Arizona Wildcat soccer alum Twila Kilgore's coaching dream continues as Olympic assistant.

While so many little girls dream of playing soccer on a global stage like the Olympic games, former Arizona Wildcat Twila Kilgore’s dream was a little different.

From early on, Kilgore knew she wanted to coach. Her role models weren’t so much soccer players as they were coaches — including a club coach who drove her to practices.

Today, she’s doing just that — and at one of the highest levels in the world. She’s an assistant coach on the US Women’s National Team, which begins competition this week at the 2024 Paris Olympic Games.

A Wildcat from 1998 to 2001, the former UA midfielder/forward grew up in a time with no fully professional women’s soccer league in the United States. The WUSA, which was founded in 2000, was short-lived. It last just three seasons before folding by the time Kilgore graduated from Arizona in 2003. Opportunities overseas were just as scarce; they didn’t pay well, either. The NWSL didn’t come along until well after Kilgore had stopped playing the sport.

But Kilgore realized early on she wanted to always be involved in soccer and specifically “give back and help others,” she said.

“Growing up on our block we would pretend to do the Olympics,” Kilgore said. “We’d have all sorts of different competitions just as kids fooling around. Like most Americans, it’s the premier event that you’re thinking of playing in, probably when you first start thinking about it. I knew that I wanted to coach at a very young age, so it’s pretty special for me to be able to coach in the Olympics.”

The USWNT plays Zambia in Nice, France, in the first round Thursday at noon Tucson time on USA Network; the match can also be streamed on Peacock.

Many of the soccer matches for the Paris Olympics will not be held in Paris itself, but elsewhere in France. Some qualifying matches and the eventual championship round are in Paris, though.

For 10 months, Kilgore served as the interim head coach of the U.S. team — after Vlatko Andonovski stepped down and before current coach Emma Hayes started in May.

During that time, the U.S., which struggled in last summer’s FIFA World Cup by losing in the Round of 16, won the Gold Cup. It wasn’t entirely smooth sailing, though, as the American team lost to Mexico and needed penalty kicks to outlast Canada in the semifinals before winning the Cup. Kilgore bridged the gap during this transition period before Hayes, the new coach took over.

Kilgore made a choice to “be my authentic self and I wanted to choose the next right things,” she said.

“I didn’t want to make wholesale changes, because we knew a next head coach was coming in,” Kilgore added. “I wanted to pick the right next steps, one right after the other, and I wanted to enjoy it. This is a game and players sign up to play because it’s fun. Those were my goals.”

Kilgore climbed the coaching ranks quickly as an assistant, becoming associate head coach at Pepperdine from 2004-2013. She was then head coach at UC-Davis from 2014-2019 and an assistant for the USWL’s Houston Dash from 2019-2022.

In 2003, she started coaching in the Region IV (West) Girls’ Olympic Development Program and in 2019, she joined U.S. Soccer’s coaching staff.

Along the way she became the first American-born woman — only the third woman globally — to earn U.S. Soccer’s Pro Coaching License.

A number of players on the current Olympic team were coached at various levels by Kilgore, including Lynn Williams, who was at Pepperdine, and Jaedyn Shaw. Kilgore said she “enjoys watching people learn and grow and push some boundaries they didn’t know they had.”

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Kilgore has also been part teaching and coaching the USWNT’s new guard — the generation of soccer players taking the historically dominant U.S. program into its next phase.

“Something that’s a common thread throughout the history of the U.S. National Team is that this is a group that understands they represent a massive country — that it’s such a privilege to wear this crest. We say it can be a heavy crust, but it’s also like a joyful crust,” Kilgore said. “Jaedyn described it as a super cape — just what it means when you put on this jersey. This is a team that always looks to find a way, and it’s also always evolving.

“One of the things we talked a lot about during the interim period was being proud of who we are, but also proud of who we’re becoming. I think this team’s got a really good mix of this history of grit and hard work and understanding what it takes to win and being willing to find a way. Also, this mix of wanting to evolve, wanting to grow, wanting to pivot. That’s how you stay relevant.”

Always looking ahead

Kilgore said she was always planning ahead for her future. She worked camps in the summers and selected Arizona specifically to be taught by former Arizona coaches Lisa Fraser and Bruce Caris. Kilgore, who was a four-year starter, is still in the UA record books as Twila Kaufman. She is tied for sixth in career games started (72), was Arizona’s Rookie of the Year in 1998 and was twice named to the All-Pac-10 academic team.

Kilgore also worked with Jeff Janssen, a sports leadership expert, while she was a Wildcat, and he recognized her skills in that area right away.

“He threw a little gas on a little fire I had going,” she said.

She also moonlighted during her years in Tucson as a junior varsity ‘B’ coach for girls’ freshman soccer at Salpointe Catholic High School.

One of her former players, Kathleen Kelley, said that Kilgore inspired her and encouraged her. So much so that Kelley, a goalkeeper, still plays soccer today — for two teams in Tucson’s women’s soccer league.

This is exactly what Kilgore had in mind when she set her mind to go into coaching — to have a lasting impact on young women. She’s still doing that, just now at the elite level.

As she thinks back to that little girl who longed to be on this stage one day — coaching the USWNT in the Olympics — “You were right to dream big dreams,” she would tell her younger self.

“Some of those dreams that didn’t come true were still so good, because you were able to use them as fuel to get where you are now,” Kilgore added of what she’d say if she had the chance. “Nothing is wasted, not a single thing, and enjoy it and compete like nobody’s watching.”

Kilgore admits she thinks of that often, but “it’s the first time I’ve ever said it,” she said.

“But you hear that term, ‘dance like nobody’s watching.’ I think just having the freedom to be yourself in your role is so important, and to not worry and just be you, be prepared and enjoy it.”