Pregnant Alex Morgan Strikes Ball on the Volley

This is profound for women’s soccer players. Yes, Alex Morgan isn’t the first women’s soccer player to have a baby and continue to play soccer but she’s certainly the most well known and someone who hasn’t shied away from continuing to play even as she gets closer and closer to having her baby.

Morgan is still in the spotlight, doing magazine shoots like this one. What’s more, what with the delay in the Olympics until next year, she’ll be more than ready to play. I’m thinking she’s going to be even better that she was before when she returns, even more confident and strong. After having a baby scoring goals will seem just that much easier.

On the beach, slicked back hair, big earrings, while pregnant, and nailing the ball on the volley. Glamour is right.

Alex Morgan Finds the Silver Lining:

The World Cup champion had it all planned out: train full-throttle to be ready for the Tokyo Olympics less than three months after she gives birth this spring. She didn’t plan for an Olympic postponement, or the reality of giving birth in the midst of a global pandemic. But she’s already looking to the next goal.

But like the steely competitor she is, she’s comfortingly not rattled by the whole thing—and already looking to the next goal. “We can only hypothesize over so much uncertainty in the future,” she says. Whether the next chance to play comes in the next three months or in the next year, she’ll be ready. “If I have no goal to try to achieve” she says, “then that’s not true to the core of who I am.”

Morgan kept up with her regular training schedule (which included six days a week of intense workouts—on-the-field sessions, weight training, Spin classes, runs) until she was seven months pregnant before letting off the gas to adopt an easier version of that routine (regular jogs, physical therapy, pelvic-floor physical therapy, prenatal yoga). Still, the idea that she’d risk her run for the gold to do something as predictable and potentially limiting as getting pregnant drew critics.

Add this one to: The Many Looks of Alex Morgan