This interview is one of four cover features for Issue 33 of MUNDIAL. To read it in print, become a subscriber today.
Megan Rapinoe still tastes the salt on her upper lip. Still feels the Parc de Princes trembling. Still hears the explosion as her free kick, whipped, low, hard, through the mess of legs in the box, crashes into the back of the net. She remembers it all vividly.
June 28th, 2019, Parc des Princes, Paris. A World Cup quarterfinal. USA v France, the hosts. 45,595 fans. 35C. Sweltering. Packed. Electric.
I remember it vividly too. Having saved up the money to be able to travel across the Atlantic Ocean to France, I could not wait to witness the greatest tournament in the world in person. I’d been managing to move around the country okay with some loose French from school and got tickets for the Spain game in Reims, which required a beautiful train journey through the Champagne region. There were two Rapinoe goals that evening, too. Both penalties. Poise. Precision. Pink hair.
And although I hadn’t got the funds left to get into the Parc des Princes that evening, I still felt like I was there. Watching football in a bar surrounded by locals is sometimes even more consuming than being in the stadium. And that evening, glued to a screen in the 11th arrondissement of Paris, I couldn’t have wished for more. Rapinoe’s two goals, Alex Morgan’s flair still flowing from the five she scored in her first match of the tournament, that noise. With so many French voices around me, I felt like Wendie Renard was marking me or Amandine Henry was running me in circles. I found myself forgetting to blink as I watched. I was completely captivated. I had been waiting for times like this.
“Beating France at Parc des Princes: scoring and silencing a crowd that also wanted to cheer for us too … it’s one of the best, probably the best environment for any game that I've ever played in,” Megan Rapinoe tells me with that familiar composed voice. As someone who has followed Megan’s whole career, who has heard and listened to everything she has to say, who was watching her open-mouthed that night … being able to speak to her like this feels like coming full circle.
While my story in and around football played out much differently than Megan’s, our beginnings and the way we were raised are quite intertwined.
There was something about putting on those black, shiny adidas shorts that stuck to my thighs during the hot summer days that hooked me in. Without knowing much about football, I knew I liked dressing up for it. I grew up in Beverly, Massachusetts, a city along the north shore of Boston. Before I could talk, I could walk, and before I could run, I could dribble with a football.
The world wasn’t made with me in mind
Football was introduced to me pretty early on. My dad was a wicked athlete, a local basketball all-star, and college soccer star retiree. He would run around the backyard with my brother and me tirelessly, introducing different sports to us organically. One day we would learn to shoot a basketball, the other juggle a soccer ball. Some days we would bike ride and just race from street light to street light. Everything was an activity, and every day felt like a game. My mom would force-feed us spaghetti and bagels because there weren’t enough carbs we could possibly consume to maintain our level of activity.
Across the country in Redding, California, Megan Rapinoe was too raised with the permission to run around with free reign. Megan, nine years older than I, fondly remembers playing all sorts of different sports, riding bikes, and watching her older brother play football from the sidelines.
“Oh, gosh, I look up to my older brother, Brian,” Megan tells me proudly. “Brian is five years older than my twin sister and me, so we basically were just following him around everywhere. And I think my earliest memories are really of his soccer teams.”
For the little girl in me, first seeing Rapinoe play, first watching her sport pink hair and refusing to go to the White House while Donald Trump was in office, I have always found her relatable. Now, speaking to her, this has multiplied infinitely.
The ways female athletes are introduced to the sport often include a male—in fact one of the main factors girls drop out of sports at two times the rate of boys by the age of 14 is the lack of female role models. Despite having female role models that I admired on television or on posters, every single one of my coaches was male until I got to college. My dad was my first coach, and I went on to have all men managing my football career up until my junior year of college when a female coach was hired.
Megan, however, did have a strong female influence earlier on in her footballing career.
“My mom and one of her really good friends coached the team at one point, and I think we were just kind of carted around everywhere with them. And because I was a twin, we always had a built-in play date and a built-in one-on-one sort of partner. So we were always playing together. I think those are kind of like my first memories of being in and around the game and loving it.”
Megan was often plopped at her brother’s practice and naturally found entertainment playing with what was around her. While my mother demanded that my brother and I return home when it gets dark, Megan remembers her mom’s whistle.
“She had a whistle—a very distinct and loud long-carrying whistle. You could hear it from like a mile away. We would hear the whistle, which basically was a sound like ‘don’t go too far where you can’t hear it,’ otherwise you’re in trouble. You definitely don’t ignore the whistle,” she tells me.
You don’t become one of the most successful female footballers of all time—two World Cup titles, an Olympic Gold medal, FIFA Women’s Player of the Year, Ballon d’Or Féminin—by listening to every whistle you hear. Her mother’s whistle, though, would remain a constant reminder of the values instilled in her from those early days.
Being a female footballer wasn’t always cool, nor even sustainable. Despite growing up idolizing the 1999’ers and everything they did from winning the 1999 World Cup against China and Brandi Chastain’s monumental penalty kick and electric celebration, there was never a super clear path. It felt like Mia Hamm, Julie Foudy, Kristine Lilly and the rest of that team were stuck in a poster, something to be put on a wall and looked at, dreamed about, but never able to reach. But players like Rapinoe ensured that that foundation would be built on.
These women were icons, and at ten years old, I saw myself in them in a way I could never see myself in anyone else. It didn’t take me long to grow up looking up to other members of the USWNT for what they did both on and off the pitch. They had a bad-ass-ery about them, whether it was something physical like a choppy short hairstyle and tattoos or something completely internal that was activated when the whistle blew. There was fierceness, there was competitiveness, and there was a level of excellence that felt almost impossible to achieve but something for a little girl to dream about. They fought for equal pay, they fought for player autonomy, they fought for fair treatment. They would fight for 90 minutes, then 365 days a year for a better path than they walked.
For most of my teenage years, my legs would tingle before every practice. I dreamt about taking every step with a touch on the soccer ball, and I visualized my first call-up. The reality? I was forcing myself into pick-up games with boys around town despite them calling me “gay” or too “boyish”. I would also convince my parents to let me camp out at this indoor facility for hours in hopes a team may need an extra player. Boys teams would often look past me until one day they realised that if they wanted to win, they’d look past my long curly hair and growing lady physique.
My parents never told me no or that I should just play with girls. It was one of those things where, to them, no idea or ambition was too big, and as long as I wasn’t mean or stupid, not much was off the table.
In the Rapinoe household, there was an overarching lesson of doing the right thing and being a good person, of standing up for yourself, your family, and for people who aren’t in a position to do so. While Megan’s mother grew up poor and was often made fun of for having new clothes, Megan herself had things and also the ability to play football exceptionally well. Her parents made it clear that sure, it’s fine to be good at sports, popular, whatever, but she also had a responsibility to use that for good, whether that’s sticking up for each other, other people, or just doing the right thing.
“My mom was the second-eldest of eight kids, and has shared a little bit about what that was like,” Megan tells me with that poignant voice a little softer, a little shyer as she spoke about her upbringing. “My mom got made fun of, and they didn't have new clothes, much less clean clothes.”
South of Sacramento, Rapinoe played for the same club, Elk Grove Pride, all the way until she began college football at University of Portland. Weaved into her long commute to club practice, Rapinoe was first introduced to the U.S. youth national team system in 2002 and made her first senior team debut aged 21 on July 23, 2006, in a friendly against Ireland, and scored her first two goals four months later against Taiwan. It wasn’t long before a dreaded ACL injury, something so common in women’s sports with so much more research to be done, put a pause on things in late 2006, and another tear came during recovery the following year. The fight to come back from a double ACL, to play 203 times for her national side, to win three NWSL titles with OL Reign and a Division 1 Féminine shows the type of tenacity required to be successful in the women's game. The obstacles? The fight? It keeps on coming.
On September 1st 2016, Colin Kaepernick was preparing for the San Diego 49ers final preseason game against the Atlanta Falcons. As the national anthem played around the stadium, Kaepernick knelt on one knee in an act of defiance regarding racial injustice. His teammate Eric Reid joined the protest, and two weeks later, Kaepernick appeared on the cover of Time magazine for a story on patriotism and protests. The complexities of America were there for everyone to see: Kaepernick was voted most disliked NFL player, but his jersey became a top seller. The president said to “get that **** off the field, but Nike revealed a campaign with the tagline: "Believe in something, Even if it means sacrificing everything."
Just two weeks after Kaepernick first knelt in protest, Megan did the same. The first prominent white athlete to show support.
“Being a gay American, I know what it means to look at the flag and not have it protect all of your liberties,” Rapinoe told America Soccer Now post-game.
You aren't going to be able to Executive Order trans people out of existence
That same year, Rapinoe was among five players who filed a complaint to the federal Equal Opportunity Commission regarding gender discrimination and in a fight for equal pay. And in 2022, a $24m settlement was reached.
“I wanted to make my own situation better and women's football better. Whether it was equal pay or gay rights or racial justice,” she tells me when I ask her how it felt. “I'm going to use every lever possible. So if that lever is soccer or that lever is a press conference or a social media platform, there's always something bigger than the sport.”
“I’m a woman, and I’m gay, and I played women’s sports; the world wasn’t made with me in mind.” To Rapinoe, if she didn’t speak up, nothing would ever change.
It’s 2025 in America, and this conversation between Rapinoe and I occurred the day after Donald Trump passed an executive order banning trans women from women’s sports. The same day is known as National Girls and Women in Sports Day, and this is not a coincidence.
Women’s football is arguably the best it’s ever been—with USWNT defender Naomi Girma signing a world-record fee of $1.1 million to join Chelsea FC. USWNT manager Emma Hayes is preaching loud and clear that we need to be looking at everything through a female lens. While women’s sports are at an all-time high, rights are not. The NWSL created a $5 million fund as part of a landmark suit resulting from a series of sexual and emotional misconduct allegations in 2021. The fund is for players who experienced abuse and further requires the league to uphold safeguards and safety measures.
“Don't tell me it's about the rights of women's sports,” Megan said when asked specifically about Trump’s rhetoric. “That is totally just disingenuous to say that. I think it's just really cruel. You know, if you strip it all back, it's just kind of cruel and depraved. This isn't an issue, and you aren't going to be able to Executive Order trans people out of existence.
“We've just gone through a very long period over ten years of really needing to fight just to get to a baseline of, like, equal rights and non-discriminatory behaviour, and when people stop just shitting on women's sports. I think we are sort of at that moment.”
The little girl listening out for her mother’s whistle still exists within, but over time through injustices, through victories, Rapinoe speaks out against the noise.
She feels passionately aligned with other women who do the same—and mentioned former teammate Naomi Girma as someone who can carry the torch into the next generation.
“Obviously, one of her best friends from college tragically took her life,” Rapinoe said about Girma. “And just using her platform to bring awareness to something that not only was incredibly difficult for her personally, but something people struggle with a lot, especially young people right now … So I think that is a really great example of being a rebel and doing something different and using your platform to affect change for good.”
I am 31 years old now and have never felt closer to Rapinoe and her tireless campaigning. For me, I grew up watching her, grew up seeing her voice demand change, and fully felt the changes within my own life. While I never went on to play professional football, as a coach, I get to help inspire little girls to pursue a dream and passion that will fairly compensate them. Football was never a feasible career option for me; the pro leagues in the U.S. were wobbly, and the pathway wasn’t clear.
“There’s so many ways that we can grow and kind of codify lasting change,” Megan tells me towards the end of the call. “And I always encourage players specifically to be involved and use their voice. Players, actually, are always the most powerful people in sports.”
Since retiring in 2023, Megan still uses her platform to inform, change, and advocate for those who can’t. She speaks bluntly on her own podcast, still acts as a morale leader with the national team—most prominently regarding the recent homophobic incident with young USWNT and PSG player Korbin Albert—and has the backs of footballers facing backlash for just being who they are: just look at how she went back at JK Rowling after Barbra Banda won the 2024 BBC Women’s Footballer of the Year.
Call it rebellion, activism, badass, whatever, but I just think it’s necessary. My eyes close and I see Megan, arms outstretched, spine extended, a woman listening to her mother’s whistle and standing for all of the things she believes in.
