In 2020, at seven months pregnant, Alex Morgan was still training with the US Women’s National Soccer Team. In a viral video, you can see her doing drills in a sweatshirt that reads “LFG USA.” It was clear the soccer star had no intentions of giving up her love for the sport when she became a parent.
Morgan, now 36, played a pivotal role in helping build the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL)—widely considered the world’s best professional women’s soccer league—both as a player beginning in 2013, and now as an investor in her former club, the San Diego Wave. In addition to her three years as a forward on the Wave, her résumé also includes two Olympic medals with the US Women’s National Soccer Team and two World Cup championships. But it’s her accomplishments off the field—building a family alongside her husband, former pro soccer player Servando Carrasco, and raising two kids—that she hopes serves as an inspiration for other athletes who are also moms.
She gave birth to her daughter, Charlie, in May 2020 and returned to the field less than six months later, which was a longer break than she would have had if the Tokyo 2020 Olympics had not been postponed to 2021. The mental and physical strain was difficult enough that she decided growing her family meant speeding up her retirement from soccer. Early into her second pregnancy, in September 2024, Morgan decided to end her 15-year professional career and gave birth to a son, Enzo, in March.
Morgan is now speaking out about her pregnancy, the postpartum pressures athletes face, and how she’s hanging up the stigma of moms being compared to one another—along with her cleats.
“It’s been so great just being able to take a lot more time this time around with the kids,” she tells SELF. Today, life six months postpartum looks much different than it did the first time around. “I mean, at this time, with [Charlie], I was moving to London to play with Tottenham Hotspur.” Plus, it was 2020—so she was dealing with a pandemic, tending to her postpartum body, and adjusting to a new country and city. Morgan was simultaneously prepping for the Tokyo Olympics, and says she felt like the only person who was parenting while playing on the US Women’s National Team. “I felt my body stretching in ways I wasn’t used to before,” she says.
After her second pregnancy, she didn’t push herself to her physical limits. “I felt like I took care of my body, but I also gave it the grace to not go on a run or get in the gym,” she says. “And my body responded really well this time around, in being able to give birth and get back to feeling good. I actually feel like it was the not having all that pressure on myself to get back quickly on the field.”
Though most of us don’t face the same physical pressures as pro athletes, there is one aspect of new motherhood Morgan describes that is entirely relatable: breastfeeding stress. Like many new parents, Morgan worried about whether her baby was getting enough milk to hit all of the right growth markers. On top of that, she was focused on getting back in the gym and on the field. With her second, “I just listened to my motherly instinct,” says Morgan, who proudly shares that she’s combo feeding her son breastmilk and formula, and says there’s nothing “unhealthy” or “imperfect” about it.
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