CHESTER, Pa. -- Lynn Williams and the rest of the United States women's national team will play England on Saturday at Red Bull Arena, just a few miles from the Manhattan skyline. Stages don't come much bigger than the Big Apple.

Yet the setting didn't need to be any bigger than a sushi restaurant in the middle of the Midwest for Williams to understand how life changes for those who wear a national team uniform. Visiting her boyfriend recently in a quiet corner of Nebraska where he plays college basketball, Williams finished her meal and prepared to leave when a stranger approached. The young woman hadn't wanted to interrupt, she told Williams apologetically, but she recognized her. Could they take a photo together?

It is one thing to be recognized in a National Women's Soccer League setting, where she is the reigning league MVP for the North Carolina Courage (formerly the Western New York Flash). It is logical that people make a connection when they spy her in the company of the national team. But it is more than a little strange out of context, in the middle of nowhere.

"There are so many people who have done so many crazier things than me," Williams said. "For someone to recognize me, it's amazing. It's an honor."

It is also going to happen far more frequently.

They will come to know that one of the national team's newest and youngest faces lived a lot of life before she was new and young. And she has the scars to prove it.

Six months after the United States exited the Olympics without a medal, the 23-year-old Williams is undoubtedly the poster child of the youth movement coach Jill Ellis undertook after Brazil. A breakout star a year ago in her second NWSL season, Williams made her first national team roster in October. Her first goal was the fastest ever scored in a debut, the ball finding the back of the net 49 seconds after she entered.

Her second goal came Wednesday in her fifth appearance. In a SheBelieves Cup game between the United States, ranked No. 1 and the reigning World Cup champion, and Germany, ranked No. 2 and the reigning Olympic champion, it settled matters in a 1-0 American win.

"First and foremost, she deserved a look based on her productivity," Ellis said. "Then when I brought her in, her willingness to learn, her coachability, for sure her athleticism, her nose for goal -- pretty quickly I thought she's someone ... we have to see her and invest in her over these next few months to see what she's capable of."

All of this only eight years after Fresno State, her hometown school, was the only Division I soccer program to feel the same way. Encouraged by her dad to leave home and experience life somewhere beyond Fresno, she was prepared to turn her focus to track and field, in which her sprinting exploits drew more Division I interest. Only when Pepperdine entered the picture during her junior year of high school was she assured of an opportunity to play the sport she preferred.