Nick Cushing on Denver Summit: ‘I am hugely ambitious. I’m here to win a championship’
· Yahoo Sports
The light streams through the windows of Nick Cushing’s glass-enclosed office in Denver, Colorado — one of the sunniest cities in the United States. The 41-year-old’s enthusiasm pours through the laptop screen, his hands moving constantly as he speaks during our video call.
The first ever head coach of Denver Summit FC — one of the two National Women’s Soccer League expansion teams for the 2026 season, which kicks off this weekend — animatedly explains to The Athletic the challenge of building a roster from scratch in just six months.
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Recruitment, playing style, fanbase, culture, identity… where do you even begin? What do you even say on that first day to a group of players and staff who have never worked together before? (Spoiler: two former England internationals gave him some tips.)
A blank page may intimidate some, but not Cushing.
The opportunity with Denver — awarded a place in the 2026 NWSL in January last year — reminds him of a similar project back home in England just over 12 years ago. In late 2013, Cushing became manager of a relaunched Manchester City women’s team, guiding them to what is so far their only Women’s Super League (WSL) title three years later.
“We built this train that was just moving,” says Cushing, who also managed City-affiliated MLS side New York City FC from 2022-24. “I feel like that fearless 29-year-old (from 2013). I’m hugely ambitious. I’m here to win a championship.”
Cushing, born in Chester, near Manchester in the northwest of England, became an Everton season-ticket holder at age three — his father is a diehard fan of that club — and has been obsessed with football all his life. Apart from his family and music, little else matters.
A sports-science degree taught him he was not going to follow that route. Instead, Cushing cut his teeth coaching the game at primary schools and at semi-professional men’s team Vauxhall Motors, based in his home county of Cheshire, whose junior ranks often picked up players released by nearby Premier League sides Liverpool and Everton.
City scouted the young coach to work at their boys’ academy before he moved to a role with the women’s team. After 12 years in Manchester, he joined New York City, owned by multi-club organisation City Football Group (CFG), where he helped win the MLS title in 2021.
After Cushing was sacked in November 2024, he and his family decided to move back to England. He started working as a methodology coach for CFG, supporting other coaches across their stable of teams, from Spain to Brazil, India and Australia, in person or via video call. In January last year, he turned down the offer to work with another NWSL franchise. “I didn’t feel (returning to) America was right,” he says.
Then on the morning of Monday, March 10, a date etched in Cushing’s memory, CFG’s managing director of global football Brian Marwood called.
“I didn’t see it coming,” Cushing says. Just 24 hours after City Women’s manager Gareth Taylor was sacked, Cushing was back at the Etihad Campus, taking training as that team’s interim head coach.
He had less than a week to prepare a side, hampered by significant injuries to key players, for a League Cup final against Chelsea — the first of four meetings between the teams in 12 days across different competitions.
Cushing’s main task, though, was to finish at least third in the WSL, so securing Champions League qualification, but City, hampered by injuries, would eventually miss out on European football by a point. A 2-1 home league defeat against Chelsea a week on from losing by the same score in that final was, on reflection, Cushing’s biggest disappointment of that second spell as City manager.
“In the end, we just ran out of players,” he says. “You’re trying to bring enthusiasm to it, but it just seemed to be coming apart at the seams.”
According to Cushing, the women’s team managing director Charlotte O’Neill and director of football Therese Sjogran were clear on their direction of travel. “I was happy to help out,” he says. “But it was always agreed that they knew they wanted Andree (Jeglertz, last summer’s appointment who has them eight points clear at the top of the 2025-26 WSL) as the coach. I was fine with that.”
Then Denver came calling.
Cushing and wife Claire had agreed that England would continue to be their home but after the first telephone conversation with his prospective employers back in the States, he told her: “This could be the project for us.”
He flew to Colorado to watch the U.S. women play the Republic of Ireland on June 26 in nearby Commerce City and met the Denver ownership, led by businessman Rob Cohen, president Jen Millet and general manager Curt Johnson.
The scale of Denver’s ambition, their enthusiasm to build a professional women’s sports team, the rare opportunity to start with a blank slate and help shape a club’s whole strategy from the ground up sold Cushing. He was clear from the start: he wanted to be the head coach but also influence the strategy behind the team.
The 15,000-strong fanbase that had been established even before a player — let alone the later signings of Colorado natives Janine Sonis and Lindsey Heaps — was announced, the state being a hotbed for the sport and plans for a women’s-specific stadium to be built in 2028 also appealed to him.
Cushing’s experience, at City and especially in MLS, has contributed to shaping his strategy in Denver. Game identity, recruitment and culture are the three aspects he believes are essential to winning. His years in MLS also helped him understand how to approach a salary-cap league in terms of playing style. “Every team attacks everybody, MLS is the same,” he says. Creating a large quantity of attacking chances is crucial, therefore.
The focus for Cushing is how to make his team a “threat” rather than a “beautiful football team”.
At City in the WSL, he started with a playing style and then created a winning team. In the NWSL, he wants to start by creating and scoring, before evolving the Summit into a possession-based side with specific patterns of play.
“When I came on board, we had the ideas but we didn’t have any players,” he says.
‘Build a team which can compete for consistent championships’ was the remit. Cushing and his team had six months. Unlike at City, as WSL sides are not restricted by a salary cap, he had to strategise about how to allocate funds, especially for high earners.
“We want to win, and we want to try and win quickly,” he says. The first three players recruited were Kaleigh Kurtz, Ally Brazier and Abby Smith — established NWSL players with over 150 games under their belts who know what it takes to win in that league. Full-back Sonis, who had worked with Cushing in his first spell at City and was an NWSL champion with the Portland Thorns in 2022, was also added.
Then it was about trying to attract world-class talent — someone like Denver native Heaps.
The USWNT captain will join in June, after finishing the European season with France’s OL Lyonnes. Such a signing was, in Cushing’s words, a “no-brainer” who sees Heaps’ arrival midway through the campaign as a major boost.
Signing locals such as Heaps, Sonis and Brazier was a thread throughout, as it helps establish an emotional connection with the Denver public. Cushing himself has enjoyed exploring the nearby cities of Golden and Boulder, too, watching the NFL’s Denver Broncos and basketball’s Denver Nuggets, led by three-time NBA MVP Nikola Jokic, and has his eyes set on taking in a concert at the iconic Red Rocks amphitheater.
The last element of the recruitment strategy was to find players who could be the future of U.S. soccer, as Cushing did at City with promising future England internationals such as Lauren Hemp, Esme Morgan, Jess Park and Georgia Stanway. The balance of recruiting both oven-ready experience and young prospects was important. In a salary cap league, the aim, according to Cushing, is simple: “Get more for your money. It’s developing players.”
Denver’s director of scouting Mike Smith has extensive knowledge of the NCAA — U.S. university-level — game, but recruitment was a challenge at the start. This is the first year the NWSL has no expansion draft or annual college draft. “Everything was a sales pitch,” says Cushing. “That was really difficult in July and August.”
On the flip side, the Summit were not limited to just one first-round draft pick. Cushing believes they have signed what would have been four of the first six or seven picks if there had been a draft this year: Jasmine Aikey of Stanford, crowned the college game’s best player last year, Yuna McCormack, who won the 2025 NCAA championship with Florida State, and Devin Lynch and Natalie Means from Duke and Georgetown, respectively.
Cushing was also responsible for building his own backroom staff, and sought NWSL experience and previously-established connections. He brought in Angela Salem, a former NWSL player and later an assistant coach with 2024 expansion team Bay FC, and Alan Mahon, who had been his City assistant, plus Julie Twaddle, previously head of performance at City and Racing Louisville, and ex-City and England No 1 Karen Bardsley as the goalkeeping coach.
The Summit’s first ever head coach sought the advice of England and City legends Steph Houghton and Jill Scott, along with other coaching mentors, about what he should say on day one to a whole new group of players and staff.
Cushing’s message centred around transparency and consistency.
“I’m here to win, to create a winning team, and a team that can win for the fans,” he told the group. “The way that we go about it is the important part, but the bottom line is everything we do is to create a culture and style that is going to consistently give us the opportunity to make progress and win.”
He believes a style of play should promote behaviours that feed into the team culture. For example, hard work, commitment and communication are essential to an aggressive, pressing team. “If you don’t have those attitudes, you won’t be good at the way you want to play,” he says. “It’s very simple.”
Off-field culture is just as important. Pre-season trips to California’s Palm Springs and Santa Barbara or a visit to the Denver-based National Western Stock Show help, but it is more about consciously cultivating an environment by connecting people with the team’s vision and promoting peer-to-peer leadership and communication.
“I’ve learned you never finish culture, ever,” Cushing says. “You have to consistently reflect. Consistent messaging, behaviour and standards. That’s how you create a winning culture.”
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
NWSL, Women's Soccer
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