Megan Reid
A cavernous firehouse garage— empty, with high ceilings and the firetruck and ambulance backed up outside— can double as a pretty solid indoor soccer arena. Megan Reid would know.
At the Sonoma Valley Fire Department, indoor soccer means 2v2, or 2v3. The ball bounces, echoes. It’s obvious that one of these players has a soccer past beyond just firehouse futsal. She’s smaller than the rest of the firefighters-- under 5’8” compared to the others’ 6’2” or 6’3” statures— but she zips between the other players and between the big metal poles that run through the middle of the “field.” Those poles separate where the trucks typically park. The player challenges with strong tackles and nifty ball skills. She kicks the ball into a single foam roller, knocking it on its side– scoring a goal in the rules of their makeshift game.
That’s Megan.
When Megan applied to Sonoma Valley, she wasn’t looking for a pickup soccer group. She had played soccer for years growing up, then in college at the historically-strong University of Virginia women’s soccer program. She could have gone pro straight out of school but had stepped away from the sport after the death of her father in 2016.
Her love of soccer wasn’t complicated, until it was.
But when she applied, and department chief Ted Hassler saw that a former NCAA DI college soccer player would be sitting before a panel he’d be on for the interviews, he saw an opportunity. Hassler loved soccer; he had played, and coached his daughter’s team. He was the reason the crew played soccer in its downtime, and he wanted to use what Megan called his “dry humor” to hear what the potential new hire had to say about the sport.
“How can you play soccer?” he asked her. “It’s one of the most boring sports.”
“He actually tried to get a rise out of me at one point,” Megan remembered. “I respectfully called him on it.”
Later, Hassler told her that he had heard about her playing history and wanted to “test” Reid. He wanted her on his crew— and as a part of his soccer squad.
In her first pickup game on the job, Reid made a fast first impression, “flying out of nowhere” with a slide tackle to prevent an opposing team’s goal.
“I don't like to lose,” said Reid.
Slowly, between pickup games at the firehouse, coaching locally, and making a dare with a former teammate, Reid’s attention turned toward professional soccer. That spark began to return.
Now, Megan Reid is on fire for the National Women Soccer League’s Angel City FC. She played every minute for the team in its inaugural 2022 season and, in December, signed a one-year contract with the team.
But, it’s not a fire that was kindled overnight.
As Megan grew up, sports were a family affair. Both of her parents were active and had an extended history of playing sports, and so Megan continued the family tradition. She tried flag football, rugby, soccer, basketball, baseball, swimming, tennis— “anything I could get my hands on,” she said.
Soccer and basketball became Megan’s two main sports as she got older. The two were during the same high school season, and she sandwiched those between running track and playing water polo for her school.
Megan’s mom passed away when she was seven, so sports became something she and her dad, George, did together, along with her two older siblings.
“I think one summer alone I was on five separate teams,” Megan said. “I would be going from like 7 a.m. all the way until like 7 p.m. straight, and he would drive me to and from everything or would arrange for carpools for me to jump between the different sports.”
“It was kind of like a little chess match of who could take who, where, and, who was on which team that could bring us to different sports,” she said.
As Megan’s soccer skills flourished, so did her opportunities to compete outside California, where she grew up. George didn’t like flying on planes, so the pair would drive— like up to a tournament in Oregon, around 13 hours or so. They’d chat, or Megan would sleep in the passenger seat, as the pair journeyed up the California coast. Together, in familiar rhythm— they grew to understand one another, Megan said.
“We are very much alike,” she said. “Like our mannerisms and our personality, we’re both quieter, but like if you get us on the right topic, we talk your ear off.”
In high school, Megan practiced four hours a day after classes and would stay up until the day’s end, watching the clock tick past midnight as she completed her homework. She thought about college, and what came next, and settled on the fact that she’d have a better chance of a soccer scholarship, versus basketball.
She was in recruiting talks with Air Force and Cal Poly as she rounded the corner into her last semester of high school. But, not set on either of those options, she decided to reach out to the coaches at the University of Virginia.
During her junior year, she had visited Virginia, somewhat coincidentally, after attending a visit to Georgetown with a friend and her dad. They were traveling together, and the friend had been visiting UVA for academics, not sports. Her dad recommended Megan reach out to UVA’s coaching staff.
She wondered if it would be awkward that she was there— she wasn’t technically being recruited by them, after all. Inviting yourself on a visit to the school that Soccer Wire ranked as the sixth-strongest women’s soccer program over the past 25 years? Megan wasn’t quite sure if that was a faux pas, until she got there.
“[The UVA staff] were the coolest people, so welcoming, so accepting, just wanted to show me everything,” Megan said. “They really gave you the time of day, which is a unique thing I think from a college, especially when like, they're not even looking to recruit you at that point in any way, shape, or form. They just make the time.”
That was junior year. By senior year, she had better videos, better highlights, and better performances at big-name club tournaments. At the encouragement of her club coach, she reconnected with UVA head coach Steve Swanson, came out to an official visit that spring, committed, and was at preseason training just months later.
A rare late-recruiting story, but come the fall season, Megan was ready to go.
She started 18 games her freshman year and scored her first career goal on a 50-yard volley while playing on the backline. She stepped to an Old Dominion player to clear the ball, followed through on a clearance, and looped the ball over the top of the goalkeeper, who was too far off her line. An accident, and a screamer at that.
“Normally, we're a team that celebrated, and I think we watched that goal happen, and everyone just stood, did not move, and just stared— and like: ‘Did that just happen?’”
Scoring goals wasn’t new for Megan, but doing so from the backline was. Prior to college, she had played center forward, but coming into Virginia's stacked roster, she was looking for playing time amidst an attacking arsenal of players like Morgan Gautrat (née Brian) and Danielle Colaprico. They needed a right back, Steve said, to play alongside defenders like Emily Sonnett and Kristen McNabb. Megan wanted to play, so right back it was. Then it was centerback, after Sonnett graduated.
As Megan remained a mainstay on the Cavaliers backline, there was the question of whether she’d make the jump to the National Women’s Soccer League like other Virginia alum had. UVA could make a case for being Centerback U, having graduated the likes of USWNT defenders Becky Sauerbrunn and NWSL first-draft-pick Sonnett.
But Megan had her hesitations, debating some of the same questions that circle many female athletes’ minds as they near graduation. Underneath the dream of being a pro athlete came the reality: “making 10, 16 grand a year and struggling to get by and just dealing with so much abuse that was in the league at the time,” said Megan. She had other interests— and other potential career paths.
“I didn't know if that was something that I wanted to put up with,” said Megan. “I wanted my last, you know, hurrah with soccer to be fun and enjoyable, or as enjoyable as it could be.”
Megan had spent hours talking to her dad about this very topic, He was rational above all else, Megan said. Mildmannered and very rational. “Caring and loving, but [rationality] was definitely more at his forefront– like ‘why are we doing this?’ It should make sense.’”
There was soccer— always had been, as long as Megan and George could remember. Still, Megan had also always felt drawn to the military, to serve something bigger than herself, to be a part of a team, to stay active in her career. Her dad, however, was more hesitant. While Megan pictured herself working in intelligence overseas, George worried about her safety in the military. She was already across the country for school. He wanted his daughter home, or at least on this side of the Atlantic.
Together, during winter break of her junior year of college, they sat down and brainstormed a list of jobs that might still tap into the parts of military service that appealed to Megan. Police officer. Megan wasn’t sure. A contractor, building things? Still, she wasn’t totally sold.
“You could be a firefighter,” George said.
Megan hadn’t thought of that before. She could be.
“I think he was very good at analyzing people, what their strengths, their weaknesses are, and being very honest about them, and then being like, ‘This is what I think is best for you,” Megan said. “For me, trusting him, it came easily because I felt like it was just very easy to see ourselves in one another.”
After years of long drives up the west coast and taking Megan and her siblings to practice after practice, the pair understood one another.
“That was actually one of the last long conversations I had ever had with my dad,” Megan said.
In the spring of 2017, her father passed away. Megan also had hip surgery. Not playing soccer due to injury, and now having lost the person who was the reason she fell in love with soccer and sports in the first place, the thought of declaring for the NWSL draft, walking across that stage, and posing with a team’s scarf and keeping that same grind of day-in and day-out practice, didn’t feel right.
But she thought about that conversation with her dad, the one about firefighting.
“At that point, I was just trying to find anything that brought me some joy, and some life,” she said.
She went on a ridealong with a local fire station near UVA and felt a spark. George had been right, but that didn’t surprise her. Into the fall, as she played her senior year of college soccer, she began regularly volunteering at the local station. It was a young crew, full of UVA students, but Megan could see herself there, older.
“I'd come to practice every day so excited about something I did or saw or like learned [at the station],” she said. “It was a blast.”
Megan turned her tassel and graduated in December of 2017, after finishing the soccer season and earning All-ACC Second Team honors. While some of her teammates prepared for the NWSL draft, Megan signed up for firefighting and EMT-Basic certification courses, which she completed throughout the spring. She studied and volunteered and watched movies with the station crew as the weather grew warmer and the start of the 2018 NWSL season came and went.
As her lease expired in Charlottesville, the last thing legally binding her to UVA, Megan knew it was, financially, time to move back home. She said goodbye to her teams— both soccer and firefighting— and headed back to San Francisco.
In California, Megan coached youth club soccer as she sought a job at a fire department. The entire process could take six months to a year: physical tests, psych evaluations, an oral board exam, a chief’s interview, and more.
During this process, Megan worked as an emergency room technician and found herself looking to get her paramedic license— she enjoyed the medical side of her work and knew that someone who doubled as a paramedic and firefighter was especially hireable. Just as she quit her technician job and enrolled in medic school— March 10, 2020— the world shut down. Classes were split, online and in-person, and the format made learning somewhat difficult, Reid said. She needed hands-on experience and could help with the certifications that she already had, she knew.
Helping meant working at a trauma center, dealing with the onslaught of coronavirus cases on top of car accidents and heart attacks, and broken bones.
“It sounds horrible, but like when you go to a car accident, for instance, like most people be like, ‘Oh my God, a bone is sticking out of their leg. Oh my gosh,’” Reid said. “Whereas like for me, like that's, unless it's spurting blood, it's not even a thought in my mind… I didn't wanna get stuck in that mindset of like, I am so drawn to the trauma that I can't focus on the underlying issues, and so that's why I just wanted to expose myself to it as much as possible.”
With this experience, Megan applied for a job at the Sonoma Valley Fire Station, where she wasn’t hired full-time yet but was offered an internship. Sonoma Valley— That’s where she interviewed with Ted and began pickup soccer games in the firehouse garage. Sometimes, she’d get to skip chores to watch soccer with Ted.
“I didn't think he liked me at first,” Megan said. “I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, this guy's a little scary.’ Then he just starts talking to you and he finds one connection and then you're like, ‘Oh my gosh. He’s the sweetest.’”
And: “I don't wanna scrub the toilets,” Reid added, laughing.
This was how she ended up at the Sonoma Valley Fire Station. It was, in part, how she ended up in the NWSL.
Megan still kept in touch with teammates from UVA— teammates like Annaugh Madsen. The pair were on the phone when Madsen mentioned a conversation she had with another former teammate of theirs: Veronica Latsko, now a pro player on the OL Reign. “Meg totally could have played in the league, if she had wanted to,” the conversation between Latsko and Madsen went. “She still could, if she wanted to.”
“Ha, that would be funny,” Megan admitted after Madsen told her about the conversation.
“That would be really funny,” Madsen said, “but like of all the people to do it, you would be the annoying person that could actually do it.”
“And I was like, ‘Ha, no. Like shucks. No, but thank you,’” Megan recalled saying.
“It would be funny if like, I dared you,” said Madsen.
A dare? That caught Megan’s attention.
“Well, if you dare me…” said Megan. She did miss soccer, but the question was whether she could pick up where she left off.
She began competing with Lamorinda United, her local amateur Women’s Premier Soccer League team, alongside players that she had coached— the team was good, too. Her former college and club coaches began reaching out to professional contacts they had, looking to see who might say yes to a former Virginia centerback, turned paramedic, four years removed from her last collegiate game.
Her old club coach had connections in Denmark, where Megan went to play on a trial for five weeks. There, she tweaked her hamstring, so she came home early, and as she was returning to the United States, she got a call from Swanson, Virginia’s head coach. He’d secured Megan a spot on the discovery list for the San Diego Wave, one of two new NWSL expansion teams in California for the 2022 season.
That was perfect, Megan thought. “I need to make sure I don't embarrass you,” she told Steve over the phone. “Would it be okay if I came and I trained with you just like for a couple of weeks, like maybe before I head out?”
She returned to her old stomping grounds as she rehabbed her hamstring. By the time she was ready to fly back to California, Steve gave his appraisal, which Megan remembered as: “I think anyone that's looking at you would be able to see that you're just rough around the edges, but you can be smooth… I think you have the baseline of what it takes to make the leap.”
Megan’s month-long trial period at San Diego was competitive, and eventually, the club let her know that she wasn’t quite what they were looking for at the moment. She had been calling Steve every few days to keep him updated on the training and trials. After the cuts, she let him know she was planning on heading home, back up the coast, the next day. There was no reason to hang around.
“Wait,” said Steve. He told her not to leave San Diego just yet. He’d call a few more people, and see what he could do. If she didn’t hear from him by 10 a.m. the next morning, she could head out.
The hours ticked by, and sleep came, and no call. The next morning, Megan had her keys in her hand, ready to drive home, when her phone rang. Steve.
“Freya from LA is going to call you. If you get a random number, pick it up.”
Freya Coombe, Angel City FC’s coach. Steve was right— she called a few minutes later, and she let Megan know the team was actually driving down to train in Chula Vista at that very moment. She invited Megan to a trial period with ACFC, one that began with a scrimmage against San Diego, just three days after Megan had been let go from their discovery list.
She held her own against the likes of Jodie Taylor and Katie Johnson, and Freya invited Megan back to Los Angeles to continue to train with California’s other expansion team.
After another scrimmage, Megan was heading to visit family friends when she got a text from the GM, congratulating her on being offered a contract with the team.
A contract. A professional soccer contract. Dare, complete. She called her siblings, and boyfriend, and closest friends. Plus, she told Madsen, of course, and Ted.
“He was just so stoked, really excited,” Megan recalled. “He was like,’ I'm already planning on figuring out which games I can come to.’”
The Sonoma Valley fire department crew came down to Los Angeles for an Angel City FC game this summer, in July. The firefighters donned black ACFC jerseys and participated in the coin toss before Angel City faced the OL Reign. Megan had arranged it all prior with the ACFC front office, getting the crew— and soccer mega-fan Ted— down on the field.
Angel City lost, 3-2, but the game was special for Megan because of the familiar faces rooting her on, in-person.
The other crew members told Megan that Ted cried a little bit.
“He was just a proud dad, or proud friend, however you want to put it,” Megan said.
The other crew members are “like my big brothers,” said Megan.
“I think they just had a blast kind of getting to be a part of it and getting to be a part of my new team,” Megan said. “My new team and my old team joining— it was a really cool kind of blending moment.”
Megan made an impact with her new team in her first season. Injuries to LA defenders Sarah Gorden and Paige Nielsen meant Megan was in the starting lineup. Megan’s strong performance meant that she was in the starting lineup every game of the 2022 season— and on the field for every minute of the season. She was Angel City FC’s only Ironwoman and only one of seven in the NWSL that year. She earned the team’s Rookie of the Year honors and resigned a one-year contract in December.
From volunteer firefighter to playing in front of 32,000 fans, Megan knows how to handle pressure. She’s defending forwards that she watched on TV while growing up, now getting to be a little “thorn in their side,” she said. She’s playing in front of the NWSL’s largest-ever crowd. She’s craving the 1v1 defending situations that she first dreaded at UVA, when she switched to the backline.
“I made the conscious decision that like, you know, screw it,” Megan said. “I'm going to make 1v1 defending my thing and, instead of being scared of it, I'm gonna be excited for it… And if you beat me, I get pissed and it's like, ‘Let's go again.’ When you come at me again, I'm like, ‘Oh yes, I get this chance again.’”
Megan— who, in October, head coach Coombe described as steady and consistent— is familiar with that pressure and the teamwork of shifting, stepping, and defending with a backline.
“[As a paramedic], When you walk into a room and someone has died, and you have five people next to you, every single one of them knows their job,” Megan said. “When you walk in, like someone knows ‘I have airway,’ ‘I have IVs,’ ‘I'll get this,’ ‘I'll start compressions.’ It’s just very seamless. Like people just start doing the job, they work together, and it's almost sometimes without even having to say anything.”
“[In both soccer and my previous roles], you have a team, you have to trust that team. You have to be able to work with that team, respect them, hear them, and solve problems together. Lean on each other when things are hard and hype each other up when they do the right things. It's truly one and the same, just within different environments.”
For Megan, the goal is to keep her passion for soccer alive “and to just enjoy playing the game again.” As she and Angel City find their identity and continue to grow and connect, Megan said it would be amazing to play for years or receive weekly or monthly NWSL accolades, but:
“My main goal is to enjoy the sport, love the sport, and whatever it affords me down the road,” Megan said. “I'll embrace it, you know? And I think that's the way that you don't get burnt out.”
That’s the way you keep the fire burning— though Megan’s got experience with doing the opposite, too.
