Twila Kilgore has known she wanted to be a soccer coach since she was a talented youth player in Southern California, being driven to practice via carpool by her coach, Hugh Donald.
“I had this incredible experience where at a young age when I was playing, I got to see the impact the coach could have on somebody's life because I spent so much time with him,” Kilgore said. “He'd be taking care of coaching business on those car rides, too. So I always knew when I was done playing, I would want to be a coach and just kind of give to other people what he gave to me.”
Kilgore also credits another coach she worked with in her youth, Guigui Fereira, for sparking an interest in coaching at a young age. While she couldn’t pinpoint an exact thing either coach said to her that stuck with her, their overall way of coaching the person and the player was something she still remembers.
“I think it was just the consistency of the positive impact,” Kilgore said. “It's in the simple everyday things that add up, just somebody's consistent, positive presence and what that can offer young people, not just as they acquire skills in sport, but as they go through life’s ups and downs.”
Kilgore finished her record-setting college career at the University of Arizona in 2001. For the next three seasons, she played semi-professionally with the Arizona Heatwave of the USL W-League. But by 2004, a path to full-time professional soccer was gone. The Women’s United Soccer Association, the first ever full-time women’s professional soccer league, had folded after the 2003 season and the next full-time women’s professional soccer league wouldn’t appear until Women’s Professional Soccer kicked off in 2009.
“It was pretty clear that if I wanted to [get into coaching] now was the time,” Kilgore said.
Kilgore started in the college ranks as an assistant at Northern Arizona and then was an assistant and associate head coach at Pepperdine before spending time as a head coach with W-League side Los Angeles Legends and the University of California, Davis. In 2019, she joined NWSL side Houston Dash as an assistant coach, before becoming an assistant coach with the USWNT in 2022.
But just before she was officially brought in as an assistant with U.S. Soccer, Kilgore acquired some valuable experience at the international level. While still an assistant in Houston, she was brought in to run the U.S. Under-23 Women’s Youth National Team camp at the start of 2022. As a self-described over-preparer, Kilgore immediately got to work preparing for this opportunity of leading a youth national team for training camp. Then, she learned who her opponent in that camp would be late in her preparation.
The full U.S. Women’s National Team.
“I got to camp, and as prepared as I was to coach the 23s and take them through a series of things I wanted to teach them, I quickly realized that they needed something different than what I had prepared for in order to be their best,” Kilgore said. “It was just a really good lesson in putting the people first and meeting them where they were at. Putting our plans aside and making some adjustments. And it ended up being one of the most rewarding and best experiences I've ever had being with that 23 team.”
Being flexible and making adjustments would become the central theme of a major challenge – but also opportunity -- that came her way in the fall of 2023: being the interim head coach for the USWNT.
Following Vlatko Andonovski’s resignation after the 2023 Women’s World Cup, Kilgore received a call from U.S. Soccer Sporting Director Matt Crocker asking if she would be willing to take over as the interim coach. She says she asked for some time to think about it and then discussed the opportunity with her husband.
As incredible as the opportunity was, she didn’t want to take it unless she believed she was the right person for the job.
“I knew that this was a team that was really humble and ready to take some time and to take steps and make sure that we were continuing to move forward,” Kilgore said. “To really look in the mirror and be open to discussing the things that we're really proud of and want to keep, and the things that we know we need to change and evolve. They were in the right place, and I was the right person.”
Once she officially took the helm, Kilgore said she started to feel the weight that came with sitting in the head coach seat for the world’s most decorated women’s national team. But like with her time with the U23s, or the time she spent as a youth watching her own coaches make sacrifices, she settled into a familiar philosophy to deal with the pressure.
“I chose to focus on serving the players and that really helped me stay focused on what the most important things were,” Kilgore said.
For Kilgore, while working remotely with head coach-in-waiting Emma Hayes, the important thing was shepherding the National Team through a transition from one era of players to the next while maintaining the high standards of the program.
Kilgore had debriefs with the players to talk about what everyone believed needed to be changed. Once expectations were established, the players and coaches kept coming back to them to hold themselves accountable and to get better.
“This group just did a really good job every time we played,” Kilgore said. “Regardless of whether it was a first-capped player or a veteran, they were honestly reflecting and earnestly trying to improve on the next performance without worrying about what the world was thinking while we were going through the transition.”
As the interim coach, Kilgore was in charge of the send-off matches for legends Megan Rapinoe and Julie Ertz and also gave first caps to M.A. Vignola, Mia Fishel, Olivia Moultrie, Jaedyn Shaw, Korbin Albertand Jenna Nighswonger, the latter three of whom would end up making the 2024 Olympic Team.
Through this transition, she led the team to two trophies, the 2024 Concacaf W Gold Cup and the 2024 SheBelieves Cup, as the National Team began its buildup toward the 2024 Paris Olympics.
Of course, the USA would go on to make history, winning the gold medal in just the 10th match in charge for Hayes, four friendlies and the six Olympic matches.
Kilgore quickly acknowledges the work everyone did during that period.
“I'm just so proud of the whole delegation”, Kilgore said. “One thing you realize when you sit in this type of seat: it takes everybody. You're not a leader if nobody's following you.”
And despite Kilgore and her staff knowing that more changes would come once Hayes arrived full-time, she says she’s most proud of how everyone brought about their own change “in a way that kind of was joyful and met everybody's needs and moved the program forward.”
Now as Kilgore departs U.S. Soccer to pursue other coaching opportunities, she thinks back to her role as interim head coach, and it always takes her to the staff and the players. As difficult as the transition was from the post-2023 World Cup to the 2024 Olympics, it was still just a coach working in service of those around her.
“And then they won gold,” Kilgore said. “But there's so much more than that. I hope they look back on that past year for the rest of their careers and see certain moments in their journey during that they will lean on in the future.”
“And I'm just so proud of that.”