Alex Morgan Celebrates Launch of Project Giving Girls Greater Opportunity to Play Sports

The soccer icon is dedicated to creating ‘equity and opportunity’ in sports for young girls.

Alex Morgan / Matt Thomas/Getty Image

Last month, Alex Morgan hung up her professional soccer jersey for the last time. The athlete announced that she would be retiring from the game of soccer. The decision wasn’t easy, she acknowledged in her announcement, but the timing felt right.

But in the month since, Morgan has proven that her retirement from professional athletics doesn’t mean she’s stepping away from the game full-stop. In fact, she’s doing quite the opposite. She maintains a vested interest in the future of the sport—and the future of all women’s professional sports.

As a cofounder of TOGETHXR, a media company dedicating to highlighting the stories of female athletes, Morgan has proven herself to be a positive force in the fight for greater equality in the sports world. Now, having stepped away from the game, she’s committing even more time and attention to that very effort.

Most recently, her push for a more level playing field took the form of a new mini pitch at the Mission Valley YMCA in San Diego. With the help of her eponymous charitable foundation, the Alex Morgan Foundation, the 35-year-old funded the creation of a small soccer pitch at the community center. The mini pitch, which opened in late September, is intended “to create equity and opportunity for girls and women on the field and off,” the foundation wrote in a recent Instagram post.

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Sports equity is, according to Morgan, one of the “pillars” of her foundation, which aims to facilitate positive change for women and girls everywhere. “Helping girls have more access to play soccer, futsal, pickleball, you name it,” the former pro soccer star said in a video about the latest venture. “Creating this mini pitch and bringing it to life is a step towards that.”

The project isn’t primarily concerned with training the next generation of soccer stars (though that wouldn’t be a bad outcome, either). It’s about “helping build physical strength, mental strength, building confidence,” Morgan explained. “We hope to continue this sports equity and [creating] opportunities for girls. We’re not gonna stop.”

The mini pitch project is just one of the many new initiatives that Morgan and her foundation have on the docket for the coming year. With more time on her hands, there’s no doubt that the icon’s impact will be felt even more widely as she devotes more and more time to her passion for sports equity. We can’t wait to see what she does next.