The three-times World Cup-winning centre-back Christie Pearce Rampone described Dawn Scott as “the secret to everything” and the Ballon d’Or winner Megan Rapinoe, asked how she felt about losing USA’s high-performance coach to England, shed tears.

For those who have worked with Scott, she is simply the best. Now, after nine years in the States, the South Shields-born sports scientist is working for the Lionesses, aiming to unseat her former team from the top of the game. Scott won two World Cups and an Olympic gold medal with USA but switched sides at the end of last year and faces her former employers in her first game with England in the SheBelieves Cup on Thursday.

The match has come too soon for the England players to have fully benefited from having Scott on board and being in the other dugout at the Exploria Stadium in Orlando will test her emotions. “It will feel weird,” Scott says, sitting on a sofa in St George’s Park, ginger tea in hand. “It was my life. I built some very close professional relationships with players. When Lindsey Horan came back from PSG, we took her to LA for two or three days to do some testing and we literally chaperoned her round with me saying: ‘Have you had tea? Are you going to bed?’ She now calls me mum,” she says with a smile.

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It was Scott’s passion for the science of her players that made her so coveted by Phil Neville and the Football Association. “After a major tournament [the 2019 World Cup] you take stock.There was a change in coach over there, they were doing a bit of a search and throughout the process I was told a new coach might have their own staff. Round about the same time the FA were in touch.”

Family was another key piece of the puzzle. “My dad passed away in 2012 and you don’t realise it but when you’re away for 10 years you miss out on family events and supporting your family. My mum used to come out four or five times a year [but] she had a knee replacement last January so her mobility is worse.” At the moment, Scott is living with her mum in the north-east and driving to the FA’s base in Burton upon Trent.

Then there was the matter of unfinished business. Scott previously spent nine years as the head of sports science for the England women’s team . “Take Jill Scott and Steph Houghton, for example,” she says. “I was around when they were coming into the England squad and the other piece for me is to be a part of their journey again.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dawn Scott worked with Steph Houghton (left) and Jill Scott during a previous spell with the FA. Photograph: Alex Caparros/Fifa via Getty Images

Thinking she would be a physics teacher, Scott studied the subject in Nottingham but university football dominated and she took a year out, getting a job as a data scientist before transferring to study accountancy, and play football, at Sheffield Hallam. In the end she found her fit: sports science at Manchester Met. A string of jobs in the field followed and in 2001 they led to a role with Hope Powell’s England team.

“Back in the day at the FA we used to have a regional strength and conditioning programme,” Scott says. “In four of the regions the best place for players to go for strength and conditioning was the local prisons because they had the best equipment. So there was a group up in the north-east: Jill, Steph, Demi Stokes, Jordan Nobbs and, a little bit later, Lucy Bronze, Carly Telford, and they would go into the prison twice a week and lift. The trainer would meet them at the reception and lead them through the prison. Jill being Jill, full of energy, nothing malicious, would mess around so she actually got banned from going for a while.”

Things were not too dissimilar when she left to join USA in 2011 but what followed was a decade of innovation at the top level. One well-publicised area was the use of the FitrWoman period tracker app to monitor players’ menstrual cycles. “For me there’s not enough evidence right now to be able to prescribe training on the back of menstrual cycles,” Scott says cautiously. “There also isn’t enough evidence, or enough injuries, to fully relate and link injuries specifically to menstrual cycle; that’s my personal opinion.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dawn Scott during her time with the USA. ‘I’m a fan of looking at every single facet of a player’s performance,’ she says. Photograph: Meg Oliphant/Getty Images

“I’m a big fan of education. If you’re going to ask a player to do something, do they understand the mechanism and the why? We travelled to the nine US pro teams and delivered an education session and then with the US team we had them fill in a long survey to identify any symptoms they may be feeling or any impact they felt it had on their performance and then we addressed the symptoms. Imagine you’ve got a player saying they’re sore, they’re not sleeping, they’re not recovering? Obviously that’s going to impact a player’s performance whether it’s menstrual cycle-related or not. So we started addressing those things, through focusing on the recovery.”

Scott helped build a winning machine and is increasingly aware that, like the players, she is powerful role model. A female scientist at the top of her trade, Scott has taken part in the CBS television series Mission Unstoppable which aims to close the gender gap in Stem (science, technology, engineering and maths) disciplines. “I think we’ve almost got a duty to be visible,” she says. “I guess there were no role models out there for me.”

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For the 11.7 million BBC viewers of England’s semi-final defeat by USA in last summer’s World Cup the superiority of the Americans was clear. “I’m a fan of looking at every single facet of a player’s performance,” Scott says. “Whether that’s recovery, nutrition, hydration; the stuff on the field is one or two or three hours of the day. The FA has a project called ‘The other 22 hours’. For me you could be the best trainer on the field but if you don’t then look after yourself as much as you excel on the field then you’re not starting the next session as recovered as you could be.

“I feel like a lot of the time we focus on the physical recovery and preparation but there’s the mental side as well. Do we rest our brains? Do we rest our mind? How do we recover the brain and mind? Sleep is the freest form of recovery and how many of them or us have effective and good sleep at different kick-off times? On different days of the week?”

It is that attention to detail that saw such an emotional outpouring from members of the USA team and fans on the announcement of Scott’s departure. “I think sometimes we get caught up with numbers and data and we lose track of the player,” Scott says. “First and foremost we have to always remember the player is a person. I think the person, the player, has to be central to everything.”