.”

The balls get rolling Thursday night against Canada at Exploria Stadium (7:30 p.m., Universo, HBO Max, Peacock). We’ll see if there’s a Sullivan-Kornieck combo, or anything else that gets people up and shouting.