USWNT’s Sophia Wilson set to pause career after announcing pregnancy | OneFootball

Portland Thorns and US women’s national team forward Sophia Wilson (née Smith) has announced that she is expecting her first child with her husband, Arizona Cardinals wide receiver Michael Wilson.

Wilson made the announcement in an Instagram post with the caption “life just keeps getting sweeter.” The Thorns, in their own announcement, said that the team is “proud to support [Wilson] through this incredible new chapter,” while the US national team passed on congratulations of their own on social media.

The Wilsons have been a couple since meeting as freshmen at Stanford University, where both were student athletes. They married in January this year.

“I feel like, aside from soccer, that’s what I feel is my calling, to be a mom,” Smith said in an interview with the Cardinals website in January. “My career, it has to stop for a period of time when I am pregnant so that’s not something we can just let happen at any moment … [but] we’ve been patient for a long time.”

Wilson will now presumably miss the majority, if not all, of the upcoming NWSL season and USWNT games during that span. Aside from time away from game action during the pregnancy itself, the most recent NWSL collective bargaining agreement put in place last year guarantees six months of fully paid parental leave for players, who will continue to have full access to team facilities during that time

The 24-year-old is the highest-profile USWNT player to miss time for pregnancy since Alex Morgan, who announced her pregnancy in 2019, gave birth to daughter Charlie in May 2020 and returned to games for club and country in November of that year. She went on to earn 45 additional caps with the USWNT before retiring last year.

Header image: [Photograph: Brad Smith/ISI/Getty Images]