Smooth transition

HARTFORD -- The job popped up unexpectedly at the other end of a phone line two winters ago. April Heinrichs , the United States women's soccer coach, told her assistant she was resigning and that he had to put a team together to play in the Algarve Cup. As in, right now.

"I told our staff, whatever we do, let's have fun here in Portugal," Greg Ryan remembers. "Turned out we ran the table and didn't give up a goal. Next thing you know, you're the head coach."

Since the 50-year-old former pro took over as only the fifth coach in program history, the Americans still haven't lost a match in regulation (35-0-7) and are favored to win their third World Cup in six attempts at the quadrennial tournament in China in September.

"I'm in shock," says Ryan, whose squad's only defeat was a shootout loss to Germany in last year's Algarve final. "We figured we'd take our lumps. In January, we took all our young people to China and still didn't lose. Doing as well as we have, I never anticipated this."

The US might be a team in transition (10 of the 18 players named to the roster this week will be making their Cup debuts) but it's still loaded with bemedaled veterans in captain Kristine Lilly, Briana Scurry, Kate Markgraf, and Christie Rampone. And the Yanks still play -- and win -- the way they always have.

"We're still an attacking team," says Lilly, whose teammates take on Norway this evening (6 p.m., ESPN2) in a tuneup at Rentschler Field in East Hartford. "We're still about speed and getting behind defenses. We haven't changed that much."

The most notable difference under Ryan is an improvisational quality that stresses imagination. "Greg gives us the freedom to play, to be ourselves out there," says Lilly, who has been moved from midfield to forward, where she has scored six goals in eight matches this year.

Ryan says that he has made a point of adopting certain approaches from his three predecessors -- Anson Dorrance's pressure defending, Tony DiCicco's 4-3-3 formation, and Heinrich's technical emphasis. But his coaching style comes from his playing days in the old NASL with the star-laden New York Cosmos.

"It was a fantastic learning experience for a young American player," says Ryan, a Dallas native who had been an All- American at Southern Methodist. "The passion those players had, how much of themselves they invested. When I walked in that first day and saw Franz Beckenbauer, Carlos Alberto , and Giorgio Chinaglia I said, OK, this is a different world."

Ryan was a bit player on the Cosmos, who showcased their big international names. "I would get in rarely," he says.

What Ryan learned from his brief time in New York, though, was how the game's elite create their own system on the field. Soccer at the top level is about rhythm and flow and invention, he believes, not about executing a preordained plan.

"You take Barcelona," he says. "When Ronaldinho and Lionel Messi are playing, they're not thinking about what the coach wants them to do. My first goal with this team was to encourage them to do what they wanted to do, and then we'll talk about it."

That was a luxury that Ryan didn't have in his days coaching the women's varsities at Wisconsin, SMU , and Colorado College.

"I had to do more remedial work in college," he says. "At this level, the players have a good sense of where to be. In college, it was 'Where's Waldo?' Where'd they all go?"

Ryan's collegiate days were invaluable for learning the nuances of dealing with female players. "When I started coaching women, I made a lot of mistakes," he says. "I'm still very straightforward, very honest. Maybe brutally honest. But I try to say it in a nice way."

Though both DiCicco and Heinrichs had been assistants before taking over the head job, Ryan didn't assume that he would get the nod even after he had been interim coach for a couple of months. "I knew it was a little bit of a long shot," he says. "There were a number of good candidates out there."

But Ryan's résumé as understudy on the Olympic gold-medal team and his knowledge of the youth pipeline made him the ideal candidate for a team going through a turnover. "The more information you have, the easier things go," he says. "Being an assistant, you're perfectly placed to step in and become a head coach."

The mutual familiarity between Ryan and his players made for a reasonably seamless transition. "He had that history with the team," says forward Abby Wambach. "It was different, but it didn't feel foreign."

What was most different was the absence of four of the Fab Five -- Mia Hamm, Joy Fawcett, Julie Foudy , and Brandi Chastain -- who moved on after the Olympics. Yet the group departure probably made the changeover less stressful than it might have been.

"There were so many changes that we weren't replacing people, we were just filling holes," says Ryan. "So there wasn't the same sense of a threat that you might have had with an all-veteran team."

There was still plenty of experience, and Ryan made a point of building around it. "Greg wanted to find his personality players," says Wambach. "He called me and Kristine and Shannon Boxx and Kate Markgraf and said, 'You've got to be our leaders. ' "

With no major tournaments on the horizon, Ryan also could plug in newbies such as defender Stephanie Lopez and midfielders Lori Chalupny and Leslie Osborne, play mix-and-match with lineups , and look at five dozen candidates. Yet no matter who the starting 11 have been, the squad has kept winning.

"I'm never surprised when we win," says Lilly, the only holdover from the 1991 squad that won the first Cup. "No matter which team's out there."

The winning will be considerably more challenging come September. The Americans, who start with the same trio they faced on home soil four years ago (North Korea, Sweden , and Nigeria), never have lost a group match in Cup play. But Ryan warns that they can't afford to take anything for granted this time.

"There are fewer and fewer games where you can say, 'This is one we should win,' " he says. "Every one is a must-win. We won't have any soft games in the tournament. In other years you could say, once we get to the quarterfinals, it's going to ratchet up. That's not the case now."

John Powers can be reached at jpowers@globe.com.