Here’s a fun fact about ACFC Interim Head Coach Becki Tweed and ACFC Goalkeeping Coach Dan Ball: when they were both assistants at Gotham, the two were housemates for a year.
Tweed, says Ball, is “the tidiest person you’ll ever meet.”
“The place was spick and span,” he says. “She did the vacuum seven times a day. She loved to do the washing-up; we had a dishwasher, but she didn’t want to use it.”
There’s a risk of drawing a parallel here that’s a little too cute, but you don’t have to stretch too far to see the connection between Tweed’s preference for washing dishes by hand and some of the qualities that define her as a coach.
“She's willing to work hard, she's committed to the details, and when little things are out of place, that bothers her,” Ball says.
“And she’s a delight to be around,” he adds.
Angel City is still undefeated since Tweed took over in June, and the most visible change is the new catchword around training: competition.
That’s not to say the players haven’t always been competitive, but the interim coach has built competition into their day-to-day in new ways.
“You ask most people what they’re playing for, and they play to win, right?” says Tweed. “Or I would hope that’s what they’d say! So if you play to win, you need to win something every day.”
In Angel City’s training environment, that holds true on multiple levels. Most literally, there’s the “Champions League,” a running intra-team competition that started at the beginning of the season, where players earn points at a different training activity each day. One day it might be a 7v7 scrimmage, the next a possession drill.
In a more general sense, training is scrappier and more physical than it’s ever been, with the aim to safely prepare players for what they’ll face on the pitch in the rough-and-tumble NWSL. Tweed has added elements of contact to all parts of a training session, starting with the warmup.
“The game doesn't always look ideal or how you want it to look,” Tweed says. “The question is, how do you overcome those moments? How do you stay calm in the chaos? I think if we can create those pictures daily, nothing comes as a surprise on the weekends.”
You can see the difference during games. “If you've noticed, lots more of our women have gone to ground in the last seven games,” says Ball, “or gone to compete aerially. They’re more comfortable doing that because they’re feeling contact in the warmup.”
And of course, playing time is on the line. “There has to be some kind of value behind competition,” says Tweed.
“You can’t expect the team to just walk up to a game and compete, and then train for five days,” adds Ball. “We now compete for five days, and then demonstrate to the world what we've been competing like on the weekend.”
The emphasis on intra-squad competition is unsurprising for a coach who, when asked about her favorite part of coaching, answers “winning” without a moment’s hesitation. “I don't think there's any better feeling than winning a game. I don't think it'll ever get old or boring,” she says.
Tweed’s journey starts in Bristol, in the southwest of England, where she grew up in a football-mad family. Her dad coached her younger brother’s team, and Tweed started playing with the boys and on the street when she was around ten. “It wasn’t until I was maybe 14 that the first girls’ team was made at my local club,” she says.
That team didn’t have a lot to work with. Tweed would sometimes play an afternoon game in the same kit her brother had worn in the morning, and they only trained once a week. But despite the lack of resources, she looks back on those years fondly.
“The other six days [when we didn’t train], I would just go play with my friends,” she remembers. “We’d put sweatshirts down and reenact David Beckham free kicks, and play headers and volleys until it became dark and you couldn't play outside anymore.”
Switching to the girls’ team brought a shift in perspective. Because it was so new—and because many fewer girls at the time played football in England—they weren’t as good as the boys’ team. “It's so funny, you don't realize what's outside your local team,” she says. “When I started to play for the girls’ team, I was like, ‘Oh, I'm actually okay.’”
Tweed stayed at Bristol City through her teen years, eventually moving to the senior team.
“When I go home now and go back to the club, there’s still some of the same people there, but it’s crazy different to what it used to be,” Tweed says. In place of the single girls’ team that started when she was there, the club now has girls’ teams at every age group. The senior team now plays at Ashton Gate, the same stadium the men’s side plays at.
Bristol, like all but a few top women’s clubs in England at the time, wasn’t professional, with players getting basic expenses paid for but not much else. After Tweed finished her education at the club’s academy (unlike in the US, an English academy is a literal school in addition to a soccer team), she started coaching at the youth level on the side. Initially it was a practical step—“I wanted to work in football but didn't have the opportunity to make enough money,” she says—but she also found she loved that side of the game.
After a year at the London-based club Millwall Lionesses, Tweed came to the States.
At Jersey Blues, a WPSL side in New Jersey, she found the perfect setup: in addition to playing at what was then the highest level of women’s club soccer in the US, the club connected her with coaching opportunities at the youth level. After a few years of bouncing back and forth between Jersey and England, she landed a full-time job coaching girls at STA in Morristown, New Jersey.
Tweed’s range of experiences with coaching and being coached—much of it within an underfunded landscape that wasn’t setting girls and women up to succeed in the sport—gave her an appreciation for the importance of real coaching tailored to individual players.
“When I first started to get coached, I was probably 15, 16,” she says. “At your local clubs, it was dads and volunteers. I’m super grateful, but I look back and imagine if I could have been coached from eight years old.”
Tweed went to collegiate soccer next, helping lead the women's team at Monmouth University to a conference championship. In early 2020, she sent her resume to the head coach of what was then Sky Blue FC, Freya Coombe. She went with the team to “The Bubble”—the first Challenge Cup, held in Sandy, Utah in a contained environment in the depths of the pandemic lockdown—and landed a full-time job with the club the year they rebranded as Gotham FC.
Two years later, Coombe asked her to come out west to join the Angel City staff.
In her two years at Gotham, Tweed came into her own as a coach. Working under three head coaches—Coombe, Scott Parkinson, and Hugh Menzies—gave her a firsthand view of what worked and what didn’t. Another formative coaching experience was her time as an assistant to Tracey Kevins, head coach of the U-20 USWNT, in 2022.
“The Becki that rocked up here in January is notably different to the person that I spent a year with,” says Ball. “She had more of a fringe role at Gotham, and now she's like the engine. She's got a really clear idea as to what she wants from both the women on the field and the staff off the field.”
Midfielder Elizabeth Eddy played under Tweed at Gotham and was struck by that growth from the first phone call she had with the interim head coach, before she came to LA at the end of June.
“Becki called me, and she said, here's my vision. This is where I see you. This is how we're going to play. This style suits you,” says Eddy. “She was really clear about what the team’s style is. She went from being a nice, newer assistant coach, to being totally capable of head coaching.”
That kind of clear communication and transparency is a big part of who Tweed is as a coach, who says building trust with players is the first priority. “You can have the best players in the world,” she explains, “and if you can't get the best out of them, it doesn't matter.”
“At this level, you have to know why,” she continues. “Building relationships with players where they trust you is really important to any age group, but at this age group more than anything. Players at this level, if you don't believe in it, they know.”
There’s an element of vulnerability in that dynamic. “You have to be able to at some point say, I got it wrong,” she explains. “What I also think is okay is when players can see the game differently and actually speak about it. You can't be the coach that says, ‘it’s my way or no way.’ You need to have your ideas and convictions, but you have to be open minded and let other people into that.”
Tweed has learned things about herself in these last two months, too. One lesson mirrors what has been one of the most noticeable changes on the field—the team’s ability to see games out to the end.
“I'm pretty calm under pressure,” she says. “If someone would ask me, ‘Do you get stressed out?’ I would say yes. But I think over the last few months of coaching, I'm not as stressed as I thought I would be. I can take a breath and let it go. I can talk through things and make things make sense without feeling panicked about it.”
“That's something I didn't know I had in me, at all.”