Angel City players are grateful for vast support

For Sarah Gorden, Mother’s Day is particular because it’s not just a celebration of motherhood. For her, it’s also a celebration of perseverance, grit and survival.

Especially survival.

Gorden turned pregnant during her junior 12 months of school and for most of the next 12 years, she tried to stability her life as a skilled soccer participant with her duties as a single mom. It wasn’t simple.

“I honestly look back and I have no idea how we got through that,” said Gorden, who made $8,000 as an NWSL rookie with the Chicago Red Stars in 2016, less than the town’s minimal wage. “We’re making no money. We were definitely using government assistance and government aid. And then the help of family and friends.

“I’m impressed and proud of the part of me that got through that. But it was no way to live.”

As the reminiscences come flooding back, so do the tears.

“It’s so difficult to explain,” said Gorden, now 33 and the captain at Angel City, as she dabbed at the tears with a tissue. “Not having enough money, not having enough time, wondering if I’m being selfish, wondering if I’m making the right decision. Ultimately it came down to: I didn’t feel like I had another [choice].”

A decade later, the NWSL minimal wage is $50,500 and the league’s collective bargaining settlement ensures moms job safety, full wage and advantages for the period of a pregnancy-related absence, stipends for baby care and sponsored preparations for girls touring with youngsters up to age 14.

Angel City, based by three moms, has gone past what the league has mandated by supporting moms with perks that embrace a well-stocked nursery at the group’s training facility on the campus of Cal Lutheran University.

“From the beginning, we always strive to support the whole player. Physically, mentally, emotionally, psychologically,” said Julie Uhrman, one of Angel City’s founders and now a principal adviser to the group. “And then to support them if they came in as parents or became parents. That’s not just players. Staff too.”

Uhrman, who raised two youngsters while building a profitable profession as a media and leisure govt, speaks from expertise.

“They can do both and they can excel at both,” she said of her players. “And we’re going to provide the support and the environment for them to do that.”

On its lively roster of 25 players, Angel City has 4 moms — the most in the NWSL. The work that went into the infrastructure now in place for them originated with Sarah Smith, the group’s former director of medical and efficiency.

Smith, who left the membership in January and now advises elite athletes — primarily skiers — in Utah, said the support she received from Uhrman and others during her own being pregnant two and a half years in the past impressed and informed her work with Angel City.

“Having the leadership of the club and the female leaders in the club, and then wanting to be able to support all of the players through their different journeys, through motherhood, I was really glad to be part of that,” she said. “But it really started with the fact that I had just gone through it, and I was able to share those experiences.”

Angel City ahead Sydney Leroux’s 9-year-old son, Cassius, waits for his mother to depart a group huddle at BMO Stadium on May 2.

(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

The first participant she guided through that journey was Scottish ahead Claire Emslie, who gave start to a son in December.

“I’ll be honest. Having seen how much she wanted to do for moms in the game made me excited to become a mom,” Emslie said. “We weren’t even thinking about having a kid. But knowing what she wanted to do if there was a pregnant player made me want to have a kid because I knew that this is the best place I could possibly be.”

Emslie, 32, was cleared to swimsuit up for Angel City’s recreation with San Diego on Saturday — the day before Mother’s Day — after lacking the past 12 months on maternity depart. But she continued to practice until just before giving start and that, mixed with the 12 months off from the weekly pounding of skilled soccer and the physiological modifications her physique went through during being pregnant, have made her better, she says.

“I feel better. I’m different,” she said. “I got a lot stronger and that’s something you can’t build while you’re in competition. My speed is back. I think I’m actually faster. And there’s also sort of an effect where you’ve got more red blood cells in your system now. So they say your cardio is actually better.”

The prime years for a girls’s soccer participant — between the ages of 25 and 29 — overlap with their prime reproductive years. Until just lately, however, girls had to make a selection between a household and a profession. Now many are selecting to do both.

Sophia Wilson, a former NWSL scoring champion and MVP, and Mallory Swanson, her teammate on the U.S. Women’s National Team, both missed play in 2025 to give start. They are among the 28 moms in the league, and more are coming with the most latest NWSL availability report displaying six groups lacking players going on maternity depart.

Angel City participant Claire Emslie, who is pregnant, tours a nursery the group constructed for players.

(Courtesy of Angel City FC)

Emslie’s own experiences inform her those numbers will continue to grow.

“I got to a point where I need[ed] to start thinking about life after football. And if I want to have a family, because of the biological clock, I need to start trying soon,” Emslie said. “It’s now kind of a normal thing to have a baby and come back.”

“Now I wish I’d done it younger,” she added. “Having a baby and continuing to play, they’re on the journey with you. So to have, say, five, six years professional football with a family, that’s amazing.”

Smith believes the willingness of star players such as Wilson and Swanson — and before them, Alex Morgan and Manchester United’s Hannah Blundell — has introduced important focus to the issue of motherhood in soccer.

“That is where the game is going. I think you probably can see it across the league, the number of mothers,” Smith said. “And that’s a variety of circumstances. It may be mothers whose partners have carried children. It may be also players that are thinking about having children later and want to freeze their eggs. What I wanted to make sure is that we, we supported all of those different circumstances.”

That included designing and stocking the nursery at the training facility Angel City inherited from the NFL’s Rams in the autumn of 2024.

“We put stuff in there for Caiden, for Sarah’s son, because it wasn’t just for Claire,” Smith said. “We wanted to make sure that all of the players and their partners felt good and comfortable. You just want to take a little bit of stress off of the players.”

Angel City captain Sarah Gorden with her oldest son, Caiden, during a picture shoot.

(Courtesy of Angel City FC)

When the membership inherited the nine-acre observe facility in 2024 from the Rams, Angel City designated the most important of the places of work for the nursery. The workplace belonged to head coach Sean McVay, and now it options partitions painted pink and gentle blue and a crib, a altering desk and a menagerie of stuffed animals.

“We want players to come to Angel City because we are the absolute best place for you to grow as an athlete, as a human,” Uhrman said. “And, you know, thinking about the fact that they might want to become mothers at some time or they’re coming in as mothers is really important.”

Gorden remembers a time not so long in the past when that wasn’t the case. Early in her profession in Chicago, she said she had to carry her son to a group assembly and was punished by being benched. Another time she couldn’t discover baby care on the day of a recreation — a Mother’s Day recreation.

“I just remember bawling all morning and just feeling so stressed,” she said.

Gorden has a fiance who helps with parenting and her son Caiden, now in center college, has grown into a candy, empathetic boy.

“So yeah,” Gorden said, smiling through the tears, “a lot of progress. The league gets it now.”