First things first: I have an op-ed over at CNN about the NHL's newly announced ban on Pride Tape, after doing away with Pride jerseys last season.
Much has been written about the disparity between out athletes in men’s sports versus in women’s sports. A 2018 study from the Human Rights Campaign found that a majority of Americans had witnessed anti-LGBTQ+ attitudes in sports, and the US ranks poorly among peer countries when it comes to homophobia in athletics. The unsafe culture created by the men’s leagues themselves is largely to blame. How can we ever expect men to feel safe coming out when even using rainbow-colored stick tape during game warmup is considered controversial?
Also, I will be at the New Hampshire Film Festival tomorrow morning for a screening of The Herricanes, a documentary about the Houston Herricanes of the National Women's Football League. I was interviewed for the film and will also be doing a Q&A panel after the screening with filmmaker Olivia Kuan.
Now, onto the newsletter.
I don't pretend to know what goes on in anyone's personal life. I also will not speculate on how this information became public. What I do know is that Ali Krieger deserved better than having her final professional game before retiring from the sport of soccer overshadowed by news of her impending divorce.
If you haven't heard, former USWNT members and NWSL players Ashlyn Harris and Ali Krieger are getting divorced. Harris is the one who filed, and the two have been together since 2010 and married since 2019. Together, they have adopted two children.
The blowback directed at Harris has been swift and whether her team leaked that information or someone else did, she does not come out looking good here. Krieger's pre-game press conference was canceled and the media has been overrun with stories about the divorce filing.
What Krieger should have gotten was an unabashed celebration of a storied soccer career. From NY/NJ Gotham FC's press release about Krieger's retirement:
Over the span of her 108 appearances for the USWNT, Krieger was a member of three FIFA Women’s World Cup teams (2011, 2015, and 2019) – winning in 2015 and 2019. In 2015, she helped lead one of the greatest defensive performances in World Cup history when the U.S. recorded five shutouts and held opponents scoreless for 540 consecutive minutes. The following year, she was a member of the U.S. team that won the Concacaf Olympic Qualifying tournament, and she later starred for Team USA at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games in Brazil.
Krieger was also a champion and pioneer in the professional ranks internationally. In 2008, Krieger – at the time the only woman on the USWNT playing overseas – won the UEFA Women’s Champions League with 1.
Before joining Gotham FC via trade in December 2021, Krieger played four seasons for the Washington Spirit (2013-2016) – including the inaugural NWSL season in 2013 – and five with the Orlando Pride (2017-2021). In her third season as Washington’s captain in 2016, Krieger led the Spirit to the NWSL championship game. In 2017, she started every game, led the Pride to their first playoff berth, and was named to the NWSL Best XI.
Because the media largely does not know much about women's sports and because Harris was the one to file, headlines have largely been framed around "star" soccer player Ashlyn Harris filing for divorce from her teammate and wife. It would be laughable if it weren't so insulting.
The thing is, before you file for divorce, attorneys will usually ask if you have any major life events coming up—marriages, births, graduations, retirement games—that would want to avoid ruining with the news. Harris and Krieger have a relationship with PEOPLE magazine; theirs isn't the kind of divorce you can quietly file and not have that information leaked to the press or kept under wraps. It would have been so easy to sit on this until after the season finished and I will never understand why that didn't happen—unless the goal is to be intentionally mean.
Fans and teammates have been coming to Krieger's defense online and it's not hard to see why. Regardless of the reason for the divorce, regardless of how amicable it is or is not, the timing of the announcement just seems needless and avoidable.
One thing is for sure though: this proves that queers are just as capable of messy relationship drama as the straights. Equality!
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