Ashley Sanchez ran at the left post, controlled a lofted cross, found a window between defenders and took a quick shot inside the far post, beyond the goalkeeper’s reach. It is a familiar sight for the North Carolina Courage winger, who has scored 19 goals that way and more this season. Against Gotham on Saturday, the finish looked set to be her 20th, which would have tied Temwa Chawinga’s 2024 record for the most goals in a single NWSL season.
It was not to be. As Sanchez celebrated with her teammates and fans in the WakeMed Soccer Park stands updated a handmade “Sanchez Goal-O-Meter”, the center referee was summoned to the VAR monitor and the goal was ruled out: her teammate Gianna Paul was a touch offside when the play began. No tied game, and no tied record.
“I was just happy to tie [the game] up,” Sanchez said of the moment the ball went in the net. “I honestly wasn’t really thinking about what that would mean until after, and I was like, ‘Oh, dang, I could have done it.’ It was a good goal. I was really upset that we didn’t tie the game up right then and there.”
If the 20th goal comes, it will have been worth the wait — much like Sanchez’s season. In the seventh campaign of her professional career and at 27, she is in the best form of her life and leads the NWSL’s Golden Boot race. She has already broken at least two records: the most NWSL goals scored in one season by an American, and the most goals by a Courage player in one season.
That form has not arrived without difficulty. Sanchez was on the US women’s national team’s 2023 World Cup roster but did not see a single minute of playing time in Australia and New Zealand. Five months later, after four years with the Washington Spirit, she was traded to North Carolina without warning.
She does not dwell on that turbulent period now. “I feel like I’m past that point. But when I look back at this season I’m like, ‘I guess I had to go through some tough times to get here.’ I always felt like there was a reason that I had to go through them – maybe that was character-building, or not taking things for granted,” she said. “When I look back now, I’m really happy those things happened because I have perspective now. But definitely at the time, I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.’”
The change that unlocked her, she believes, was positional. Before this year Sanchez had been an attacking midfielder and had never played on the wing professionally. She credits her coaches with helping her with “a lot of little things” — her timing, what to look for, making runs in behind defenders — but says the role itself fits what she does naturally. “It was my first time professionally playing on the wing,” she said. “So I was like, ‘Hopefully I’ll score a lot of goals, but I don’t know if I’m going to hit 20.’”
Her goal tally has come as a welcome surprise to her, but someone in Cary, North Carolina, saw it coming. Mak Lind, the Courage’s first-year head coach, told Sanchez during preseason that she would have a 20-goal season. “I was laughing,” she recalled. “He was like, ‘I don’t know why you’re laughing. I’m being serious.’” At the time she thought the prediction was “insane”. Entering this year, Crystal Dunn and Alex Morgan held the American single-season record with 15 goals in 2015 and 2022 respectively, while Chawinga and Sam Kerr were the only players to score 17. Sanchez had never scored more than five in a season. “There’s a reason that there are these records that nobody’s touched,” she said.
Lind is the seventh head coach Sanchez has played under in her seven NWSL seasons, a managerial revolving door she says can make for difficult conditions to improve — especially when coaches change midseason. That has not been the case with Lind, the Lebanese-Swedish manager in his first year in the league, who has offered stability to a team that had an abrupt head coaching change in the middle of 2025. “He’s just a really good person,” Sanchez said. “And I think when we all talk about it – he’s just so nice – we’re just like, ‘We need to protect him.’” The squad’s respect for him as a person translates into respect for him as a coach. “It’s the first time that I’ve been like, ‘Wow, I do want to win for him.’ … He puts a lot of trust and confidence in me and I want to reward how he treats his players,” she said. “He’s definitely the kindest coach I’ve ever had in my life.”
Sanchez is happy to keep scoring if it helps the seventh-place Courage reach the playoffs, but racking up goals and records is not her focus. “I think that the season I’ve had is already so great. And I just try to tell myself if it ended right now, I would still be happy,” she said. “And all the other stuff is kind of just extra at this point.”
Then there is the question that has swirled around the American women’s game for months: will Emma Hayes call Sanchez up for the USWNT’s friendlies against Spain next month? Hayes has been clear that she has shifted from widening the national team pool to narrowing in on her roster for next year’s World Cup, and Sanchez’s last international appearance came in October 2024. Her club form, though, begs for attention. Sanchez said on Tuesday that she had not yet heard from Hayes, and while she has thought about a call-up, she is not dwelling on it. “The only thing I can do is just make it as hard as I possibly can for [Hayes] to make her decisions, and put myself in the best position to get called in or play in these games,” she said. “But ultimately it’s up to her and I have to be comfortable with it maybe not being good enough.”
“For me to be able to get called back in – I think a lot of people, and maybe even myself, kind of counted me out. I think it would just be a testament to going through a little bit of a tough time and still being able to find your way back,” she added. “But I also think this season has been so incredible that even if I didn’t, I would still be so proud of what I’ve been able to do. It would feel like a little bit of an extra cherry on top. Obviously I would like to, but we’ll see.”