Coaching a women’s youth national team in the United States brings some special challenges with it.

Along with the normal pressures of selecting a team, building a winning squad and meeting high expectations at the international level, U20 WNT coach Jillian Ellis has to navigate choppy scheduling waters, mixing and matching various rosters as the team gets together only intermittently due to college academic commitments.

Ellis recognizes there is a two-edged aspect to this, but chooses to embrace the positives as the team looks to defend the title won by Tony DiCicco’s squad in Chile at the 2009 event. The team just won the CONCACAF Qualifying Tournament in Guatemala to advance to the main event, to be played in Germany this July.

“I have two main goals in the next three events, one is to evaluate potentially a few more players and the other is to give our players as much experience as I can in playing together against international competition,” Elllis said. “That can be tough to do when we go on international trips because we only take 18 players. It’s also true that of the group I took to Guatemala, over the next five months not everyone will able to attend every event we have, so this will present some opportunities for other players to step up, the way Morgan Marlborough and Kendall Johnson did.”

Marlborough a striker from Nebraska, and Johnson, a fullback from Portland, did not have a lot of youth national team experience but made the roster with their fine play at the team’s final pre-tournament camp in Florida in early January.

Among the players getting an additional look will be Auburn offensive wiz Katy Frierson, along with a couple of players who missed out on Guatemala due to injuries and a couple of completely new faces to the mix (Ellis wasn’t revealing names just yet).

“I know when we go to Spain for instance, some of the players won’t be able to come along because of their academic commitments,” Ellis said. “Others will have to miss some of the later events. That’s a good thing in allowing us to look at other players, but at some point we want to nail down our rosters and start preparing as a single entity.”

Ellis spoke about how quickly this team jelled for the CONCACAF event, which might seem surprising given that most of the players were trying to tear each other’s proverbial hearts out in the college soccer wars through the fall. Ellis’ UCLA Bruins were even bounced out of the College Cup semifinal by the Stanford Cardinal of two team standouts, fullback Rachel Quon and attacking midfielder Teresa Noyola, just a month and a half before the group, also including UCLA forwards Sydney Leroux and Zakiya Bywaters, joined forces so cohesively to win the international event.

All parties insisted on switching gears and being on the same page was no problem.

“When we got to camp and all these tournaments, we are only there to represent the U.S.,” Quon said. “All of that other part is left behind.”

“We all know this is a whole different situation,” Noyola added. “We all kind of joked about the Final 4. One time Amber Brooks (North Carolina player), I gave her an unintentional whack in the face, and she got on my case for that. It was all in good fun for sure. There was no awkwardness or tension with any of us.”

Quon credited Ellis in part for that spirit.

“We all just click on the soccer field,” she said. “Jill wanted us to come together and she helped us work as a unit for the single goal of winning.”

“Playing as a team like that where we have to get the win and qualify really helps too,” Noyola said. “We hadn’t been challenged like that before and I think it really bonded us together.”

The team will get together approximately once a month between now and the U20 World Cup. Next up is a U23 event in La Manga, Spain, followed by domestic camps in March (Florida), April and May (both in California) and a trip to Germany in June for international matches with Germany and Japan. An international opponent might be recruited for one of the domestic camps, while the March event will feature matches against WPS opponents Atlanta and Boston.

Along with looking at the overall 20-player squad, Ellis and her staff will be trying to cement the players’ understanding of her attractive, attacking system, and settle on some specific lineups.

“What I really liked about this group is that they always came out and tried to play,” she said. “You want to bring out the best attributes of a player like Kristen Mewis. With Tiffany (McCarty) and Zakiya (Bywaters) we’re focusing on finding a partner up top for Syd (Leroux). So we’re still working through some things and we need to emphasize keeping the ball and moving well off the ball. I was exceptionally pleased with the play of the back line.”