CNN
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Teenage sensation and highschool scholar Alyssa Thompson was chosen with the No. 1 total choose of the Nationwide Girls’s Soccer League (NWSL) Draft on Thursday.
Thompson was picked by Angel Metropolis FC, who later described the 18-year-old as a “phenom and generational participant.”
“She’s a participant who could make a right away influence, however she’s additionally younger and may develop and look to be a participant that we’re constructing a future off of, too,” common supervisor Angela Hucles Mangano mentioned in a press release on the workforce’s web site.
Thompson, who remains to be a senior at Harvard-Westlake in Los Angeles, grew to become the primary participant ever picked immediately out of highschool, having forgone her school eligibility and declaring for the draft final week.
“This was the toughest choice that I’ve ever needed to make in my life,” Thompson mentioned of selecting to enter the draft. “There have been so many again and forths about it, however ultimately, I made a decision that it was the most effective for me.”
Thompson – who additionally specialised within the 100 meters throughout highschool – has been a extremely touted prospect for years, along with her talents on the sector evident from an early age.
In 2020, she and her youthful sister, Gisele, moved to play for the Whole Futbol Academy, a boys’ membership within the Main League Soccer’s academy system, MLS NEXT.
Thompson credit this transfer as serving to her get to the place she is now, particularly by way of getting used to the physicality.
“The boys’ sport, it’s super-fast and so they’re tremendous bodily as properly,” she defined. “You will have to have the ability to play the ball rapidly off one contact and go precisely as a result of, when you take one unhealthy contact, they’re on you and also you’ve already misplaced the ball.”
In 2021, she was named the 2021 Excessive College Soccer Participant of the Yr after scoring 48 targets in 18 video games with Harvard-Westlake College.
Final yr, the then-17-year-old Thompson made her debut for the US Girls’s Nationwide Staff, approaching instead in video games towards 2021 European champion England and Spain.
She now joins a few of her USWNT compatriots, comparable to Christen Press and Sydney Leroux, at Angel Metropolis.
Thompson’s choice by Angel Metropolis may very well be the proper setting for the LA native as she’ll be taking part in dwelling video games in her hometown. She even spent a while coaching with the workforce final preseason.
“With the ability to play in entrance of my household and mates is one thing that’s actually essential to me,” she mentioned. “LA is simply such an incredible place, with completely different cultures and completely different individuals.”
Angel Metropolis is a majority woman-founded workforce which made its NWSL debut final season. The investor group is led by Oscar-winning actress Natalie Portman, expertise enterprise capitalist Kara Nortman, media and gaming entrepreneur Julie Uhrman and Alexis Ohanian, Serena Williams’ husband and the co-founder of Reddit.
The Kansas Metropolis Present picked Duke ahead Michelle Cooper with the second choose of the draft.