Editor's note: Rose Lavelle and the U.S. women's soccer team have advanced to the knockout rounds of the 2019 Women's World Cup. Before the start of the tournament, we profiled the midfielder and some of her U.S. teammates who would be making their World Cup debut.

Rose Lavelle has not played in the World Cup. She has, on the other hand, pondered the anxiety that comes with asking the stranger in the aisle seat on a plane to let her out to use the restroom. She has chronicled, extensively, the weight loss travails of Wilma, her bulldog. She has publicly confessed her inability to parallel park and her addiction to bookstores.

"I always tell people that Rose is the coolest weird person," U.S. teammate Emily Sonnett said. "She doesn't care if she has a weird way, she's going to stay that way. But she's so cool doing it."

All of which is to say that, as she turns 24 this month, she has more experience than anyone on the U.S. roster at being Rose Lavelle. She is an expert at it.

The U.S. women are counting on that in France.

Belying the label of defending champion, the U.S. roster announced Thursday includes 11 players who are participating in the World Cup for the first time. The starting lineup for the opening game on June 11 will likely include at least four World Cup rookies -- and counting goalkeeper Alyssa Naeher, five people playing their first World Cup minutes. The hope is that they know themselves well enough to be who the United States thinks they can be. And who the team needs them to be.

Take the midfielder with the moves to break open back lines. Lavelle proved in less than a half that she belonged at the international level. She spent the next two years stockpiling often painful experience in what it takes to stay there. If American hopes this summer depend on Lavelle being up to the challenge, both of those things matter.

"She is just such an interesting, neat person, and I think that kind of translates into her game as well," fellow U.S. midfielder Lindsey Horan said. "She's a very creative player, unique player, and I think those are the players I love playing with the most. She brings so much to this team. She's just a very dynamic and technical player. She's crucial in our attack, bringing something else to the plate."

Like Horan, Mallory Pugh and others, Lavelle is part of the first generation for whom the United States' 1999 win is at most a hazy recollection. Her defining World Cup memory came four years later in the fall of 2003, when Lavelle woke up on a Sunday morning eager to watch the U.S. women take one more step toward a second consecutive trophy. Instead, by late afternoon, the 8-year-old in Cincinnati was back in her bunk bed and crying under the covers after Germany beat the Americans in a semifinal.

That is the generation U.S. coach Jill Ellis turned to after World Cup success four years ago -- and especially after the subsequent Olympic disappointment a year later in Brazil. There had to be new talent added to the existing core to field a team in 2019 capable of winning back-to-back World Cups, the challenge that went unmet in 1995 and 2003. The U.S. women answered the ghosts of the past in 2015, escaping the shadow of 1999 once and for all. To move into the future and take on a global game ever more sophisticated, a new generation had to supply more creative, technical and versatile talent.

Lavelle looked the part in her U.S. debut in 2017. She was the silver lining to an otherwise miserable afternoon against England, a loss in bitterly cold conditions in New Jersey. Ellis called her performance "phenomenal" that day. U.S. forward Tobin Heath said afterward that Lavelle's fearlessness stood out most.

She started her first six appearances with the national team, with two goals and an assist, but in a game that June, Lavelle felt something pop in her hamstring. After making it all the way from crying about the national team to playing for it, the hardest part of her own World Cup journey was just beginning.

The injury was the first of what Lavelle described as three muscle tears in her hamstring. She returned from the initial tear in time to make one more start in 2017, playing in front of 30,596 people in her hometown of Cincinnati. But a second tear later in the fall, this to what she said was a different muscle, ended her year. Four to six weeks for recovery became four to six more weeks.

After missing the 2018 opener in January, she felt she was finally ready to regain momentum when the team gathered for the SheBelieves Cup at the end of February. Then she felt another twinge in the hamstring. And she said doctors told her they found another tear.

"I went into SheBelieves expecting to get cleared to play finally," Lavelle said. "And then I got an MRI and found out it was going to be another three months. And I had to start all over.

"That was the moment that it was finally a little too much for me."

She returned to the field that summer and regained a starting spot by the time World Cup qualifying began in the fall. Even then, Lavelle wasn't yet fully her old self mentally, and she sought the confidence that once defined her game. Those concerns notwithstanding, she scored the decisive goal in the final of the CONCACAF tournament against Canada.

Hamstring issues hampered Rose Lavelle for over a year, but she worked her way back into the starting lineup ahead of World Cup qualifying last fall. Katharine Lotze/Getty Images

In the midst of the hamstring issues that she said tore at her mentally and physically, it was difficult to see a silver lining. And it could yet be that the U.S. effort this summer suffers because one of its most promising young players missed valuable minutes over the past two years, time on the field for both club and country that would otherwise have honed her game. It's also possible she wouldn't be nearly as ready for the mental grind of a World Cup without enduring the toughest test of her mental strength.

Reading "An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth" during a recent training camp (because why not), Lavelle found something that resonated when former NASA astronaut Chris Hadfield described the ratio of time spent in space compared to time spent preparing for it.

"The amount of time we spend in games is minimal compared to the hours of training and recovery and film and all of that," Lavelle said. "Now that this is my career, that was a big realization my first year. Yeah, it's supposed to be fun, and I still want to enjoy it the same way. But I need to take other aspects of my life, other facets of the game, more seriously, with recovery and more off-the-field stuff -- take that just as seriously as I take training and games."

The comparison wouldn't have meant much to her two years ago. It does now.

Lavelle's availability will remain a concern this summer. Although apparently unrelated to her hamstring issues, she missed the most recent U.S. game and Washington's National Women's Soccer League opener with an injury. No matter how much more seriously she says she takes training and conditioning, the same willowy frame that helps her dance through defenders might leave her vulnerable to wear and tear.

What the United States is counting on is that World Cup experience isn't a concern, not for Lavelle and not for those around her. It is counting on the fact that no one is better at being Rose Lavelle.

Especially after the past two years.

"She's just always herself, on the field and off the field," Horan said. "I don't think she really cares how people perceive her. She is a little quirky and a little bizarre at times. I think that's what is so funny about her -- some of the stuff she says just comes out of nowhere. But that's typical Rose."

She is comfortable with who she is. And that's someone who can help the U.S. women win the World Cup.