When you have a career year and match a single-season goal-scoring record of 20 goals in NWSL, the spotlight brightens quickly. Your skills end up in more social media clips, you earn more league recognition, and you gain overall honors. You also get way more media requests.
North Carolina Courage forward Ashley Sanchez is having a personal-best season. Drafted in 2020, she's playing a new position as a winger and has become the first American player to score 20 goals in the NWSL regular season. While she still has a handful of games to set an even more impressive record, she found time for an interview with CBS Sports after a club training session while on her way home with a teammate in the car.
"I'm here with Ryan [Williams] too in the car, so don't say anything bad about her," she joked. For Sanchez, navigating the brighter spotlight means blocking most of it out altogether. She's on the verge of breaking a league goal-scoring record, recently engaged, and now back in national team camps for the first time since January 2025.
"I mean, definitely, [more attention] is a little bit different, but I think I just try not to care too much about outside noise or opinions, and just try to, like, control myself and the product that I have on the field. I think also part of it is, I feel like I have done a lot more than maybe I thought I was gonna do. So, now it's just all this other stuff is just kind of extra," she explained about the increased attention.
"I feel like I just keep setting the bar for myself, but a lot of that is definitely not listening to other people and their opinions and just not getting too high about all this extra stuff. We still have so many games left and so much more to do. So yeah, I guess I don't want to say I don't care, but I kind of guess I just don't care too much." Sanchez's previous career highs were back-to-back five-goal seasons -- her final year with the Washington Spirit in 2023, and her first season with North Carolina after being traded there in 2024.
Her efforts in earlier seasons with the Spirit earned her more national team call-ups, where she was considered among the "next gen" core of players, and she even made the 2023 World Cup roster with the U.S. national team, though Sanchez was one of three players who didn't get to play a single minute in the tournament. The disappointment took some of the joy out of the sport for her, and with a new head coach and a smaller roster for the Olympics, she ultimately missed the gold medal run at the 2024 Summer Olympics. Then 2025 presented a new career low: two goals over 23 appearances and a season where staff and players couldn't find the chemistry with each other.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
