The NWSL has a record number of active mothers rostered, 28, this season. The figure represents a shift in support and understanding around pregnancy, postpartum and parenting. The Athletic explores these topics and more in a series devoted to motherhood and soccer.
Sophia Wilson is standing on the sideline at Audi Field in Washington, D.C., about to enter the pitch for the first time since becoming a mom. The U.S. and Portland Thorns forward worked tirelessly to reach this moment, and now, 19,215 fans will witness the deeply personal milestone to open the 2026 National Women’s Soccer League season.
When Wilson runs onto the pitch, it is as if a year had not passed since she last played. The 25-year-old still moves with the same conviction of an NWSL champion, MVP and Golden Boot winner. She only played 14 minutes, but it was all she needed.
“I knew from the time I got pregnant that I was going to be very patient with myself through the whole process, even during pregnancy,” Wilson said in April. The U.S. women’s national team gold medalist welcomed her first child, Gigi, in September 2025. “Getting back to playing at a high level is not just a straight path. It’s not going to happen with the snap of my fingers. A lot of work went into it behind the scenes that a lot of people didn’t see, and a lot of work is still going into it.”
With four goals in 12 games for the second-place Thorns, and her seamless return to the USWNT earlier this year, Wilson has come back with purpose and shows no signs of slowing down.
“For me, it’s (about) being gracious with myself and going into it with the perspective of, ‘look at what my body has done for me and what it’s still continuing to do for me,’ and knowing that it is very possible to be great at both things — be a great mom and be a great athlete.”
Portland Thorns forward Sophia Wilson returned to play earlier this year following pregnancy. (Hannah Foslien / Getty Images)
Wilson is among a new generation of players who are starting their families during the prime of their careers. Resources are more readily available, especially at the NWSL and U.S. women’s national team levels, and players like Wilson have taken full advantage.
There is growing recognition that pregnancy does not signal the end or the pause of a playing career, but rather an active chapter within it.
The shift is driven by society’s increasing acceptance of mothers in the workplace, greater visibility of players who have returned to elite sport and, most importantly, improvements in science, infrastructure and resources accessible to women who wish to pursue motherhood and sport.
The result, says Emily Kraus, a sports medicine physician at Stanford University working with the Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance, is a sense of protection and support afforded to players that did not exist previously.
“You’re not going to be alone on an island with your baby breastfeeding, trying to understand how to get a workout in or get strong and feeling this like pressure to come back,” says Kraus. “Women feel like, now there’s help.”
That is evident with players like Wilson and fellow NWSL and U.S. forward Mallory Swanson. The 28-year-old returned to the Chicago Stars on May 16 and scored in her second game back the following weekend. She also spent a season away from the game to start a family. Swanson gave birth to her daughter, Josie, in November, two months after Wilson welcomed Gigi.
Both players described never feeling a sense of urgency to rush back to the pitch too soon.
“When it comes to pregnancy and postpartum, I don’t think there is one way to do it,” Swanson said following her team’s loss to North Carolina Courage earlier this month. “There’s an outline that you can follow, but everyone’s pregnancy and delivery and postpartum are completely different.”
This is exactly what the research shows, according to leaders in the women’s health field. However, that mentality has not always been the norm.
The pressure of someone else’s timeline
While postpartum describes the time after giving birth, the considerations and processes to prepare women to return to elite sport begin well before.
“In a perfect ideal world, we’d be thinking about our health during pregnancy and postpartum, even before we’re becoming pregnant,” says Margie Davenport, director of the Program for Pregnancy and Postpartum Health at the University of Alberta.
The idea of considering what is happening in the postpartum period is still relatively nascent. The pinch point, says Davenport, arrived in 2018 when the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) recognized a “fourth trimester,” the critical 12-week period following birth.
Around the same time, more elite athletes were getting pregnant and not only returning to sport but often coming back even stronger, such as track and field duo Allyson Felix and Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce and, most famously, tennis superstar Serena Williams.
Track and field duo Allyson Felix and Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce and, most famously, Serena Williams have led the way in athletes returning post-pregnancy.(Steph Chambers / Getty Images)
The greater media presence is not without its challenges, however. While more women were exposed to new possibilities, they were also exposed to other women’s timelines of returning to play, creating unrealistic comparisons.
The postpartum period, says Davenport, is “hyper-individualized,” just like pregnancy. It is part of its beauty, she says, but the singularity can also lead to the spread of misconceptions, or even fear of doing something wrong, which can erroneously influence how women consider and act during their own journey.
“During pregnancy, you’re told you can’t do this, don’t eat that. You’re always hearing what not to do,” Davenport says. “After pregnancy, people feel free, only to discover more rules and expectations.”
Historically, women athletes were given six and 12-week milestones to reach. Davenport and other experts have increasingly urged the use of frameworks as opposed to time-stamped guidelines when working with federations and clubs around postpartum recovery. The idea is to focus on gradual individualized resumption of physical activity that’s driven by one’s personal symptoms, such as sleep, recovery and fueling, all of which will need to be carefully measured and balanced.
Davenport and Kraus have previously developed some of those operational frameworks, including Kraus’ Pregnancy and Postpartum Playbook and Davenport’s “Step into Play” training framework, released in 2025.
FIFPro and FIFA’s newest guide, released this year and developed in collaboration with Davenport, represents the most comprehensive body of study thus far, outlining a five-stage framework designed specifically for soccer players, focusing on symptom-led, individualized recovery as opposed to historic, arbitrary timelines.
While flexible timelines might not seem groundbreaking, one of the toughest shifts in postpartum research is recognizing that timeline variability, says Davenport, paired with the pressure of returning for major tournaments like the 2027 World Cup. This can negatively impact a player’s postpartum recovery, Kraus warns.
Portland Thorns Sophia Wilson with her daughter Gianna talk with Trinity Rodman. (Brad Smith / Getty Images)
“We get so many athletes who say, I wish somebody would have talked to me about the importance of taking it slower during the first few months so that my tissues can heal and then I can build up more progressively and consistently instead of having these yo-yo setbacks,” she says.
“I would say I hear more of that, even though at the highest-level professional athletes, they say they tried to rush back too quickly during their return to sport because the pressure was on.”
Recovery starts before giving birth
One of the first recommendations from both Kraus and Davenport for women returning to elite sport is to stay active throughout pregnancy to maintain fitness and strength levels and positively influence mental health.
According to Davenport, new research found that people who had a 50 percent or more reduction in their physical activity from preconception to the first or second trimester were at almost double the risk of having an injury postpartum. Exercising, meanwhile, led to a 40 percent reduction in the risk of major pregnancy complications, such as preeclampsia, gestational diabetes and gestational hypertension, as well as profound impacts on the mental health of the mother.
“We know a lot of athletes lose their place on the team, aren’t allowed to continue training on the team out of an abundance of caution, which is a bit problematic,” Davenport says. “They’re losing their fitness, their sports-specific skills, whereas if they were able to continue their training, they won’t detrain to the same extent.”
Davenport and Kraus instead recommend regularly training during pregnancy to maintain fitness levels. In fact, alternative training methods have been found to provide marginal gains for athletes when focusing on different areas and adjusting workouts during pregnancy.
“This was considered to be a huge advance in a time that we traditionally think of as a bit of a pregnant pause,” Davenport says.
How quickly an athlete returns to activity following giving birth is also heavily dependent on the birth itself.
“You have to be a little bit flexible because between pregnancy and postpartum, you have this rather large event, labor and delivery,” says Davenport. “Labor is called labor for a reason. There can be complications, challenges that throw off every single birth plan that you might have, which can also influence how you return and recover postpartum.”
Gradual increase is a key phrase amongst researchers when discussing returns to regular activity, focusing initially on duration, before increasing impact and intensity.
FIFPRO’s new framework encourages athletes to try to reach 120 minutes of either moderate (light sweat and marginally increased heartbeat) to vigorous (heavier sweat and heartbeat), but even this is a goal to work towards at the athlete’s comfort, Davenport says. Types of exercise executed depend on the specific athlete. Footballers focus on retaining multidirectional movement plus cutting, power and high aerobic capacity.
For Davenport, the best way to determine if an athlete is pushing themselves too hard is poor recovery symptoms, such as pain or exhaustion. “As long as you’re recovering well, you shouldn’t be concerned,” she says.
Screening, education and myth busting
Screening is another avenue to assess recovery. Researchers screen for medical conditions and other complications that might prevent an athlete from returning, including mental health, depression, anxiety, pelvic floor and kinesiophobia, or the fear of movements.
The latter is largely driven by the knowledge gap that remains amongst athletes, says Kraus. For example, historically, women were told that breastfeeding increased the risk of bone-related injuries, specifically stress fractures, she says. However, more evidence suggests that lactating does not increase the risk of osteoporosis or fractures, even in the long term.
Even so, the impact of exercise on bone mineral density in the postpartum period remains limited in research. The Wu Tsai Alliance has announced new research targeting how bone and biomechanics evolve as athletes return to sport, bodies heal and hormones normalize to a pre-pregnancy state, as well as the impact of tissue and ligament laxity.
Frameworks similarly champion the importance of incorporating a pelvic floor specialist into pregnancy and postpartum recovery training.
According to Davenport, athletes, particularly those engaged in high-impact sports, and those who are pregnant and postpartum, are at the highest risk for having urinary incontinence, or the involuntary leakage of urine. A new study found that between 60 to 70 percent of soccer athletes experience at least some urine leakage when competing, which is consistent in other impact sports such as rugby and gymnastics. Strengthening the pelvic floor can help treat this, as well as improve core stability.
Fueling, hydration and sleep are also increasingly important factors to successful postpartum recovery. According to Davenport, for athletes who are also lactating, researchers believe an additional 250 to 500 calories per day are burned.
While it can sound obvious, Kraus says adequate fueling is often an overlooked part of the postpartum period, especially as athletes wrestle with bodily changes.
Other factors, however, are difficult to measure, especially postpartum mental health. According to Davenport and Kraus, athletes can feel conflicted and even guilty about returning to elite sport and training so soon after giving birth, while others raise concerns about leading a “double life.” These internal conflicts can be debilitating for athletes and negatively impact return to play. While there is wider recognition amongst researchers of this struggle, “research into intervention and coping remains limited”, says Kraus.
Mallory Swanson said she reached out to former teammates like Alex Morgan and Cheyna Matthews for advice on motherhood and playing. (Meg Oliphant / Getty Images)
Ahead of the 2026 season, during NWSL media days in Los Angeles, Wilson and Swanson reunited for the first time since winning gold at the Paris Games. The pair won the hearts of America alongside forward Trinity Rodman as the attacking trio “Triple Espresso” after scoring 10 of the team’s 12 goals that summer.
“Mal and I went through a similar journey this last year, and going through that with someone you’re so close with is so special, because it’s such a unique experience,” Wilson said. “There’s few people in our world that know what we do that also have gone through that at the same time.”
The players had each other, as well as the invaluable learnings of the players before them — including Alex Morgan and Crystal Dunn, who showed them that being a mother and professional soccer player was possible. Swanson said she reached out to Morgan and other players, like former Stars teammate Cheyna Matthews, for advice.
“It’s nice to have that connection with them and see what worked for them and try that for myself,” Swanson says. “And if it works (for me), it sticks. If it doesn’t, then (I’ll) try something different.”
@espnw So adorable 💙 (via @Chicago Stars FC) #soccer #fc #stars #babies #cute ♬ original sound – espnW
Kraus and Davenport express excitement around the potential that the field of postpartum research carries, given the huge strides undertaken in such a short space of time already. But they emphasize the importance of clubs and federations to work with new findings and speak openly with athletes about support options. And while the ACOG’s 2018 recognition of the fourth trimester brought a wider acceptance regarding the mental side of postpartum, including depression, research as far as intervention and coping is more limited, says Kraus.
Even so, there is recognition that a positive mental shift can occur after giving birth. It’s one that players in the NWSL and beyond have also referenced.
“I feel like my perspective on life in general has shifted a lot in all the best ways. I feel more grounded. I feel more present. And I think that’s how I view the game as well,” Wilson said, ahead of her return to the U.S. women’s national team. “I’m trying to approach it with, more than ever, a ‘goldfish mentality,’ and be present in whatever practice, whatever game I’m in, and then it’s on to the next. Take what I need and what I want to learn from, but leave the rest behind.
“I think being a mom has taught you to do that, because life just goes too quickly, and I think we put too much pressure on things that we can’t control, and I feel like I’ve learned to just focus on what I can control and enjoy every moment as it comes.”