Soccer legend Alex Morgan retired her jersey number with the San Diego Wave early this month, marking a historic moment in women’s sports. Some of Point Loma Nazarene University’s women’s soccer players said Morgan’s retirement and work would commemorate a great soccer player and advocate for equal opportunities for young girls.
Morgan retired her jersey number, 13, on Sept. 7 and was the first woman in history to retire her number in San Diego, CA.
PLNU soccer player Laine Moraes, a fourth-year political science major, said that some people may assume jersey retirements have to do with ego, but Morgan’s was much greater than that.
Another player, Madison Khan, a third-year psychology major, said that her retirement had to do with who she is as a person.
“It shows a lot more than just the number on her jersey, but more about who she is in her character,” Khan said.
PLNU women’s soccer Head Coach Kristi Kiely has led the team for eight seasons. Before she was a coach, she played soccer for Westmont College in Santa Barbara, CA.
Kiely said that the impact Morgan left on the soccer community stemmed from the women who walked alongside her.
“I’d love to give Alex a lot of credit for her work, but I also don’t want to lose sight of, I think, the people that she would say also, she walks alongside because they did it collectively,” Kiely said. “I think she’s done a tremendous job, no doubt, under a lot of pressure … to be able to be the star that she was for the team, and then also have these undercurrents of needing to fight on behalf of herself and teammates. To be a mother and a spouse, I mean, she was wearing a lot and wearing it well.”
In December of 2023, the PLNU Women’s Soccer Team got to meet Morgan after becoming Division II National Champions.
“She was complimentary and spoke words of wisdom over our group and congratulated us on the championship,” Kiely said in a follow-up email interview.
After multiple attempts for a follow-up interview with PLNU players, they failed to comment on their experience meeting Morgan.
Morgan started the Alex Morgan Foundation in March of 2023 after playing for the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team and winning two World Cups in a row. After the 2023 season, Morgan retired and continued her career with the San Diego Wave while simultaneously growing her foundation.
According to the Alex Morgan Foundation website, the goal of her foundation is to help young girls and women find confidence in both sports and life. It invests in programs to empower women and create opportunities for them to play professionally.
“I think it’s extremely important, like us here at Point Loma, a lot of us were privileged growing up to have access to playing soccer, and that’s not the case for everyone,” Moraes said. “And so promoting, you know, confidence and access to soccer is so important in order to grow the game for the next generations.”
Khan said that equal opportunities are especially important as young girls develop into sports.
“I think especially in youth sports, where development happens and is where a lot of the impact of the sport happens … whenever people talk about their experiences with sports, just in general, maybe it’s trauma, maybe it’s not good experiences, or it’s really positive,” Khan said, “it always comes from the younger years of developing into that sport. I think it’s really important that women’s sports, and women’s soccer, is finally getting more attention and care.”
Both Moraes and Khan grew up playing soccer and looking up to the professional soccer players on the U.S. Women’s World Cup team. Seeing those women succeed affected both Moraes and Khan and shaped who they wanted to become as soccer players, they said.
“Getting to watch them win back-to-back World Cups in a lot of our formative years as people and as soccer players was huge,” Moraes said. “And also, just like the growth that kind of group made in equal pay as well during that time was really big. So I’d say for sure, it was formative.”
Khan, like Kiely, was also inspired by watching the success of professional female soccer players.
“It just made it seem like it was actually possible for the first time,” Khan said. “Because again, like growing up, a lot of things that we saw — that I saw — were men’s sports teams being really successful … so finally, seeing women’s sports and the sport that I played, too, being really successful at a really high level, definitely was inspiring and made me realize it was possible and not far out of our reach.”
Cade Michaelson 
Makenna Richardson