College coaches stretched along the sideline in their prim white scouting chairs and flapping track suits like a overextended supply chain. A few sat clustered together, huddled over their notepads, trading player impressions and gabbing about life on the road. As ever, dutiful parents patrolled this thin line of scholarship connection, passing out rosters with player GPAs, extracurricular activities, soccer accomplishments, interests.

As it is most days, it is all very cordial this day. Dozens and dozens of college coaches from across the country had flocked to a north Houston suburb to watch ECNL’s Texas showcase, featuring some of the very best girls club players from the U14 to U17 age groups. A concurrent U17 girls youth national team camp had knocked a handful of the country’s best players from the showcase, and some of the country’s best teams opted to skip it entirely. For most, that has more to do with travel expenses than exposure, since the latter is an almost impossibly enormous benefit at any of ECNL’s five massive national showcase events.

This particular game happened to be a U14 game, and this particular team – the one many of these coaches had come to scout – featured one of the best young players in the nation few know about yet. She plays up a year with the U14s, which means she is physically undersized, but as a creative hub with preternatural vision there are few at this age who’ve displayed similar authority and verve anywhere in the country. If the proper authorities are paying attention, she will, without doubt, be playing in U.S. youth national team camps sooner rather than later.

As I wandered between fields, collecting reams of rosters and doing scouting of my own for our purposes, I noticed this particular field had more scouts than most. Not all of them were here to watch this particular player, mind you – this club is among the best at talent production among younger aged players in the country – but you could tell she’d grabbed the attention of the sideline like a passing plane hooking in a Fulton balloon.

Among this ragged supply train spread along the sideline were two coaches from major women’s soccer universities discussing the proceedings. Long moments of quiet scribbling led to brief vocal observations: “Too many touches,” “where are her feet there?” “great vision.” These were standard if somewhat upper level moments of reflection on a game that had little momentary relevance but wide-ranging significance in the years to come. After all, we are talking about the strength of seedlings that have only barely broken the dirt bed.

Like everyone else, both were intently watching the diminutive playmaker salting the fields of her broken opposition. She danced through tackles, taking small rabbit touches to move around defenders and unleashing scything passes that moved through seemingly watertight cracks in the defense’s line. It almost appeared as if the ball never left her feet as she moved, lashed by an invisible rope to the inner half of her boots as midfielder and defender alike flailed at her ankles.

But being younger than everyone else on the field, she was undersized and comparatively slow in a flat race, the victim of a maturation process that had moved many of her defensive markers into a physical realm she simply couldn’t match. At one point during the game, a teammate freed her into an open ravine in the right-central channel and she was off, bearing down 1-v-1 on a keeper quickly shuffling back toward her own line.

But she was not alone. The center back had recovered, and in five quick steps she overtook the diminutive playmaker, who in comparison looked as though she was moving in quicksand. Sheared of her greatest asset – tight dribbling and vision – she’d been exposed physically by an older player and dispossessed before she could snap off a shot. Possession reset, both players trotted back to their respective areas of influence and on the game went.

In a vacuum it was an insignificant moment, and it did not register on the sideline beyond a few coaches shifting their weight in their seats, a few scribbled notes and some groans from the 50 or so parents in attendance. But the two coaches in front of me – both from major Division I women’s soccer powers – leaned in for a conference.

“Did you see how slow she was in space?” “I can’t see her passing our beep test.”

This was a problem.

The second comment floored me. Here was a player who should be trumpeted as a shimmering vision of what our women’s soccer system can produce. A soccer hamlet in the United States of America – where we couch our analysis in 40 times and not in reaction times – produced a skill-forward player without straight-line speed, and we question it suspiciously. If she cannot pass the beep test in five years when it comes to that, perhaps the issue is the beep test and not the player.

It was not the comment, issued almost nonchalantly and most definitely unironically, that is the greatest cause for concern among our women’s soccer producers in this country, but rather it’s reaching implications.

The U.S. Women’s National Team won the World Cup in 2015, which took mounds of pressure off the system that produced the players themselves. The situations between the women and the men are so radically different, it appears on the outside, that to question the club-to-college-to-pro system and the type of players it produces is to question the best system in the world. Right?

But that line of thinking undercut the bloated British Empire as it haughtily sat on its colonial possessions in America. What can this rabble teach us, the empire upon whom the sun never sets, about rule? We rule everything. Until they did not, of course.

It has been said many times over that the rest of the world is catching up with the USWNT, which had gone 16 years without a World Cup until the last. Not in gasping leaps, of course, but in quiet lulling steps in the dark. And if there is anything clear about the U.S. way of playing against its opposition, it is that brute strength and overwhelming speed can paper over a lot of issues. That is not to say that those things are wholly American, or that the U.S. only has physical specimens on its roster. But to deny those things provided the propellant for every USWNT in history is to deny the very thing that has made those teams dominant as a collective force.

This cannot sustain the U.S. for much longer. The resources paid to upper echelon women’s soccer in most of the world’s countries outside the U.S. has been comically paltry for many years until recently, when systems in remote corners have begun to tease talent out of the shadows. And that talent is skilled, diverse, tactically astute. This is the French U20 team from the 2014 U20 Women’s World Cup. U20.

All that to say that the U.S. will not be able to afford to rest on its physical haunches for long. As the rest of the world (or at least those parts that continue investment in women’s soccer) begins to crackle online, the American physical advantage will matter increasingly less. As the U.S. men have discovered, a purring iron lung and an impressive bicep curl will not win you games when your opponent has had a ball attached to his feet since he was three.

All too often the tactics of our U.S. youth women’s national teams diverge into the realm of the direct, bypassing the individual skill inherent in those sides and relying to a fault on balls over the top and the speed to get under them. Some teams have made an effort to pass through the middle, and that is laudable, but too many have rested for too long on physical ability that will not always be there when you need it.

All of these things flashed like a red warning label as I heard those words on a field underneath a Texas afternoon.

The trouble comes in spurts at every level. If our young American ingenue is not protected at the club level and allowed to flourish in a passing system that gives her space to develop as she should, she will gradually begin to rely on the physical aspects more than the mental. This happens every day in America as a byproduct of the things we value: size, speed, lateral agility. The profoundly sad thing, once you really peel back the curtain, is that we produce skillful players. There are right here, stepping through tackles and heel-click nutmegging defenders. But through the devastating physical benchmarks we’ve created for ourselves (the ubiquitous beep test being one of the most egregious), we have told our players, wittingly or not, that the aspirant characteristics are not under the skill column. They are physical.

This is how many of our nation’s top colleges recruit, and so it is how many clubs – the gatekeepers of these players’ futures, in many ways – style their players. To be in the system at the highest levels, you have to play the game.

The good news is that there are clubs willing to give these players space to grow as technicians, and there are a handful of truly forward-thinking college programs pulling them out of these boxes that cast them as physical-first players. For some, that’s OK. Abby Wambach was never going to be that player. But for many, we’ve told them that speed kills and size withers and everything else is a secondary concern.

The answer should be to support and allow the sapling to flourish in the way it would flourish, not to construct a scaffold around it and mold it to the norm. That creates robots, and a nation of soccer robots is no soccer nation at all.