Two and a half years ago, on the night of the 2024 NWSL Draft, the Washington Spirit traded Ashley Sanchez to the North Carolina Courage for a draft pick and $250,000 in allocation money. Sanchez found out the way most players do — fast, and in public. She posted on Instagram that she was “shocked and heartbroken to be leaving such a special place,” and added that Washington, D.C. would “always feel like home.”
That trade is worth remembering right now, because of what happened Sunday. In a 6-0 win over the Chicago Stars, Sanchez scored her first career hat trick to finish with 18 goals this season — the most ever by an American player in a single NWSL season. She did it in her third year with the club that acquired her in a deal she never asked for.
The number itself is remarkable. What makes it worth a closer look is everything underneath it: a scoring rate that, once you check it against the record she just broke, tells a more complicated story than “best ever”; a position change that unlocked her; and a career that, until about five months ago, gave almost no indication this was coming.
The Numbers Nobody Double-Checked
Multiple outlets reported this weekend that Sanchez passed a previous American record of 17 goals. That number is wrong.
The actual record — 15 goals — was set by Crystal Dunn for the Washington Spirit in 2015, when she won the NWSL Golden Boot and MVP award in a 20-game season. Alex Morgan matched it in 2022, scoring 15 goals in San Diego Wave’s inaugural campaign, in just 17 games. Both totals are confirmed directly by the NWSL, U.S. Soccer, and each player’s own club at the time — there’s no ambiguity here, despite what got repeated this week.
That correction matters for a second reason: it changes how you should read Sanchez’s accomplishment. She has more total goals than either Dunn or Morgan. But she needed 23 games to get there. Morgan needed only 17.
| Player | Season | Goals | Games | Goals per game |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Alex Morgan | 2022 | 15 | 17 | 0.88 |
| Sam Kerr | 2019 (all-time record at the time) | 18 | 21 | 0.86 |
| Temwa Chawinga | 2024 (current all-time record) | 20 | 25 | 0.80 |
| Ashley Sanchez | 2026 | 18 | 23 | 0.78 |
| Crystal Dunn | 2015 | 15 | 20 | 0.75 |
Sanchez’s goal-per-game rate is the lowest of the five seasons in that table. That’s not a knock — it’s context the record alone doesn’t give you. She has been the most productive scorer, cumulatively, that any American has been in a single NWSL season. She has not been the most efficient. Both things are true, and the second one gets lost every time a headline just says “record.”
For what it’s worth, Sanchez still has seven games left to play. At her current rate, she’d finish somewhere around 23-24 goals — which would put her ahead of everyone in that table, including Chawinga’s all-time mark of 20.
What Actually Changed in 2026
Here’s the number that should have led every story about this weekend: across her first two seasons in North Carolina — 2024 and 2025, 49 regular-season appearances combined — Sanchez scored seven goals total.
She has 18 this year. In one season, she’s scored more than double her combined output from the two seasons before it.
That kind of jump doesn’t happen by accident, and there’s a specific, sourced explanation for at least part of it: North Carolina lost midfielder Manaka Matsukubo to Chelsea this summer, and her departure opened space higher up the field that Sanchez hadn’t previously had. For most of her career — three seasons at UCLA, four in Washington, her first two in North Carolina — Sanchez played centrally, often tasked with distribution as much as finishing. This year, the Courage have used her more on the left wing, closer to goal, with less defensive responsibility pulling her out of the box.
It’s worth being precise about the timeline, though, because the full explanation isn’t quite that tidy. Sanchez was already scoring in bunches before Matsukubo left — she was named Sports Illustrated’s Player of the Month for April after scoring in all three of North Carolina’s matches that month, well before the summer roster shuffle. So the position change and the open space it created appear to have accelerated something that was already building, rather than single-handedly caused it. The clearest data point of the acceleration: she had 13 goals through Aug. 22, then five more in the two weeks that followed, including Sunday’s hat trick.
The Record Above the Record
Sanchez’s 18 goals also happen to match a number with its own history. Sam Kerr scored 18 for the Chicago Red Stars in 2019 — at the time, the most anyone had ever scored in a single NWSL season, American or otherwise. That mark held for five years until Temwa Chawinga broke it in 2024, scoring 20 for Kansas City Current in her first season in the league, a campaign that also included scoring against all 13 other teams and a run of eight straight matches with a goal.
So Sanchez, right now, has quietly reached a total that would have been the outright NWSL record as recently as 2023. She’s not just the best American scorer of the season. For a five-year stretch of league history, a player with her exact total would have been the best scorer, period.
She’s not there yet. Chawinga’s 20 is still two goals ahead, and Sanchez has North Carolina’s final seven matches to close that gap. Whether she does is a genuinely open question — but it’s a much better question than “will she add to her own American record,” which she’s already answered by continuing to play.
Why the USWNT Angle Isn’t Just Speculation
It’s easy for “this could mean a national team recall” to be filler in a piece like this — a way to gesture at stakes without evidence. In Sanchez’s case there’s an actual paper trail worth laying out plainly, instead of hyping.
She has 28 senior USWNT caps, three goals, and was named to the 2023 World Cup roster — meaning she isn’t an unknown quantity being talked about for the first time. Her most recent camp call-up was in January 2025, for that year’s SheBelieves Cup, over a year and a half ago. In the time since, her production dropped to seven combined goals across 2024 and 2025 before this season’s turnaround.
That’s the honest shape of the case: a player with real prior national-team standing, currently out of the picture, now producing at a level that historically gets attention — but with enough of a gap since her last call-up that nothing about a recall should be assumed. Emma Hayes has not commented publicly on Sanchez this season, and no reporting has indicated she’s under active consideration for October’s camp. The connection between her form and a possible recall is a reasonable question to raise. It is not a prediction.
The Part of This Story That’s Easy to Skip Past
Go back to that draft-night trade for a second. Sanchez wasn’t dealt because she’d struggled — she’d just helped Washington win the 2021 NWSL Championship and had been part of the setup that made Trinity Rodman, her longtime teammate, one of the league’s most productive attackers. She was traded because a rebuilding front office had other priorities, on a night when the Spirit also flipped a different starter for a different draft pick.
North Carolina, for its part, didn’t get an immediate return on the investment. Sanchez’s first two seasons in Cary produced steady, unspectacular numbers — enough to be named a finalist for the league’s inaugural Midfielder of the Year award in 2024, not enough to suggest a scoring record was two years away. The club extended her contract through 2027 in February of this year, months before any of this scoring surge began, which means North Carolina bet on her development rather than reacting to a hot streak already in progress.
None of that guarantees anything about the rest of her season, or about Emma Hayes’ plans, or about whether she catches Chawinga. But it’s a more accurate description of how she got here than “record-breaking star” — which implies a straight line that didn’t exist. It was a trade that hurt, two quiet seasons, a position change, and then, suddenly, a two-week stretch that rewrote part of the record book.