For most NWSL players, asking them to tell you how they got from their senior year of college to their current team results in a familiar story: success with their NCAA team, realizing that pro soccer was a true possibility, getting drafted, signing a contract, and earning minutes from there.
For Angel City defender Megan Reid, who with one more 90-minute appearance will have played every second of the expansion club’s first-ever regular season, the story is a little bit longer.
Speaking to Pro Soccer Wire over Zoom, the story of how she went from a college career at the University of Virginia to playing pro soccer in front of sellout crowds in LA requires nearly 12 uninterrupted minutes. It’s a journey involving loss, persistence (from Reid, and from others on her behalf), two-on-two games in a fire station garage, a dare from a friend, and nearly four years out of truly competitive soccer.
The 26-year-old offered a self-deprecating apology for being long-winded, but there’s nothing she could have left out.
It starts in 2016, when Reid’s father passed away. Reid was a junior at the time, looking ahead to her final season at the University of Virginia. At top NCAA programs, it’s customary for the coaching staff to start preparing a sort of resume for players who are going to pursue the game professionally, and as Reid went into her winter break in 2017, head coach Steve Swanson and his staff were doing the same for her.
The customary path with the familiar story was laid out. For Reid, it just wasn’t one she was ready to pursue in that moment.
“When I came back (to school), I was just like, ‘You know what? I don’t want to keep playing,'” said Reid, who saw sports as a bond she and her father had always shared. “It was just something that we were very much linked and connected with. So I think when he passed, I was not in a very good mental state… In the back of my head, I was always just like, ‘Oh, what would my dad say about this, or that?’ It just got to be a little bit too much for me, and I decided to put my mental health first.”
Reid had finished her degree up six months early, leaving her a semester in Charlottesville to process her grief, and to sort out what her next step was going to be. What struck her as the right move came from a discussion with her father.
“One of the last conversations that we had had before he passed was (about) what I wanted to do with my life,” said Reid, who had spent some time mulling over a career in the military. “I wanted to be able to stay active, I wanted to serve my community, I wanted to have a selfless career.”
For Reid’s father, the possibility of her being on the other side of the world was a tough one to take. Reid’s mother had passed when she was young, and keeping the family together was on his mind. “He was like, ‘Well, how about instead of the military, you do something within your community here?’
Reid lived close to a volunteer fire department in Charlottesville, and decided to give the idea a shot. She signed up for a ride-along on her 21st birthday, and the work spoke to her right away. Before she knew it, she was working towards becoming a licensed Emergency Medical Technician (EMT) and firefighter, which she said “gave me a new sense of purpose and a new focus.”
‘I dare you.’
Gaining her EMT Basic certification in Charlottesville, Reid moved back home to the Bay Area. Unable to start medic school due to the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, Reid saw a chance to meet both a societal need for people with medical training to help in the grim early days of the pandemic, as well as a way to gain experience treating more difficult, traumatic injuries.
Reid ended up taking a paramedic internship in Sonoma Valley, where her soccer-mad crew captain jumped at the chance to have a proven college player around. It proved to be a critical twist of fate.
“He had heard that I was a (NCAA D1) player and he was like, ‘I’ll take her on my crew,'” said Reid. When not away on calls, the crew found themselves playing two-on-two games, and playing for fun sparked something in Reid.
“We’d play inside the bay, basically two foam roller goals,” said Reid, smiling at the memory. “That’s when I started kind of developed my love for soccer again. I think I just needed time and space, and to find my own love of the game.”
The next nudge? Some simple banter between friends.
“My friend was like, ‘wow, it’d be so funny if you just decided to play soccer again, and ended up in the league,'” said Reid, making it clear her friend was needling her with a little sarcasm. “I was like ‘ha ha, sure, but I am having fun (playing)’ and she was like ‘I dare you.'”
Based on the story so far, you can probably figure out how Reid would respond to a dare. Tackling the challenge head-on, she started to investigate whether there was even a path for an EMT who had been out of soccer for years to get back into the professional game.
“All these chips just perfectly fell on top of one another,” said Reid. “My old club team (Lamorinda United) got invited to the WPSL… I was like ‘okay, I guess I’ll up it from playing two-on-two to playing with a team, and just see how it goes.'”
Reid played seven of Lamorinda’s eight WPSL games, and found herself still enjoying the sport. With that hurdle cleared, she called Swanson, her UVA head coach, to see if he could connect her with a professional opportunity. While the timing made things difficult — October isn’t exactly the hottest part of the transfer calendar, after all — the staff at Lamorinda knew someone at Danish top-flight side Thy-Thisted Q, and Reid booked a month of training in a pro environment.
While Reid worked out in Denmark, Swanson kept making calls, and eventually delivered big news: he’d talked to San Diego Wave FC, and they had placed Reid on their discovery list so she could join their preseason training camp.
Reid effectively embarked on a pre-preseason, training with Virginia for two weeks in the winter before heading to southern California to seek out her spot on the Wave roster. However, what she found there was a tricky challenge: a nearly 40-strong group of largely unfamiliar players, many of whom weren’t yet on a contract, training at an intensity she hadn’t experienced in years.
Reid’s own assessment of her performance as part of San Diego’s camp is mixed, but ultimately she feels she showed “enough that like I was going to grow as a player and I would grow and develop fast.” Landing a spot on a Wave team that had already acquired Abby Dahlkemper and Kaleigh Riehl before the season, and then drafted Naomi Girma was always going to be a tall task, and ultimately Reid was given some bad news: the Wave cut their roster down, and she wasn’t on it.
Reid called Swanson to let him know, and her old coach asked for 24 hours to make some more calls before she started the drive up the Pacific coast. Just when that time was up, another one of those chips she mentioned fell into place.
“I was literally grabbing my keys” to head home, said Reid. “I got a call from (Swanson), and he was like, ‘Hey, coach Freya from Angel City’s gonna call you, be ready. She’s gonna ask you some questions.’ I was like, ‘Okay, sounds good,’ and literally as I was talking to him, she rang.”
“She was coming out of San Diego’s preseason training camp. We were down there, so of course it made sense for us to look at her,” said Angel City head coach Freya Coombe, who added that Swanson’s recommendation carried plenty of weight with her. Still, Coombe said she “wasn’t really sure what to expect” from Reid, given how long she had been away from the sport.
Reid admitted that her hopes were very high when she joined San Diego’s group, but for this second new environment, she shifted her perspective. Her focus now was to give it her all, and “just enjoy it, soak it in, and then grow from it.”
Reid’s shift eased her stress, while the situation with Angel City was also one where opportunities for center backs were more common. The club had made some moves to acquire proven NWSL defenders, but had some terrible luck when it came to injuries. Sarah Gorden, coming off of a Best XI season in 2021, suffered a season-ending knee injury during the first days of preseason. Paige Nielsen, fresh off of winning a league championship, then had to undergo surgery to remove a rib to deal with a blood clot.
Reid won a contract, but she felt that her place within the the squad was mostly going to be about competing hard every day at training, and maybe seeing occasional minutes here and there. “That expectation to play like I’m doing now was never really in my thought process,” said Reid.
Coombe told Reid to expect some time in the Challenge Cup, only for the bad luck among Angel City defenders to find her next. Reid suffered a concussion, missing three games entirely and being an unused substitute in the fourth.
Those games were rough for the club, as they gave up 11 goals in four matches, so once Reid was able to play, Coombe had good reason to give her a test. Reid made her debut in NWSL competition on April 17, and while Angel City fell 2-1 at OL Reign, they managed to hold the perennial contender to a draw until a stoppage-time winner.
Suitably impressed, Coombe called on Reid a week later, and she hasn’t come off the field since.
“She was presented with an opportunity and she ran with it, and that’s a credit to her,” Coombe told Pro Soccer Wire on a recent call. “You know exactly what you’re going to get from her week in, week out, which is absolutely brilliant for a coach, especially with a center back. To know that you’re gonna get the same performance, and her ability to maintain her fitness and play every minute, has been unreal.”
After all of that, it would be completely understandable to take some time to coast. Instead, even after becoming an ever-present center back for a playoff contender barely a year removed from those two-on-two games at the firehouse, Reid says she sees more aspects of her game that could use sharpening.
“I think I’m someone that loves to grow,” said Reid, telling a story about how an Angel City coach told her she’d done well to recover in a recent game only for Reid to pinpoint a moment where she could have not just intervened, but actually gained possession as well with a change in footing.
Even Reid’s physical durability, after playing 2,070 straight minutes, is an area she thinks she can improve on. She lists off the injuries that she’s dealt with since returning to the game: a hamstring strain in Denmark, a knee subluxation, and the other various bumps and bruises that don’t show up on an availability report, but do hamper a player’s improvement.
“I think that’s what a lot of times changes, a player’s ability to grow, is their ability to look at the smaller things,” said Reid. “For me at the beginning, it was the bigger things: getting used to speed of play, getting used to being a part of a team again, like all those kinds of things that were swarming me at once. Now, I can start to focus on the smaller aspects of the games, technically improving your weaker foot. The idea is to say ‘What weaker foot?'”
After the long journey Reid went on to get to where she is, the smart money is on a two-footed, fitter, and more technical version of Reid to once again be a fixture on the Angel City team sheet in 2023.
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