Late in her senior year of high school—the moment most elite young soccer players in this country are preparing to head off to college to start a new phase in their careers—midfielder Macey Hodge decided she was done with the sport.
It was a shock to her as much as anyone. Soccer had always been a space where everything outside the field faded into the background. She felt most herself with a ball at her feet. That turned out to be the problem.
“There was no disconnect between person and athlete,” Hodge says. “It was just Macey. I didn’t know who I was without the game. That lack of separation became super, super unhealthy for me.”
Around age 16, Hodge’s life outside of soccer felt like it was unraveling. The first straw was when her parents learned she was gay after seeing a text message on her phone. Though she says they’ve since come to accept her, she comes from a conservative religious background, and the revelation strained their relationship.
“After that, everything was just super rocky,” she says. “My relationship with my parents kind of went down the drain. My sisters just didn't really understand what was going on, because my little sister was eight at the time, and I have a special needs older sister. So I felt really isolated. I wasn’t comfortable being myself at home.”
As her relationship with her parents was at its most difficult, her biological father, who has struggled with addiction for years, had just reentered her life. “The pattern is, he leaves, we don't know where he is, and then he comes back,” she says. “Then it's like, I have to pick up the pieces, because he doesn’t have anybody else.”
On top of that, Hodge’s older sister, Alyssa, was diagnosed with a kidney condition.
“There were so many different pieces that I had no outlet to talk about,” she remembers. “So I was dealing with this all by myself, and soccer was my expression to deal with these things because it was the only place where I felt like myself—so when that wasn't going well, I felt like I had nothing.
“Sometimes soccer would be a quick fix when I felt like I did good—but then the root of the problem was that I didn’t know who I was.”
Hodge decided to take a leap into the unknown, leaving behind the sport that had been her whole identity up to that point. She withdrew from Vanderbilt, where she’d committed in her sophomore year of high school, and hung up her cleats. She wouldn’t touch a soccer ball, or even work out, for another nine months.
That choice came with a complex mix of emotions. Initially, she felt relieved. “At the beginning of it, I was kind of in shock that I made that decision,” she remembers. “The first couple months, it was like, this is awesome. I have no pressure on myself to perform, to be at my best. I made this life-altering decision and people are judging me, but who really cares? Because I already made [the choice].”
After that, reality hit. She looked around and thought, “my life is a mess,” she says. “Then it was like, ‘okay I'm still depressed!’ And I actually had to take control—because I realized just creating that boundary and separation wasn’t going to fix everything.”
When it came to soccer, Hodge says, she felt “complete resentment.”
“I didn't want anything to do with it,” she remembers. “I didn't want to watch it. I didn’t want to hear about it. I really thought that was the end of it.”
“It's crazy, because you spend your entire life training to reach this goal, and then you get a chance at it, and you give it up? I kind of hated myself for it, and I think a lot of my family probably hated me for it—like, ‘are you serious? First you're gay and now you're giving up college?’”
But life went on. “I stayed home,” Hodge says. “I worked at Kroger as a cashier, played with my dogs, went to therapy. I took some community college classes.”
By the end of the year, when her friend Laney Steed invited her to visit at the University of Florida, where Steed was in her freshman season, Hodge felt ready. She made the five-hour drive from Georgia, knowing it was likely she’d get hooked right back in.
Sure enough, “I stayed a couple days, saw a couple trainings, caught a game,” she says. “And I was like, ‘damn, I wish I at least would have given it a shot.’ Like, am I going to look back in however many years and wonder about what could have been?”
On the drive home, Hodge called her club coach. “I was like, ‘crazy idea,’” she remembers. “‘I know I just went on this hiatus for nine months, but do you think anybody would have me?’ Just to try. I’m not saying I’m going to come in and be great, I just want to try it.”
Her coach called around and got Hodge a trial at Mississippi State, where she impressed the staff enough to earn a spot on the team for the 2020 season.
It wasn’t easy. Hodge had hardly worked out—let alone stayed match fit—since walking away from soccer, and technically, she was rusty. The transition was so hard she almost quit again, fearing she’d never be the same player she once was.
“What made it worth it for me was seeing the connections that I made in those first couple weeks,” she says. “I didn’t feel like I was alone anymore.”
The transition wasn’t just physically, but emotionally difficult. The changes that come with starting college—being in a new space, surrounded by new people, with a new series of responsibilities and challenges—are difficult for anyone, and Hodge’s situation made them especially challenging.
At some point, she found the fun in the sport she’d always loved. “There was no expectation for Macey Hodge to be some big name,” she says. “I would dance every day at practice, I would joke with my friends and my coaches. Playing in games was like the cherry on top. Even if I wasn’t playing, I would have been happy because of the environment and the people I was with.”
By her junior year, though, she’d found her footing and was starting to stand out. In 2023, her senior year, she was earning national recognition, including being named to the All-SEC First Team and the SEC Academic Honor Roll. She was planning to enter the 2024 NWSL Draft.
But in October, as Hodge puts it, “life said, ‘oh no, girl, you're not doing that.’” She broke a vertebra, an injury that “at the time, I thought was one of the worst things that was ever going to happen to me.”
It was spring before she was ready to play again, way too late to try to make her way onto an NWSL roster—but she had one more year of NCAA eligibility remaining, so she decided to start a graduate program in sports administration and keep playing.
That twist of fate turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Hodge’s graduate season was her best yet: the team won the SEC and made it to the Round of 16 in the national tournament. Individually, Hodge was named a First-Team All American and won SEC Midfielder of the Year.
It was during that tournament run that she caught the eye of Angel City’s technical staff. In December last year, she signed a two-year contract with ACFC.
“We were looking for a combative, dynamic destroyer in that number six position,” says Technical Director Mark Wilson. “We'd done initial video scouting on Macey and really liked what we saw, and then our technical staff went to some of the quarterfinal and semi-final [NCAA] games and watched her live, which reaffirmed that she was the type of player we thought she was.”
“A Zoom call later,” he continues, “and we knew we had the type of character we wanted in our team.”
In past seasons, Angel City has been thin on options at defensive mid, sometimes relying on players whose more natural position is further up the pitch. The true No. 6s the team has had—Amandine Henry and Julie Ertz—both arrived in LA already nearing the ends of their careers. At 23 years old, Hodge has her whole career ahead of her, and the staff hopes she’ll stick around for the long term.
“Sustainability is the key,” says Wilson. “We want players who can come in at a young age, developing to the NWSL, and then become a long-term fixture in our squad—so looking at emerging talent or young enough talent that can give us a runway into being successful, winning championships, just progressing the team forward was super important.”
Hodge has made an impact already, landing in the starting lineup for Angel City’s first two games this season and showing she can contribute as the team aims to threaten on transition plays more consistently. She got a second assist on Alyssa Thompson’s season-opening goal against San Diego, receiving a pass from defender M.A. Vignola after she forced a turnover, then quickly turning upfield and finding midfielder Kennedy Fuller, who assisted Thompson, as a defender closed her down.
“Macey has shown real vision and awareness of some of the longer passes and line-breaking passes that she's playing whilst still adapting to the speed of play and the physical dynamic of the league,” says Wilson.
Looking back, Hodge says the struggles she went through to get here help her keep things in perspective. “If I have a bad session, I think, I've seen my life at the lowest point and it gives me the perspective of, ‘okay this really isn't that bad,’” She says. “I'm living here in Los Angeles when five years ago I thought I was never going to play again, you know?”
More than anything, her journey has taught her that she’s never alone. “I think the biggest thing is just being open and honest with people that you can trust, because you're not dealing with this alone,” says Hodge. “You might feel really isolated, but when you're open about it, you might have five other people who understand. That moment of vulnerability can be super uncomfortable, but then it leads to so much support and love.”
