Soccer Star Alex Morgan on Motherhood & the Mental-Health Goal She Has for Her Daughter
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As a professional athlete, it’s no surprise that Alex Morgan has built up a lifetime of healthy habits — after all, her very livelihood depends on it. The three-time Olympian, two-time Women’s World Cup champion, and two-time U.S. Soccer Female Athlete of the Year counts sleep-tracking, meditation, and a daily multivitamin as her non-negotiables. But taking care of her health has taken on additional importance for Morgan since she became a mom to her daughter, Charlie, in 2020.
“I’m always kind of running a million miles an hour as a mom and a professional athlete and a businesswoman,” she tells SheKnows. “It almost feels like it’s 24/7 making sure that my body and mind are in sync and I’m doing everything I can to make sure that I’m able to both be the best mom that I can be and also perform on the field the best that I can.”
It makes sense, then, that as someone who’s so dedicated to her health that she even travels with her vitamins in a pillbox when she’s on the road, Morgan has partnered with Nature Made to promote its new line of pickle-flavored gummy multivitamins.
Those same things that get her through the day are among the health habits she’s instilling in her child from a young age — Charlie takes her own multivitamin, she says — but for Morgan, passing on healthy habits extends to the mental as well as the physical, and one of her main mental health goals for her daughter is to have self-confidence — “just being able to walk in any room anywhere and feel like she can stand tall and be confident.”
Building up that sense of self is one reason why Morgan brings Charlie on the road with her: her daughter gets to be surrounded by Morgan’s “team full of really strong and resilient women.”
To that end, it’s clear that we’re currently in a moment of well-deserved hype around female athletes — something Morgan and the U.S. women’s soccer team are no strangers to — and Morgan is cheering right along with the rest of us.
“I couldn’t be more proud to be an athlete in the women’s sports landscape during this time of exponential growth,” she says. “It’s amazing to see and be a part of in real time because, as a female athlete, I can say that it didn’t just start now, it started generations before me with women fighting for what we’re finally able to attain today, and say, ‘See this is what could have happened if we put the investment in and if people had access to [watch] these sports years ago.’ But this is what these past generations have fought for.”
Morgan has been part of that fight firsthand, as one of the U.S. Women’s National Team soccer players who fought for pay equity and won a $24 million gender discrimination lawsuit against the U.S. Soccer Federation.
It’s a far cry from the days when players before her told stories of having to personally sell tickets to get people to their games “and doing just so much above and beyond what we’re meant to do, which is play our sport,” she says. “We’ve all had to go above and beyond to break down barriers, and it’s just incredible to see it finally being paid back.”
Being the mom of a daughter has only served to amplify her willingness to fight for the causes she believes in — and makes the victories that much sweeter. “Just knowing that since my daughter has been born, we’ve been able to successfully achieve equal pay on the national team — to see that we’ve been able to open so many doors, to see that my daughter will not be discriminated in the way that I was as a female athlete growing up — it really matters to me.”