Kelley O’Hara had a big decision to make when a stranger called her up in 2019 and asked her to be an athlete ambassador for an unknown sports media startup.

The person on the other end of the phone was Haley Rosen, founder and CEO of Just Women’s Sports, on a mission to give women’s sports more media coverage. As O’Hara picked Rosen’s brain about her goals and vision for the company, an idea for a podcast was floated — one that would give athletes an opportunity to share their stories in their own words.

“Oh, I love podcasts,” O’Hara told her at the time, merely making conversation. “I’ve always thought it would be fun to host one.”

“Do you want to host this one?” Rosen asked.

A few minutes turned into an hour-long conversation, and by the end, O’Hara figured she’d give it a go, despite wondering if she’d even be good at it. Never mind that she had no way of knowing where this venture would end up.

It was the fact that women’s sports received only 4 percent of sports media coverage that convinced O’Hara she had to take the opportunity.

“I like to say I’m an optimistic realist, but also am pretty, ‘I don’t know if this is going to work, but it’s something I want to be a part of because it sounds like something that is going to address a problem that I see and that affects me and a lot of other people,’” said O’Hara. “Therefore, I want to be part of it … You can’t be waiting around, looking for someone else to do it.”

Taking initiative during moments of unpredictability has also defined O’Hara’s career as a soccer player. In her first year with the Washington Spirit last season, the veteran defender built a reputation as a locker-room motivator and on-field leader, helping the young team overcome tremendous adversity to win the NWSL championship. Instilling a “never-say-die” mentality in the Spirit, O’Hara was critical to the team’s 12-game winning streak and come-from-behind victory in the title game, scoring the winning goal off of a header in extra time.

Nowadays, to hear O’Hara talk about her approach to her teams and her podcast feels like one in the same.

“There’s no point complaining. It’s just wasted energy,” O’Hara said. “For me it was like, I want to be part of the solution. I think this is an issue. I think this is something that if addressed and done properly, can take women’s sports to the next level.”

Learning from the best

O’Hara learned to embrace challenges head-on during her early days with the U.S. women’s national team. As a rookie in 2010, she looked up to the older players and the sacrifices they made on and off the field to push women’s soccer forward.

Through her podcast, rebranded this year as The Players’ Pod, O’Hara has had the chance to interview athletes at the top of their games and at the forefront of effecting change inside and outside of their sports.

Within hers, O’Hara has been a leading advocate in the U.S. women’s national team’s fight for equal pay. Nearly two decades after USWNT players sat out of a 1996 Olympic camp in protest of their bonus money, O’Hara was a part of the USWNT Players Association’s bargaining committee that reached a historic settlement in February with U.S. Soccer, which committed to equal pay rates for the men’s and women’s teams across tournaments.

An amazing photo on multiple levels: inside the USWNT labor talks Saturday (from team's since deleted Instagram story): pic.twitter.com/hjU5QPJ9Uf

— Andrew Das (@AndrewDasNYT) April 5, 2017

The USWNT’s performances on the field — including four World Cup titles and four Olympic gold medals — have been just as impactful in growing women’s soccer in the U.S. O’Hara cited Brandi Chastain’s game-winning penalty kick in the final of the 1999 World Cup, followed by her ripping her jersey off in celebration, as influencing her own journey.

“One of the most iconic pictures in sports history, in my opinion. A picture that elicits so many emotions in me,” O’Hara said. “Now, having gone through the career that I have and talking with her, I’m like, she’s just incredible. I definitely looked up to her when I was a kid, for sure.”

A key contributor to two of the USWNT’s World Cup championships, an Olympic gold medal in 2012 and a bronze last year, O’Hara cares deeply about upholding the program’s winning mentality and ultra-competitive culture.

Passing the torch

The USWNT roster looks very different now than it did just last summer at the Tokyo Olympics. Head coach Vlatko Andonovski has ushered in a new wave of talented, young players, who are vying for roster spots on next year’s World Cup roster and leaving many to wonder what that means for veterans such as Megan Rapinoe, Alex Morgan and Christen Press.

O’Hara was the only player on the USWNT’s April roster with more than 100 caps, giving her the responsibility of passing on the values she learned from her older teammates when she was a rookie.

“I’ve always looked at it as this sacred team,” O’Hara said. “I have a responsibility that I didn’t used to have to create the culture, contribute to the culture to make sure the team stays here, and not just stay here, but keep taking steps forward.”

Since moving to the Spirit in a trade from the Utah Royals in December 2020, and teaming up with USWNT newcomers Trinity Rodman and Ashley Sanchez, O’Hara has regular opportunities to impart those principles.

Spirit head coach Kris Ward says they joke all the time that O’Hara and fellow defender Emily Sonnett latched onto Rodman and Sanchez at the end of the 2021 season, helping them prepare for call-ups to the national team. Rodman and Sanchez were both invited to the November camp in Australia, which took place the same week they won the NWSL championship, and they have been named to every USWNT roster since then.

O’Hara, 33, is aware her career will wind down eventually, and she has begun to encourage some of the younger veterans to step into more vocal roles. Mallory Pugh, 24, and Rose Lavelle, 26, are two players Andonovski cited as emerging leaders during the most recent USWNT camp.

“It is not hard to see how much Kelley influences this team and how much of an example she is for this team and a leader,” Andonovski said in April.

“I think there are a handful of players who are waking up now, who realize that they are veterans, who might not have thought about it before but they are now,” O’Hara said. “I think it’s very exciting. I’ve told those players, ‘Guys, this is now your responsibility. You’ve got to take ownership of where this team goes.’”

Primed for success

The Spirit learned a lot about what they were capable of last season, finding success even as external factors — Richie Burke’s firing, a public ownership dispute, an investigation into workplace culture and multiple forfeits due to COVID-19 — continued to emerge and threaten their progress.

Now in a more secure environment, with Ward as head coach and Michele Kang as the new majority owner, O’Hara feels she can more easily channel her energy into winning games. It helps that on the field the Spirit are “really friggin’ good,” as O’Hara describes them.

As Washington transitions from the Challenge Cup final into the regular season and tries to make a run at a repeat NWSL championship, O’Hara has allowed herself more freedom in the attack, pushing into the opponent’s box from her position on the backline more frequently.

“She’s feeling that, and that’s emanating throughout the entire team to make them really feel like they’re building into something special,” Ward said.

Meanwhile, The Players’ Pod, now in its fifth season, continues to grow and reach new listeners. Always looking for ways to use the platform to push women’s sports forward, O’Hara has tapped into a vision she had from the first season: interviewing people like general managers, investors and coaches, who offer a wider range of perspectives and experiences within women’s sports.

O’Hara’s responsibilities as a host, teammate and leader are keeping her busy, and fueling her drive even more.

“Honestly, I couldn’t be happier with where I’m at in terms of my professional career and the team I get to play for,” she said.

Jessa Braun is a contributing writer at Just Women’s Sports covering the NWSL and USWNT. Follow her on Twitter @jessabraun.

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.