"Smile. That's When You Play Best."
- Jason Longshore
- May 29
- 4 min read
Inside the USMNT's most underrated preparation strategy: protecting their joy
Alex Zendejas was in San Antonio with his family when the World Cup roster notification came through. He was not with his dad in that moment, but they met up a few minutes later. When they hugged, Zendejas could feel his father shaking, and then tearing up. His dad almost never cries. So when he does, Zendejas said, you know it means something. And that made Zendejas tear up too.
It is a small story. But it captures something large about this group of players and the way they are approaching the biggest tournament of their lives.
The 2026 USMNT is not just a talented team. It is, by its own testimony, a team that has learned to treat happiness as something worth working for. Not as a reward that comes after success. As a condition that makes success possible.
Ask Zendejas what kind of player he is when he is feeling good and he does not hesitate. "I'm the type of guy that when he's happy, he performs better," he said this week at the team's training base in Fayetteville, GA. His teammates at Club América figured that out before he did. During a stretch this past season when injuries and a difficult tactical fit left him withdrawn and serious, they pulled him aside. They told him they needed his smile back. Not because it made the locker room nicer. Because it made him dangerous.
That framing, joy as a performance variable rather than a personality trait, runs through the entire squad.
Matt Freese has spent much of the last year competing with Matt Turner for the starting goalkeeper position. It is one of the only genuine roster debates the USMNT has heading into the tournament, and the scrutiny around it is real. When Freese was asked about Turner starting against Belgium in March, he redirected almost immediately. He talked about how his confidence is built not on the decisions made around him but on 25 years of hard work. He travels with his own tea kettle and his own alarm clock so that he can replicate his exact home routine on the road. The point is not superstition. The point is that if the small moments feel familiar, the large ones do not have the power to destabilize him.
"It's difficult not to feel confident," Freese said, "when you're wearing the U.S. crest on your chest."
Gio Reyna arrived in Atlanta carrying a heavier public narrative than almost anyone on the roster. The 2022 World Cup. The scrutiny. Four years of questions he has now clearly grown tired of answering. He said this week that he is genuinely confused when the topic still comes up, that he barely thinks about it, that he is simply too far removed from it to feel its weight anymore.
Whether you take that entirely at face value or not, what came through clearly was his eagerness to just play. To get the soccer going after the New York media circus. To be with his teammates on a training field in the Georgia heat and feel normal again.
"The high will carry on with us until the tournament's over," he said, when asked whether the excitement of making the roster could survive the grind of preparation camp. He meant it straightforwardly. But it also points to something the whole group seems to share: a conscious effort not to let the weight of the moment crush the thing that got them here.
Alex Freeman is 21 years old and the youngest player on the roster. He came through the Orlando City academy pathway, three years of development and patience before getting the late-season starts with Villarreal in La Liga that prepared him for what lies ahead this summer. When he got the call, he was in Spain with his father, legendary NFL wide receiver Antonio Freeman. He described it as a full circle moment, then immediately reframed it as a beginning.
That reframe matters. Freeman is not naive about the size of the stage. He is choosing to meet it with gratitude rather than anxiety. He talked about the New York roster presentation, the team gathered together for the first time, able to celebrate not just with each other but with the fans, as the moment it truly felt real. Not the WhatsApp notification. The collective joy.
He is learning positioning and ball distribution from veteran Tim Ream, studying his calm authority on the left side. But what he seems to be absorbing most is something harder to coach: how to be present in a big moment without being consumed by it.
None of this is to suggest the USMNT is a team without pressure. They are hosting a World Cup on home soil. The expectations are enormous, the history complicated, and the group stage matchups unforgiving. Every player in that camp knows what is at stake.
But there is a difference between a team that knows the stakes and a team that is strangled by them. What these four players described, each in their own language, is a group that has done the interior work to stay loose.
The best teams at major tournaments are rarely the ones that arrived most burdened by expectation. They are the ones that found a way to play free.
A home World Cup only comes around once, if it comes at all. These players know that. What is striking is that the knowledge does not seem to be crushing them. It seems to be lifting them. Freeman leaning on gratitude and process. Freese grounding himself in routine and the simple dignity of hard work. Reyna impatient to stop talking about the past and start making a new story. Zendejas using his father's tears as fuel rather than pressure.
Everything these players have said this week in Fayetteville suggests they have made a choice. Joy is not what comes after the work. It is the work.
Comments