On Monday, the Washington Spirit announced their new head coach and the return of a familiar face.

Mark Parsons is back in the NWSL after a year away. The 36-year-old coach got his start in the NWSL with the Spirit, coaching the team from 2013-15 before taking the helm at the Portland Thorns and leading them to the 2017 championship. In 2021, Parsons left the U.S. for a short-lived role as manager of the Netherlands, with whom he parted ways this past summer after a disappointing Euros campaign.

There’s no question that Parsons has the NWSL experience to guide the Spirit back into the playoff picture in 2023, but his appointment also begs a few questions for the upcoming year.

A new era in Washington

The Spirit’s 2021 championship run appeared to set a foundation for long-term success, but since Michele Kang took over as primary owner in March, the club has undergone a full operational overhaul.

Kang hired famed Florida State coach Mark Krikorian in June to build out Washington’s infrastructure, and his influence became clear right away. Kris Ward was removed as head coach in August after an incident at practice, and youth and college coach Albertin Montoya stepped in as interim manager. The season ended in disappointment, with the reigning champions and 2022 Challenge Cup finalists finishing in 11th place with a 3-9-10 record and failing to make the playoffs, and indicated that more broad-stroke changes might be necessary.

Then the real work began. Krikorian hired Morinao Imaizumi (also formerly of FSU) to the team’s technical staff and made one of the biggest splashes of the offseason with the hiring of former U.S. women’s national team high performance director Dawn Scott. The appointments have been an ambitious attempt at assembling some of the biggest names in the sport in the U.S.

The team also made early offseason roster decisions that indicated a work in progress. USWNT veteran Kelley O’Hara opted to leave the club, signing with Gotham FC in free agency last week. Washington then chose not to retain Taylor Aylmer, Averie Collins, Devon Kerr, Karina Rodriguez, Audrey Harding, Alia Martin and Gaby Vincent.

According to Parsons, what happens next begins with Krikorian, and the rest goes back to Kang.

“He’s got the main job of executing this vision. I’m just grateful to be able to come in and play a part in it,” Parsons said.

“After multiple conversations with Michele, it’s clear that not only does she have the vision, but she’s acting and she’s putting everything into that vision. Every time I speak with her and Mark, something else has happened, the club has moved forward again.”

Parsons left the NWSL in 2021 after eight years in the league, at the time citing his desire to be closer to family in England as a major part of that decision. Kang, he said, tipped the scale in his willingness to return. The Spirit are attempting to modernize their staff and create a formidable infrastructure that can remain competitive no matter who is on the sideline.

‘The star of the team will be the team’

Parsons’ reputation upon his return to the NWSL can be looked at multiple ways. He led the Spirit to two playoff appearances and won a championship and two NWSL Shields with the Thorns. The decision to leave Portland was a personal one, and not driven by results.

His approach, however, did not translate well to the Netherlands, which he readily admitted on Monday.

“I gave everything, I think the staff gave everything, I think the players did,” he said. “But in the end, I felt passionately that for the better of the team, and also for the better of me, that this challenge was probably too much.”

Parsons isn’t the first coach with club success to run into problems at the international level, but his issues with the Netherlands underline some of the specificities of his coaching style. Reports of hours-long team meetings centered around culture that might be galvanizing in a club environment did not have the same effect on Parsons’ Dutch squad. Although the team struggled with injuries, the results never changed.

That approach is likely what Kang and Krikorian are looking for as Parsons returns to the Spirit. He will have control over the team’s draft and other transactions before a full preseason with the team. He will also have to figure out how to manage the team’s young stars in Trinity Rodman and Ashley Sanchez, creative playmakers who have thrived with a certain amount of freedom.

Parsons cited assistant coach Angela Salem, a former Thorns midfielder, as an important part of that process.

“Having someone who has been on the playing side is important, but also speeds up the messaging for the staff and also the players,” he said. “She knows the good side, but she also knows the parts where I’m going to be challenging because I want to be able to support these players with my heart, with everything I’ve got. But I’m also going to challenge and push.”

Parsons’ fit in Washington will likely hinge on his mentality that “the star player is the team” as well as his ability to manage high-level talent.

“I had an opportunity to talk to the team earlier on, and I said, ‘You’re going to hear a lot from me on values, behaviors and trust, and how we can build authentic trust,” Parsons said.

The success of that trust could make or break a season.

And while Parson is a proven hire, having yet another NWSL coaching search end with a familiar name might move the needle forward for the Spirit, but not for the league at large. Krikorian told the media that while he felt the hiring process was fair, the Spirit did not use a hiring committee in their search.

“It was just a couple of us that were making the choice,” Krikorian said.

As the NWSL struggles to make significant strides in opportunities for both women in leadership roles and coaches and executives of color, Washington will try to turn back the clock with Parsons under the watchful eye of fans.

Claire Watkins is a Staff Writer at Just Women’s Sports. Follow her on Twitter @ScoutRipley.

Seven-time Olympic gold medalist Katie Ledecky will receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, at a White House ceremony this afternoon. 

The Team USA standout is the most decorated women’s swimmer in the sport’s history. In addition to her seven Olympic golds, she’s also won a total of 21 gold medals at the World Championships, the most of any swimmer regardless of gender. 

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The esteemed award recognizes those who have "made exemplary contributions to the prosperity, values, or security of the United States, world peace, or other significant societal, public or private endeavors," according to a White House press briefing. 

Ledecky is one of 19 medal recipients chosen by the Biden administration this year. She joins a class that spans the worlds of politics, sports, film, human rights, religion, and science. Her fellow 2024 awardees include Everything Everywhere All at Once actress Michelle Yeoh, pioneering Hispanic astronaut Dr. Ellen Ochoa, and former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, plus posthumous winners Jim Thorpe, the first Native American to win an Olympic gold medal for the US, and assassinated civil rights leader Medgar Evers. 

Olympic gymnast Simone Biles and USWNT legend Megan Rapinoe were among 2022’s class of Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients. Biles and Rapinoe were the fifth and sixth women athletes to be given the honor, making Ledecky the seventh.

After an illustrious career for both club and country, Gotham FC and U.S. Women’s National Team defender Kelley O’Hara announced today via Kelley on the Street that she will be retiring from professional soccer at the end of this year, making the 2024 NWSL season her last.

"I have always said I would play under two conditions: that I still love playing soccer, and if my body would let me do it the way I wanted to," O’Hara told Just Women’s Sports in the lead-up to her retirement announcement. "I realized a while back that I was always going to love it, so it was the physical piece that was going to be the deciding factor."

The 35-year-old will retire as a two-time World Cup champion, an Olympic gold medalist, and at least a two-time NWSL champion, depending on where Gotham finishes this season. Her legacy as a player is hard to fully encapsulate, and will forever run through some of the biggest snapshots in USWNT and NWSL history. 

In 2012, O’Hara played every minute of the USWNT’s Olympic gold medal run, after having recently converted into a defender. Her soaring goal off the bench in the 2015 World Cup semifinal is the stuff of legend. And her return from lingering injury to play in every knockout match of the national team’s 2019 World Cup win cemented a storybook international career. 

It was O’Hara who scored the overtime goal in 2021 to earn the Washington Spirit their first-ever NWSL championship, and O’Hara who returned to help see Gotham earn a title in 2023 after years spent in the trenches with the club’s previous iteration, Sky Blue. Her 15-year career spanned two professional women’s soccer leagues in the U.S. (she earned her first professional title in 2010 with WPS’s FC Gold Pride), as well as sweeping changes to the sport both on and off the pitch.

On the field, O’Hara has always been known for a motor that never quits, making the right flank her domain in attacking possession and defensive transition. In recent years, she’s also been celebrated for a competitive fire that raises the level of her teammates, whether she’s in the starting XI or supporting from the bench.

But injuries take a toll, a reality not always seen by the fans watching from home. "I've never taken anything for granted, and I feel like I've never coasted either," O’Hara said of her late-career success in the NWSL despite battling injuries. "I've always been like, 'I gotta put my best foot forward every single day I step on this field' — which is honestly probably half the reason why I'm having to retire now as opposed to getting a couple more years out of it. I've just grinded hard."

Recently, O’Hara has been sidelined at Gotham with ankle and knee injuries, and the situation motivated her to really prioritize listening to her body. "To get injured and come back, and get injured and come back, and just keep doing it, it really takes a toll on you.

"People don't see the doubt that's associated with injury,” she continued. "As athletes we feel a certain way, we perform a certain way, our body feels a certain way, we're very in tune with our bodies. And there's always so much doubt surrounding injury. It’s like, 'Can I feel the way I felt before?' The reality is sometimes you don't."

O’Hara didn’t arrive at the decision to move on from her playing career lightly. But once she began seriously considering making 2024 her final year during the last NWSL offseason, it felt right. "Once I was like, 'Alright, you know what, this will be my last year,' I have had a lot of peace with it," she said. "Truly the only thing I felt was gratitude for everything that my career has been, all the things I've been able to do and the people I've been able to do it with."

She said she’ll miss daily interactions with her teammates and all the amazing memories they’ve created, though she feels lucky to have formed relationships that go beyond sharing a locker room. "You're basically getting to hang out and just shoot the shit with your best friends every day," she reflected. "Which is so unheard of, and I just feel very lucky to do it for so long."

The Stanford graduate also mentioned that the NWSL’s suspension of regular season play in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic made her realize how much playing allowed her the space to simply be creative every day. The tactical elements of soccer provided O’Hara an outlet for problem solving and made use of her naturally competitive edge.

She’s now gearing up to channel her on-field intensity into her post-playing career full time, which is a new chapter she’s excited to begin. "I don't know if the world's ready for it, like the fact that I'm not going to be putting all of my energy into football all the time," she said with a laugh. 

O’Hara said she would like to stay connected to the game in some fashion, whether it be as an owner, coach, or member of a front office. She’s also interested in the growing media space surrounding women’s sports, having provided on-camera analysis for broadcasters like CBS Sports in addition to starting a production company with her fiancée.

"I just feel like I have a lot of passions, and things that excite me," she says. "And I do want to stay as close as I can to the game, because I feel a responsibility — and I'm not sure in what capacity — to continue to grow it."

A sense of responsibility to grow the game has been a consistent refrain for the USWNT and NWSL players of O’Hara’s era, who ushered in a new age of equal pay for the national team and collectively bargained protections for those in the league. The landscape for new players looks different than it did 14 years ago, in large part due to this pivotal generation.

"I feel an immense sense of pride around that, because I don't know if any of us knew that was gonna happen," she said. "We kind of, as things unfolded, took the next step towards changing what women's football looks like in this country and around the world.

"I'm really grateful to have been part of this era with the players that I was [with], not backing down and pushing and knowing that was the right thing to do."

Whatever the future holds, O’Hara is going ahead full throttle. It’s a piece of advice she’d also give to the next generation of professionals looking to make their own impact.

"Whatever you do in life, do it because you love it, and the chips will fall in place," she said. "If you love something, you're willing to do what it takes. You're willing to make the sacrifices, you're willing to handle the roller coaster.

"To me, it's simple. Don't do it for any other reason but that, and I think you'll be alright."

The Phoenix Mercury center spoke with Robin Roberts about her 10-month incarceration, reflecting on her poor living conditions and shaky mental state ahead of her May 7th memoir.

"The mattress had a huge blood stain on it. I had no soap, no toilet paper," Griner told the ABC News anchor in last night’s 20/20 special. "That was the moment where I just felt less than a human." 

She also detailed some of her lowest moments during that time, saying with tears in her eyes that she went so far as to consider taking her own life on more than one occasion. However, the thought of Russian officials not releasing her body back to her family made her reconsider.

"I just didn't think I could get through what I needed to get through," said Griner.

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In February 2022, Griner was arrested and charged with drug possession and smuggling by a Russian court after Sheremetyevo International Airport police found vape cartridges containing hashish oil in her luggage. The cartridges were prescribed by Griner’s doctor for chronic pain back in Arizona, where medical marijuana is legal. In the interview, the two-time Olympic gold medalist said she had a "mental lapse" while packing, and never intended to bring the cannabis products with her when she returned to play for UMMC Ekaterinburg.

"It's just so easy to have a mental lapse," Griner said. "Granted, my mental lapse was on a more grand scale. But it doesn't take away from how that can happen." 

She was later sentenced to nine years behind bars after her Russian attorneys advised her to plead guilty the following July. Griner was then sent to a remote penal colony where she was forced to spend her days cutting cloth to make military uniforms. From there, it only got worse.

"Honestly, it just had to happen," she said when asked about her decision to cut off her signature long locks. "We had spiders above my bed making nests.

"My dreads started to freeze," she added. "They would just stay wet and cold and I was getting sick. You've gotta do what you've gotta do to survive."

Shortly after Griner’s initial arrest, the U.S. State Department classified her case as wrongfully detained, escalating its urgency within the government and calling even more attention to the situation. On December 8th, she was freed in a prisoner exchange negotiated by the Biden administration.

While she told Roberts she was "thrilled" when she got the news, she was also very upset about having to leave fellow wrongful detainee Paul Whelan behind. She also continues to carry guilt about her arrest, saying "At the end of the day, it's my fault. And I let everybody down."

Griner’s memoir, Coming Home, hits shelves on May 7th.

"Coming Home begins in a land where my roots developed and is the diary of my heartaches and regrets," Griner told ABC News in an exclusive statement. "But, ultimately, the book is also a story of how my family, my faith, and the support of millions who rallied for my rescue helped me endure a nightmare."

Longtime USWNT fixture Carli Lloyd took to Instagram Wednesday morning to announce that she’s pregnant with her first child. 

"Baby Hollins coming in October 2024!" she wrote. The caption framed a collaged image of baby clothes, an ultrasound photo, and syringes indicating what she described as a "rollercoaster" fertility journey.

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In a Women’s Health story published in tandem with Lloyd’s post, the Fox Sports analyst and correspondent opened up about her struggles with infertility and the lengthy IVF treatments she kept hidden from the public eye.

"Soccer taught me how to work hard, persevere, be resilient, and never give up. I would do whatever it took to prepare, and usually when I prepared, I got results," Lloyd told Women’s Health’s Amanda Lucci. "But I found out that I didn’t know much about this world. I was very naive to think that we wouldn’t have any issues getting pregnant. And so it began."

Lloyd went on to discuss her road to pregnancy in great detail, sharing the highs and lows of the process and expressing gratitude for the care and support her family and medical team provided along the way. She rounded out the piece with a nod toward others navigating the same challenges, encouraging people to share their own pregnancy journeys, painful as they may be.

"My story is currently a happy one, but I know there are other women who are facing challenges in their pregnancy journey. I see you and I understand your pain," she said. "My hope is that more and more women will speak up about this topic, because their stories helped me. I also wish for more resources, funding, and education around fertility treatments. There is much to be done, and I hope I can play a role in helping."

The 41-year-old New Jersey native retired from professional soccer in 2021, closing out her decorated career with 316 international appearances, the second-most in USWNT history, in addition to 134 international goals. A legend on the field, Lloyd walked away from the game with two World Cups, two Olympic gold medals, and two FIFA Player of the Year awards.