konknaijaboy | On 07, Jul 2015

As the United States celebrates its victory in the Women’s World Cup, girls across the country are sporting their Carli Lloyd jerseys, dreaming of running the field in 2019 or 2023.

One of the residual victors from this year’s tournament, which raked in an unprecedented 22.86 million viewers in Sunday’s 5-2 win over Japan — making it the highest rated soccer game in the U.S. on a single network — will be youth soccer organizations, which can expect to see an uptick in participants as a result of the success of superstars like Carli Lloyd and Hope Solo. In 1999, after the U.S. women’s soccer team last won a world cup, 7.3 million females ages 6 and older participated in soccer, which was a 20 percent increase from the 6.06 million participants in 1987, according to Public Radio International. And this most recent victory — which got very public support from high-profile figures like Beyoncé, Barack Obama, and Justin Timberlake — is sure to have a similar effect, helping boost the youth soccer participation numbers, which were steady from 2008 to 2012, according to the United States Soccer Federation.

STORY: Meet the Moms of the U.S. National Soccer Team

“There is no question that we will be a beneficiary of this victory,” Ian McMahon, national executive director of the American Youth Soccer Organization (AYSO), tells Yahoo Parenting. “Anytime there is a success as high-profile as this, with this record number of viewers, for us as an organization, we would expect to see a surge in young girls wanting to play soccer. We believe that, with what we offer, they’ll come in and want to play soccer longer and become advocates for the game. It doesn’t matter where they end up — it’s just about being active, coming out, trying soccer, having fun.”

AYSO, which counts U.S. national team member Alex Morgan among its alumnae, currently has 204,893 girls registered in the U.S., and they expect that number to increase steadily between this World Cup victory and the upcoming Olympics. But it’s not just girls who were excited by this week’s big win. “We had people in the studio who have sons and no daughters, and they were wearing the jerseys of Abby Wambach or Carli Lloyd,” Fox Sports analyst Kyndra de St. Aubin,

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