When Simone Charley scored her first regular-season goal in an Angel City jersey on Sunday, it felt like a long time coming. “It felt really good to finally get that breakthrough,” she said after the game. “I've been knocking on the door for a while now.”
Rewind a few years, and there was no guarantee Charley would be in this position today—or even that she’d be playing professional soccer.
Angel City acquired Charley, along with Tyler Lussi, from the Thorns during the offseason. How she landed with the Thorns is a longer story, and one with no other real parallels in the league.
Coming out of Vanderbilt—where she was a dual-sport athlete in soccer and track and field—Charley went unselected in the 2018 NWSL draft. She did, however, catch the eye of former Thorns coach Mark Parsons, and he made her an offer: come to Portland and train with the team for a year. There was no guarantee of anything, but if she worked hard and kept improving, the club might offer her a pro contract the following season. Charley took him up on it and leapt into the unknown.
“I was very nervous,” Charley said at the time. “Even all [of 2018], just because everything was unclear. Obviously, you come and give your best every day, but you don’t know what the end is going to be.”
Between front desk shifts at a gym and coaching individual clients (in both soccer and triple jump, which she still holds both the indoor and outdoor school records for at Vanderbilt), Charley trained with some of the best players in the world, including all-time leading international goal scorer Christine Sinclair, as well as USWNT standbys Lindsey Horan and Tobin Heath.
While having teammates at that level gives a young player access to a wealth of soccer information, what really stuck with Charley was their work ethic. “It's not like they just rolled out the womb more talented,” she says. “No, these are the most disciplined players and the hardest working players.” Taking their example to heart, she’d stay after training every day, sometimes for an hour or two, doing the bread-and-butter exercise of every kid with a dream: kicking the ball against a wall.
“Your performance is based off of, are you willing to put in the work?” she says. “Are you willing to stay after, are you willing to do the extra commitments and do the extra finishing and go the extra mile? Because that's what ends up making the difference.”
After more than a year training with the team, all that extra work paid off when Charley earned a pro contract in May 2019. She’d grown substantially as a player in that year. The Simone Charley who showed up in 2018 was fast and tenacious—still hallmarks of her game today—but needed to improve in how she read the game and had a first touch that often let her down.
By 2019, the pieces were gelling, and over the next three years, she continued to learn. She fine-tuned the timing of her runs and gained confidence in challenging defenders on the dribble. By 2021, she was an important piece of the Thorns attack—a savvy No. 9 who can score with her head, by taking on defenders one-on-one, or by running onto through passes or balls over the top. But on a team stacked with talent, she had to fight for playing time; most of her starts came when Horan, Sinclair, and Crystal Dunn were with their national teams at the Olympics.
The move to Angel City marked a new opportunity, and a new challenge for Charley. “Now having a couple of years of NWSL experience under my belt, it's definitely different,” she says. “I feel like being a more veteran player here, I've definitely felt like I've had to take more responsibility, both on and off the field.”
On the field, that responsibility goes well beyond scoring goals, and she’s been a key piece of the attack even before her equalizer against the Dash. In the 3–1 win against Gotham on August 28, for example, she helped set up two goals.
For Angel City’s second goal, she snaked her way past three defenders in the box, drawing two more as she fired off a shot; that shot was blocked, but landed at the feet of Cari Roccaro, who was now wide open. On the final goal, as Claire Emslie dribbled up the right wing, Charley and Savannah McCaskill each made forward runs, dragging a defender along with them, opening up space for Emslie to cut inside and shoot.
Off the field, Charley has taken on more of a leadership role. “Playing those first years, [out of college], it's a lot of just trying to learn from older players, taking in as much information as you can and looking to other people for answers,” she says. Now she’s someone who younger players look to for guidance “Not that I have the answers,” she laughs.
She talks about that transition as “a good challenge,” one of many she and her teammates have had to tackle this season. Perhaps the main challenge for the group as a whole has been finding their way as an expansion team.
“Everything is new for everybody and it's everyone's first time playing with everyone,” she says. “We don't have any traditions. We don't have standards yet. We’re all building this from the ground up. That is a pretty cool challenge, because you get to create your own identity.”
As far as what that identity is, words like “honesty,” “encouragement,” and “accountability” come up. The foundation for all of that, Charley says, is trust.
Part of that is “trusting that you can pass the ball into a tight space and knowing that player can handle it,” she says. “But also trusting that if someone is giving you instruction or holding you accountable to our standard, that they're coming to a place of wanting you to be better and not from just a place of frustration.”
Through all of this, Charley continues to grow as an individual player. At Angel City, she’s played as a lone striker, whether that’s in a 4-3-3 and the 4-1-4-1 the team deployed against Houston—a shift from her time in Portland, where she was always paired with another forward.
“[I’ve been] learning about my positioning and making sure I'm in, as Eleri [Earnshaw, the club’s performance analyst] says, the right place all the time—not just the right place at the right time,” she says. “It’s an area I’ve been growing in a lot, being nitpicky with where I am on the field and using my position to dictate the play and create the pictures that I want to see, as opposed to waiting for things to happen.”
Positioning is crucial to what is perhaps the most dangerous feature of Charley’s game: the way she threatens in transition. Lurking near the opposing back line, defenders always have to be aware of her, so that when Angel City wins the ball back deeper on the field, she’s often already stretched the defense out of shape. From there, she’s poised to run onto a direct ball and use her dribbling skill and sprinting speed to beat the remaining defenders.
That’s how her first goal played out on Sunday. As ACFC center back Megan Reid looked up the field for passing options, Charley had dragged Dash center back Katie Naughton back towards the Houston goal, opening up space and isolating her. With Naughton now the only defender to beat, Charley ran onto Reid’s ball over the top; Naughton and keeper Jane Campbell each had a chance to pick up the ball, but Charley doggedly chased it down, beating them both to shoot at the empty net.
As Charley has shown, the role of a striker goes well beyond just scoring goals—but being a striker and not scoring, even if you know you’re knocking on the door, can nonetheless be stressful. “To be able to get that breakthrough was a nice little woosah moment,” she said after the Dash game. “Hopefully it's the dam breaking.”