Erin McLeod is a goalkeeper for the Orlando Pride, who spent this fall playing on loan to Stjarnan, in Iceland. McLeod has recorded 118 caps in her career for the Canadian National Team, and at age 37, is still going strong as she competes for a shot at the Tokyo Olympics. JWS spoke with McLeod about her career persistence, the benefits of mindfulness, and the perspective she’s gained as a veteran player. 

I wanted to start with just chatting about your soccer career. You’ve obviously been around the game for a long time. Can you compare this past year soccer-wise to anything else in your career?

Oh gosh. I would have to say that, for obvious reasons, the pandemic has made this year more challenging and interesting and difficult in a lot of different ways. For me personally, I was really happy to be with Orlando, back on North American soil. And then obviously we weren’t able to go to the Challenge Cup with the team which was a bummer, so I just feel very fortunate that I was able to come to Iceland and to still play and to be healthy.

I think the other thing that has really come to the forefront this year with obviously Black Lives Matter and politics, is that it’s been really cool to stand up for things beyond just soccer. In some ways, it’s been really incredible, I think, as far as raising our self-awareness and understanding the topics around us.

You’ve played for a variety of teams in Europe over the last five years. What has kept you coming back?

Well, this year is kind of unique because of the pandemic. I’ve been wanting to be in the U.S. to be in a similar time zone to my family, but I really love the football in Europe, in the sense that it’s really helped me to evolve the tactical side of my game. And now you all these NWSL players here, and I think we all are becoming stronger tactically, stronger technically, stronger athletically. And the soccer culture in Europe is happy all the time, and everyone is crazy about it. I just love that. I think that it is also growing. That’s a huge draw for sure.

You signed with Orlando but, as you mentioned, the team couldn’t play in the Challenge Cup due to positive Covid tests. Can you talk about that situation and what that was like from your perspective?

It was hard just because we were so close to the tournament, and we had worked so hard, and we were feeling really connected as a group. It was such a hard thing to swallow, especially because we had been so careful and we were essentially in a training bubble.

Historically, Orlando hadn’t done well for years, and I was excited to be a newcomer to the team and realize how much it really means to them to play and get better. And then for that to happen, it was hard. And you see a lot of pride with people when things are really challenging. But I think the way that the team rallied and had a lot of new players coming into the mix, that really impressed me during the Fall Series.

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How much longer do you hope to keep playing for?

That is a great question. I don’t know. The thing is right now, I feel really good and healthy and I love the game so much. I try not to put an end date on it when I would really love to plan out a year, you know, make it to the Olympics. I would love to be on that Olympics squad. And I know it’s a far stretch, but yes, in a dream world I would play another year and then, you know, hopefully be healthy and in a good place to evaluate whether to play another year or turn off. At my age, it’s kind of a day by day kind of thing, you know?

How do you think your motivation to keep playing has changed over the years? I could imagine it’s different now than say when you were like 25.

Oh, absolutely. I think when I was with Denver, I would say I was a lot more selfish, in the sense that what I was most concerned with was probably my own development, to be pretty honest. And I was obsessed with being the best and being number one, and I wanted to be the best in the world. It’s not that I don’t want those things now, it’s just the thing I get really excited about is now I’m playing on a team and I come back and some 16 year old is on my team and I see their parents pick them up who are my age, and I’m like, alright.

But I see these young, talented players, and I think you want to see them get the most out of themselves, and that for me is motivating. And playing on a team where I can play forever and give to the team — I really love that. And driving a standard and creating and focusing on the things I can control and also trying to have an impact in a positive way. It’s much more exciting now than it has been in the past.

You’ve lived a very active life off the field in terms of your art, your philanthropic works, and your clothing lines. Do you think having all these other passions has helped extend your soccer career by helping you keep perspective and have creative outlets? 

Oh yeah, absolutely. I think for me, there’ve been a few moments in my career where I was forced to step away from the game and I kind of lost my identity and who I was. And I think what’s important and what I really encourage young people to do is to find things that they love but to still find that balance. And it’s still something that I struggle with, because I want to do so many things.

I’ve really learned to make sure now I try to go for walks, meditation walks, just making time away from the field actually helps my game. So it’s important, not just for my game, but also for my mental health.

Can you give a quick intro on The Mindful Project and how mindfulness was introduced into your life?

So I met Dr. Rachel Lindvall, my partner, who has her doctorate in mindfulness, a number of years ago. Her and her husband worked in Europe to get inspiration for their university soccer in the US and long story short, they were in Jena in Germany when I was in the Bundesliga. And they said, Hey, we’re in town. You know, I didn’t speak a lick of German, and I was broke and they were like, do you want to go for dinner? And I was like, yes, please.

So we first started chatting about soccer and it naturally transitioned into mindfulness. And at that point I had already been using a lot of mindfulness for my soccer, but also off the field, so we started chatting. And then we also talked about mental habits and mindset and at what age we start developing these, how they can work against us, even at three and half, four years old.

That’s kind of where we started, discussing how can we just help young people develop positive habits and develop those mindsets. That’s how it started, and we created a sports program and an education program for kids eight to 12, 13 years old and we ended up getting into a lot of after-school programs.

And, and then we ended up trying the same program on a couple of Rachel’s classes and her university team, and the results were unbelievable. And it’s like the increase in quality of life was like 200%, and then the decrease in stress and anxiety was 194%, and we’re like, we can do something about this. Then we started talking about a way to create a high performance program and shipping it over.

For me personally, I had a moment in my career in 2008 at the Beijing Olympics where depression had become so much, that I remember actually wanting to get hurt, because I couldn’t handle the pressure anymore. I was afraid of playing. I was afraid of making mistakes. Long story short, I tore my ACL, and I just re-evaluated everything, how I was working so hard just to be miserable. I had to change. And for me, that was kind the moment where I started evaluating my mindset and then a few years later, we had this wonderful trainer who gave me all these breathing tricks and focus tricks and awareness tricks which d opened my vision to see the whole field. And I didn’t realize at the time that they were mindfulness tricks, and then I started reading more and more about it and it helped me obviously become more consistent, more in the present moment, which is key for athletes. And I just started enjoying it more.

And ever since then, Rachel and I have been committed to creating The Mindful Project, to help others when you’re on your own. It’s like, if I’m doubting now, this is my attempt to learn and see.

You’ve mentioned elsewhere that mindfulness could have changed your career and ended up being really useful for you. Is that your pitch to other athletes who may be considering it or is it something different?

I think the trend with a lot of athletes is that we’re hard on ourselves. What I’ve learned from the research side, because of Rachel and her research, is being hard on yourself doesn’t help them learn any faster. It actually slows your learning and it makes it less enjoyable. So for me, it’s becoming aware of my self-talk, where my self compassion was at, how I viewed mistakes, and how I dealt with failure.

I think for me, if I could talk with athletes, it would first just be about enjoying it more, being in the present moment more. Because that moment where you just trust yourself and you let the ongoing monologue inside your head go for a second, it’s so liberating. And if you’ve got a great breathing thing and it keeps you focused when you’re stressed out, it’s also going to work when you’re off the field. And for me, it’s about the life tools that will help you become a better person.

That’s so well said. I wanted to end with talking about the upcoming 2021 Olympics. What is your status there? 

Well, we’re down to the wire, because obviously, you know, the pandemic made it really challenging. There was supposed to be a camp in October, which I was invited to. And you know, I think it’s been over a year since I’ve been with the national team. So I was obviously really excited about that, but it just wasn’t going to work with health and safety protocols. So I’m still in the mix, and there’s four keepers for Canada. And I can’t really say much more than that, but I’m in the mix and I think for me, that’s the first step. I think it’s important for me to stay healthy and to be playing games. You know, obviously I hope that will be possible. And with the pandemic and everything, we’ll see.

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 16 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.