Judging by the stickers on the back of her car, Renee Good, or someone she was close to, loved women’s soccer. Photos of her immobile car circulated the internet in the aftermath of her murder, having been shot multiple times in the face by an unhinged member of President Donald Trump’s Carhartt-clad militia. The back window of her SUV was lined with stickers on the driver’s side, with one at the top being the unmistakable crest for the NWSL’s Kansas City Current. Her last words were, “I’m not mad at you man.” The unhinged killer’s blurted words in her dying moments were, “fucking bitch.”
Days later, Alex Pretti, a nurse who works in the Intensive Care Unit for a Veterans Affairs hospital was wrestled to the ground by several of these men. While one was walking away with the gun Pretti legally carried, and never reached for let alone unholstered, his body — stomach down on the ground — was riddled with bullets, killing him on the spot. Both killings occurred in the streets of Minneapolis and were unmistakable murders. The only difference in how they were interpreted depended on whether you’ve fully succumbed to the brainwashed cruelty spouted by this Administration and its web of vile sycophants, or are still human.
Across sports, many athletes displayed the human reaction. Unrivaled and WNBA star Breanna Stewart joined the calls to “Abolish ICE” — the federal agency responsible for putting these men on the streets with a directive of carte blanche violence as they round up Black and brown people they deem do not look like Americans. Reigning WNBA Rookie of the Year and Minnesota native, Paige Bueckers, spoke out against ICE’s terrorizing of Minneapolis and announced that she would match donations up to $50,000 to #HopkinsStrong Relief Fund, a Minnesota-based nonprofit.
photo from Unrivaled
NBA star Victor Wembanyama spoke about the normalization of this cruelty in a postgame press conference. “Every day, I wake up and see the news and I'm horrified,” he said. “I think that it's crazy that some people make it sound like it's acceptable, like the murder of civilians is acceptable.” Fellow NBA player Larry Nance Jr. wore an ‘All My Homies Hate ICE’. Former NFL madman, John Randle, posted with an #iceout hashtag on Instagram. Other athletes to speak out include Kelly Pannek and Taylor Heise (Olympians & PWHL players), Jordan Thompson (Olympic Medalist & LOVB player), Jessie Diggins (Olympian), and Alysa Liu (Olympian). A British cross country skier at the Olympics even wrote ‘fuck ice’ in the snow with his urine.
Seventeen days after Good’s murder, and on the same day Pretti was killed, the USWNT was a couple thousand miles away in California, preparing to take on Paraguay in an exhibition match. Due to injuries and European-based American players not being available for selection, the team was a mishmash of NWSL talents. However, some camp leaders and regulars remained. Yet, the match with Paraguay came and went, and a couple days later a match with Chile also came and went, without any acknowledgment about the horrifying tragedies that occurred in Minnesota.
Given the factors around the team — youth, inexperience, hyper-partisanship — the silence wasn’t wholly surprising, but it spoke to a seemingly growing disconnect between women’s soccer players in America, and American women’s soccer fans. The USWNT that women’s soccer fans know is one that quite literally transformed the landscape of women’s sports. A team that knew a ruthless dedication to winning was never going to be enough, with each generation ingesting the lesson and continuing the fight.
Even head coach Emma Hayes, who has spoken of cherishing the legacy of the USWNT and called the appointment her dream job, either forgot or chose to disregard the legacy of the team. Speaking to reporters ahead of the match against Chile, Hayes said the team never discussed it, or if they had, the discussions were not happening in front of her. This, despite having two Mexican-Americans in camp, and another player who was born ten miles outside of Minneapolis.
The legacy Hayes and the players ignored was deep. The history of women’s sports around the world is one of struggle — for access, for professionalism, for simply the right to legally play. The history of women’s soccer in America is one of rebellion. The USWNT has packed stadiums for decades, showing the world what women athletes can be.
The 99ers showed women athletes can be revered for their athletic prowess and competitiveness, a lesson that seemingly culminated with Brandi Chastain’s iconic shirtless celebration. In the immediate aftermath of the 2015 team winning the World Cup, Abby Wambach ran to the stands to kiss her wife with global television cameras all around, just nine days after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges secured marriage equality for same-sex couples. The 2019 team won it all while fighting literally everybody — most of Europe’s historically great teams (Sweden, England, Spain, France, Netherlands), the U.S. Soccer Federation (equal pay), first-time President Donald Trump and the conservative media machine (“I’m not going to the fucking White House.”).
It’s not just the January camp squad, either. The last USWNT players to make a statement aligned with its most passionate fanbase — the one that cares about broader society over jingoism — was Catarina Macario, Kristie Mewis, Andi Sullivan and Megan Rapinoe, protested Texas Governor Greg Abbott's attack on trans children by writing ‘PROTECT TRANS KIDS’ on their wristbands during a SheBelieves match in 2022. So far, the players who’ve made up several iterations of the team since then have allowed its powerful platform to collect dust.
The team’s current pool of players are young, and have grown up in an America that’s elected a convicted rapist and overtly racist con man as President — twice. The rise of Trump and the faux-religious nationalism that’s fueled his political rise has made shamelessness a virtue, and cruelty the norm. It also hasn’t helped that consequences of cruelty aren’t societal shunning, but instead more followers and promotion. There’s power, money and somehow even respect in the suffering of others — who can be anyone once successfully ‘othered’, as was the case with the tarnishing of Renee Good and Alex Pretti after their murders.
But it’s also never been more evident that we aren’t living in a time of policy complexities between red or blue. People are being murdered in the street by their government, we’re well beyond political preference. The current, and most urgent, divide is cruelty versus humanity. Every generation built upon the platform gifted by the previous generation, because they understood that social progress only goes two directions: forward or backward. Volunteering to shutup and dribble betrays the team’s legacy, platform, fans, and humanity. ◼︎
If you’re able and would like to donate to help those being targeted in Minnesota, here are three places doing good work: