Sports Illustrated - USA (2022-05)

first looking back. To an outsider, it may have felt as if the

NWSL’s turmoil came out of nowhere in 2021: The league

had been operating seemingly as normal one week and

was engulfed in scandal the next, following more reports

from the Post and The Athletic.

The first player to speak out was on the Spirit, defender

Kaiya McCullough, who had left the team the previous

year because of what she described as a verbally abusive

training environment under the coaching staff—scream-

ing, personal attacks, threats and racist remarks. She

came forward to the Post in August. At the time, she did

not realize how many other players might have similar

stories from other coaches: “It wasn’t like I was trying to

spark some sort of reckoning,” McCullough says now. “I

was just trying to heal my own wounds

and rectify what happened to me and

people who I knew suffered in similar

ways on my own team.” Within a few

months, the landscape around the

league was radically different.

“We had just accepted, maybe, things

that we shouldn’t have for the sake

of having a league,” says Kingsbury.

“We just want to play—like, this is our

dream job. So I think for many years,

people looked the other way for the

sake of having a job the next year. But

it was finally like, Enough is enough.

Let’s bring it to the light.”

Yet pushing for change can be

daunting when there was real scar tis-

sue from the unsuccessful experiences

of past leagues: The first attempt at

women’s pro soccer, WUSA, lasted from

2001 to ’03, while the second, WPS,

survived from only ’09 to ’12. Those

collapses are cautionary tales. The

older players had lived those losses.

As long as there had been an NWSL,

there had been an implicit message

that players should just be grateful

they had any U.S. pro league at all—no

matter how poor the conditions.

“Players in the early aughts—

we were concerned about making

the league look bad or making our

teams look bad because everything

felt so tenuous and fragile,” says

NWSL Players Association execu-

tive director Meghann Burke, herself

a retired goalkeeper who played in

those past leagues. “It was different

this time around.”

When players came forward, they

were met not with a message that

they were hurting the league but with

support from big sponsors such as

Budweiser and Mastercard. There

had been a shift in the greater land-

scape around player activism; athletes

across sports had spent the last few

years speaking up, and some spon-

sors embraced that advocacy. There

was an easier path for more players

SPORTS

ILLUSTRATED

SI.COM

MAY 2022

69

Changemakers

TRINITY RODMAN

Forward

ASHLEY HATCH

Forward

ASHLEY SANCHEZ

Forward

AUBREY KINGSBURY

Goalkeeper

KELLEY O’HARA

Defender

ANDI SULLIVAN

Midfielder

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