Casey Phair: How South Korea's 16-year-old wonderkid went from USWNT hopeful to Women's World Cup record-breaker

David Richard laughs when GOAL asks what made Phair stand out at a young age. “Just thinking about it just gave me chills,” he replies. Phair was eight years old when she started to attend training sessions for his Seacoast United team and he would be her first club coach when she joined the Massachusetts side. At that time, she was playing for an Under-11s team and yet, she knew what her goals were.

‘I’m going to play Division 1,’ she would say. ‘I'm going to go to college, I'm going to play D1 soccer.’ And that was coming from her, not her folks,” Richard explains. “I can recall conversations with her dad and he's like, 'Casey wants to play D1 soccer'. She had it in her head. She always was focused on the bigger, the better, ‘What do I need to do to get there? Lay it out for me and I'm going to get it done’.”

To showcase that sort of drive and determination as a young girl is not common, to be aware of the path to the top at that point isn’t either. “And that's why that stood out to me,” Richard adds. “I've coached Seacoast teams from U10 to U21, I coached at the college level, and that determination and call out is very, very rare. It was quite refreshing and surprising.”

At that point, Phair was actually a defender, not the electrifying forward she is today. “She had the physical qualities that made her super difficult to get around,” Richard recalls. “She was fast, she was strong, age-wise, and focused. That trifecta of capabilities made her a stud on the field. She was a force to be reckoned with.

“It was later that we started moving her more into an attacking position. It left a big hole defensively, but I think once she started scoring goals, that was like, 'Oh my, I like this'. She was scoring but she was passing as well. There's that delicate line for a striker where they're either too selfish or not enough and I don't think she mastered it, but she was aware of that challenge. How much do I try to do versus making the pass? It was good to see.”

It's in that role that Phair has developed into one of the most promising young talents on the planet, her attention to detail and incredible drive helping her make the transition easily. “My style of coaching is, we're working on whatever theme, playing out of the back for example, that's our focus for this session,” Richard explains. “Everything that we did in the session was always focused on that theme and my message to the players has always been, 'If you can't see how this helps you in the game, I want to know about it'. Casey held me true to that. There are times she would be like, 'Why are we doing this? How does this relate to a game?' Again, it was almost like she was playing at a maturity level much higher than she was age-wise, which is all we want.”

It was a few years later, at U12 level, when Phair’s awareness of the path to the top paid dividends again. The Tennessee team she was playing for was heading to Virginia for the Jefferson Cup, and it was going to face a team representing the Players Development Academy (PDA), a renowned soccer program in New Jersey which played a role in the rise of USWNT stars such as Tobin Heath, Heather O’Reilly and Casey Murphy. Phair wanted that opportunity. She wanted to play against the PDA team – and she did.

“We go into the game and we have all the ball and all the territory and we're up two goals,” Larry Hart, who was coaching the PDA team that day, tells GOAL. “There was this kid up top, though. I saw her and she was a pretty good size, athletically. All of a sudden, she gets the ball, turns, runs at our four backs, ran by them and scored a goal. We get the ball back, we have 90 percent of the ball, we score a third, we score a fourth. She got the ball again, did the same thing. I turn to my assistant coach, I go, ‘Okay, this kid is interesting’, because not only was she really athletic and really fast, but she had a skillset. She was clever and she was tricky.”

After the game, Hart couldn’t resist going up to Phair and praising her performance. Having learned that she previously lived in the area where PDA operates, he added, jokingly, “If you ever go back to the northeast, let me know.” Within weeks, he had an email from Shane, Casey’s father, explaining that he worked remotely and could indeed move. Hart jumped on the phone to talk to him and, when the summer came around, Phair was on the PDA roster. “I've never recruited a kid from that kind of method,” he laughs.

Though that drive was proving to be a real asset for Phair, it would also hinder her for a spell. The youngster was always keen to train as hard as possible, with Richard remembering times at Seacoast United when her father would email him asking if there were extra sessions, “doesn’t matter the team”, that she could get involved with, because that is what his daughter wanted.

But when she turned 14, as her body was changing, that attitude started to become a slight issue. “All of sudden, you have to do recovery and you have to take a day off,” Hart says. “She couldn't do it because she was so driven, so she had a year that was riddled with injuries. Tweaked hamstring, tweaked quad, tweaked groin, just things like that, constantly, because she was always pushing herself. What we had found out was that - and her dad didn't even know this - before we had a session at night, she was in her house working out with weights, because she was just so driven.

“We said, ‘Look, if you really want to be that player, if you really want to be a big time D1, if you have dreams of being professional, you have to surrender to a training regimen now’. She was physically more developed than half the team. Some of the girls could play twice a day and get away with it. The girls that have [developed], they’re muscular and faster, they have to be more mindful of how they train. They have to train differently. When she surrendered to that, going from 14 to 15, she got better. She made a different jump, she made more of an impact, she got stronger, she got faster, she recognised that.”

At that time, Phair’s goal was to make a U.S. youth national team camp, and Hart remembers he and his fellow coaches telling her that adjustments to her training schedule could help. The young forward was at that age when talents really start to be identified by the U.S. and she wasn’t playing her best in front of scouts because of the injuries. However, soon enough, with new practises put in place, the calls came.

Yet, the feeling was that the way the U.S. wanted to play didn’t suit Phair or make her stand out, in a way. At PDA, she had become an important player in her team’s possession-based style of soccer, while the U.S. played a little more direct. The feedback from the national team on Phair was “just okay”, Hart puts it.

It was at that point where Casey’s father thought about her dual citizenship. She was born in South Korea, her mother is Korean, and he wondered if it might be an avenue worth exploring. It was an idea they sat on for a little while, but the longer the feedback remained similar and chances for call-ups passed by, it became a more interesting option.

Eventually, the Phair family reached out to the Korea Football Association (KFA) and the response was excitement. They saw her footage, they liked it and they wanted to fly her out, to bring her into a camp.

From there, the relationship between the two blossomed. The KFA continued to be impressed with Phair, bringing her into a U17 camp and eventually the seniors, all around the time of her 16th birthday. The feeling from head coach Colin Bell was that he didn’t really have anything like her in his player pool.

Phair, meanwhile, liked playing in the Korean team. The players made her feel extremely welcome, she understood the language from her mother speaking it almost exclusively at home, and she visited the country a lot growing up to see family, so there was absolutely no culture shock.

From a soccer point of view, Phair liked the style and she felt like she fit in. The possession-based game she was used to with PDA was similar to the national team and so they were a good match. In fact, slowly but surely, the reality dawned on her that it was all going so well that she actually had a shot at making the roster for the 2023 Women’s World Cup.

“She just continued to have an impact and continued to do everything that she could for her team to be successful,” Mike O’Neill, who coached Phair at PDA when she was 15 years old, tells GOAL. “That's how you get the opportunities, right? But you have to prepare for those opportunities. Some people kind of get in there and maybe, sometimes, they take their foot off the gas. Casey didn't do that. She put two feet on the gas and understood what it was going to take to be successful at that level. I think that's why she set herself up for that opportunity to be called into that camp, where the roster for the World Cup was going to be picked.”

It was July 5, 2023, when Bell announced his squad for the tournament and, in reality, Phair’s life changed forever. Her involvement in the youth national teams had been relatively low-key, but the clamour around her inclusion on this roster grabbed headlines for many reasons. It made Phair the first player of mixed heritage to be selected for South Korea at a World Cup, it meant that she could make her senior national team debut at the tournament and, if she did that, she would become the youngest player in Women’s World Cup history.

For her Korean family, it has been an incredible point of pride. Her mother, Hye-young, is full of emotion every time she takes to the field for an international fixture. For those that have coached the young forward along the way, it brings real delight, too. O’Neill and his staff erupted in celebration when Phair called to share the news that she was going to the World Cup. Her team-mates at PDA did the same. Richard, her first club coach at Seacoast United, remembers finding out the news on the PDA website.

“She's had a lot of positive coaching in her very limited career, but it was super gratifying. It's so nice to see players that move onto the next level, whether it's college or international,” he laughs. “There are so few of those. It was awesome. It is absolutely fantastic to see a player have as much success as she has.

“There have been many players at the club that move on to play college, and I've seen them play, but I don't think this will happen again in my lifetime for players coming out of the club, a player making it to a national level.”

That time in Australia catapulted Phair into the spotlight. There, she stepped onto the pitch for the first time as a senior international, became the youngest player ever to feature in a Women’s World Cup and even went close to bagging her first goal in South Korea’s third and final fixture, hitting the post in the opening moments against Germany in a match which would see the two-time world champion crash out. Back in New Jersey, all of PDA was watching as she came within a whisker, ready to explode in delight had the shot nestled in the back of the net.

Just a few days later, they were in her company, Phair kicking the ball around with the younger girls, nutmegging them and leaving them a little starstruck given what she had been doing just a week previously. It's a snapshot of the humility that has helped her ascend to such heights. Yes, she has talent and she has drive, but she also has her feet firmly on the ground.

“She came running out and she had these new cleats,” Hart recalls of Phair's return to the club after the World Cup. “She goes, ‘FIFA took mine. Because I was the youngest player ever to play at a World Cup, they took them and they’re going to be in the FIFA museum’. She’s a 16-year-old kid. She ran to like Dick’s Sporting Goods and got a pair. Two months later, she got a deal with Nike.”

“She's a really talented footballer. She's a really good person, too," O'Neill adds. “It is so important that, in all of this, you have to keep your feet on the ground. You never lose sight of what helped you get there. That's really important. I also believe that's a reflection of her family too, because they do a great job with that. It's a great family.”

Those months at PDA after the World Cup would be Phair’s last because in January she signed for Angel City, which had just made the play-offs in the NWSL. She was not short of interest from elsewhere either - be it from other U.S. clubs or across the pond in Europe. “She just turned 16. We didn’t even know what to recommend,” Hart remembers. “It was the first time we ever had a youth player go professional.”

The young girl that had grown up adamant that she was going to play D1 soccer in college was suddenly skipping that step altogether. “That’s where it kind of gives you the chills,” Richard, who watched that eight-year-old kid repeatedly state those dreams back at Seacoast United, says. “Hearing a player have such high expectations and exceeding them… It’s amazing.”

Angel City fans are still waiting to see Phair’s talent in full flow. The 16-year-old has been back and forth because of international duty, but, in due course, those in Los Angeles will see why she was picked to go to a World Cup so young, why so many clubs wanted to sign her and why she earned the nickname of ‘Ibra’, after Sweden icon Zlatan Ibrahimovic, during her time at PDA.

Those in South Korea are growing more and more familiar with her ability, Phair having shone for the youth and senior national teams over the past year or so, and followers of the USWNT could get a glimpse over the course of the next week as the Asian nation prepares for a friendly double-header in the States.

There is sure to be real curiosity from those in the stands in Commerce City and Saint Paul about Phair’s talent. After all, when she was included on South Korea’s World Cup roster, many U.S. fans took to the internet to find out about this 16-year-old who had been in the youth national teams. How big a loss to the program was she? Would she have been a USWNT star? Was this a drop of the ball by U.S. Soccer?

Realistically, we’ll never really know. Phair’s decision was down to several reasons, but a big one was how she fit into the South Korea side and its style, both of which are unique to this team. All that can be said is that if she does live up to her potential, if she becomes the star that her talent and mindset make a possibility, if she has a long and successful career at the top, it’ll be to the benefit of the South Korea team, because that is the choice she made and that is where she, in her own words, feels “at home”.