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.
That was five surgeries ago -- her career total is eight counting three foot procedures she underwent in high school. Williams' Instagram feed is a timeline of hospital rooms and medical misery. There she is still in her Pepperdine uniform in one hospital shot from 2013, elbow shattered to such a degree that doctors told her the damage was more commonly associated with car crashes than sports. And there she is in a hospital bed a little more than six weeks later, the elbow injury having freed up time for surgery she had put off to repair a torn hip labrum.
After that double surgical whammy, she felt sorry for herself after that double surgical whammy. She couldn't train the damaged parts of her body, so she more or less gave up on keeping the rest of them in tune, either. She did what felt like coping to her until a friend put a different spin on it and told her to stop wallowing.
It pissed her off at first. The truth often has that effect.
"When you're injured you don't always feel part of the team because you're not doing things with the team," Williams said. "So when I could do stuff with the team, it was mainly going out and stuff like that. That's where I kind of felt like I belonged, I guess.
"My friend woke me up and told me I was better than that."
So when it became clear that she needed microfracture surgery after her NWSL rookie season, there were moments of anger and anxiety. She saw her peers, her friends, getting called in for time with the national team. She feared her own window might close. But instead of shutting down, she redoubled her attention to nutrition. She worked to have the rest of her body in the best shape possible to attack the knee rehab. She returned weeks ahead of schedule, in plenty of time to embark on the club season that then caught Ellis' attention.
Ignored to the point she thought she might have to give up the sport rather than play in college, damaged so often that she wondered if it was worth coming back, Williams endured it all so that she might one day have the opportunity to be the player the United States needs.
But it is at least as important a part of the story she has always been one of the faces this team needs to better represent the country.
Williams' father, David, is black, her mother, Christine, is white. She proudly places the "mixed" label on herself when she talks about her family, but it wasn't always an easy tag to wear growing up in America, let alone growing up on the soccer field.
"I think it's hard to look at the TV and want to do something when you don't see people that look like you doing it," Williams said. "I definitely know when I was growing up and playing soccer, I was one of the very few black kids out there playing. As sad as it is, you almost get used to going to tournaments and not seeing people who look like you. So I think it's awesome that little girls get to go see the games and turn on the TV and go 'That girl looks like me, she has the same skin color as me, she has the same crazy hair as me,' and be OK with it."
She is part of a U.S. roster at the moment that is as diverse as any in memory. It is one thing to be an example that you can come back from injuries. Or that you can prove recruiters wrong. It is something else entirely to show people that it is OK to simply be you.
Her NWSL coach, Paul Riley, calls her a brilliant story. Jessica McDonald, her veteran teammate both with the Flash-turned-Courage and this week the United States, said she can't wait to see the heights Williams soars to in a couple of years.
Williams, whose college days in Malibu, California, offered plenty of brushes with the famous, still can't fathom how she ended up on this side of the divide.
She might think it's strange that anyone wants a picture or an autograph with her, let alone that someone asked her grandmother for an autograph after the Flash won the NWSL final in Houston this past fall. But she'll get used to it. She's gotten pretty good at being Lynn Williams.