This article supplements information found on page 10 of the Jan. 22, 2001 issue of Soccer America Magazine. Here’s more topics U.S. women’s national team coach April Heinrichs covered in her interview with Dean Caparaz: In retrospect, would you have changed any aspects of your preparation or of how you played in the Olympics? You can always look back and say what if I’d done this or we had done this better. There will be a multitude of lessons learned from the Olympics. We have to be careful with what ifs. As our sports psychologist says, they often turns into whiffs. The last thing you want to do is second-guess yourselves so much you don’t believe in what your philosophy is anymore. I truly believe we put out best team out on the field for all five games. I truly believe we had peak performances in four out of five of those games. When we’re playing as well as we did, you don’t necessarily make changes for the sake of those. I look back on the Olympics and think what if we had done this or done that, done one more training session on xyz topic. We did everything possible to win that title game. We did everything right and didn’t win. Does that mean we’re losers? By no means. Now that the tournament is over, can you say whether this was the best team that the United States ever produced? I think this is the best performances the United States of America has ever put together in a major world event. In which Olympic game did your team not play its best? Brazil. I really believe a lot of things culminated in a less-than-peak performance in the Brazil game. We had one less day rest than Brazil did. Secondly, anyone who’s trekked through a world tournament knows that the tension mounts. Our performance against Brazil [in a domestic friendly on] Sept. 1 and the way we dominated that game may have contributed to us entering that [Olympic] game with a lack of nervousness. I think nervousness is very healthy. At the same time when you play teams 10 days before the Olympics start, they’re bound to learn something. We played Norway eight times, played Brazil 10 days before Olympics started. I don’t think that was the wisest choice. You’ve got to schedule games because you didn’t have a club environment in place this year. The schedule is often out of the coach’s hands. Did you have enough time off between the Glory Tour and the China games to recharge your batteries? I’m really doing great now. The first 5-6 days was hard. Just exhaustion and probably more so mentally than physically. Then I sort of threw myself into youth issues. I traveled with the U-16 national team for eight days. I’m trying to set a structure for the national staff coaches around the country, I love youth development. I love working with ODP. It’s a tremendous passion in my life and has been for a long time. I never knew there was a difference between ODP and national teams, that one was USYSA-driven and one was U.S. Soccer-driven, although both under the U.S. Soccer umbrella. I love watching 14 year olds who are great at what they do. They are so green and have wide open eyes. I’m doing good. I was still tired when we played [against Canada] in Columbus. It was really tough to coach because the players were tired and the coaching staff was tired. After the Columbus game, then I got my feet again and I’ve been great ever since.