"I'm Ready for a Softer Life"

Merritt Mathias didn’t go into the 2024 season expecting it to be her last. What she was hoping for was a comeback—from a 2023 season she spent on the sideline due to injury and illness.

But as the year went on, each of a series of minor setbacks started to feel less like challenges to be overcome and more like her body trying to tell her something.

“This year has been very much littered with illness and injury,” says Mathias. “With my diagnosis, it just takes longer for my body to heal in the way that it needs to, and that’s a full-time job. Even on my good days it is hard. So I just decided this isn't how I want to live my life. I do not want to continue to do the thing that I love and only get to do it a minimal amount of time because the rest of my time is spent rehabbing or coming back from something.”

Mathias, who will retire at the end of the season after 12 years in the NWSL, has been lucky injury-wise most of her career. Her first major injury, an ACL tear, came late in the 2019 season, her seventh in the league, when she was playing for the North Carolina Courage. Her recovery suffered a setback in 2020, when she had to get surgery for a meniscus injury, but she was back on the field by May of 2021.

That almost-two-year recovery process was “one of the hardest things I’ve ever experienced,” she says. “Coming back from something like that, where you basically learn to walk again, it teaches you a lot about yourself. It was very much tied tightly to my own personal healing journey.”

In a way, the timing was serendipitous: “the silver lining of [the pandemic],” Mathias says, “was it allowed me the time to put myself first.”

She returned to the Courage lineup, starting 13 games in 2021, but soon hit more bumps in the road.

“I went into the offseason prepared and came into pre-season totally fine,” she remembers. “I felt great, I was playing to a really high level. Then I ended up getting Covid.”

She recovered fully, but not long after, she got mono. “The mono really, really hit me,” Mathias says. “It felt as if my body was slowing down. I just could not recover. I was so fatigued. I fought through it, but I never felt really great.”

Then she got Covid a second time.

“After the second bout of Covid, I didn't recover,” she says plainly. “I went to our medical staff and I was like, ‘I don't know what's going on, but I feel really, really off.’ I would go out to go through a warm up and be like, ‘I don't know how I'm going to make it through practice.’ It is a type of fatigue that I can't even describe. You feel it in your bones.”

That offseason, Mathias was traded to Angel City. She worked diligently to get back to full fitness in preparation for 2023, but something was off. “I was going and running,” she remembers,” and I was hitting these numbers, but it was so hard.” She’d never struggled this much to achieve the fitness level she needed.

“Part of what has made me so successful is the level of fitness I can obtain,” she explains.

Mathias will end her career as one of the most decorated players in league history, with three NWSL Shields and three championships to her name—two of each with North Carolina, plus a 2014 championship with FC Kansas city and a 2015 Shield with Seattle. She’s played as an outside back, one of the most physically demanding positions on the field, that whole time, and has long been known for her lung-busting runs up and down the field to contribute on both offense and defense.

In short, Mathias’s athleticism and endurance were her identity as a player, and that made everything she was experiencing a bigger blow than it might have been even to other soccer players.

Just a few days into preseason in 2023, Mathias was hit with yet another injury, a torn meniscus. She needed surgery. “During that time, I was like, ‘I’m going to reach out to someone and get a blood test,’” she remembers. That’s when she was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes.

It might come as a surprise that an elite-level athlete could be diagnosed with an illness often associated with inactivity and an imbalanced diet, but a wider slice of the population is at risk than people often think. “Type 2 diabetes is multifactorial, so there are lots of different reasons people get it,” says Dr. Amanda Velazquez, director of obesity medicine at Cedars-Sinai. “Even if they are a highly active individual, that doesn't preclude them from developing type 2 diabetes, because genetics is a big component, for example.”

Factors like chronic stress and inadequate sleep can also contribute; so could certain infections, including Covid. While it’s impossible to say exactly what caused Mathias’s diagnosis, it’s possible her back-to-back illnesses played a role. 

“Covid-19 is a viral infection that involves inflammation in the body, and type 2 diabetes is a chronic disease that involves inflammation in the body,” says Velazquez. “So it's not unexpected for someone to develop an inflammatory condition after being exposed to [another] inflammatory condition.”

Between her diabetes diagnosis and the knee injury, Mathias ended up having to sit out the whole 2023 season. She headed into 2024 healthy and optimistic about her return to the field, and got minutes in Angel City’s first two games. Then, a few hours before the team’s March 30 match in Kansas City, she got sick and had to be scratched from the roster.

She returned to the gameday roster on May 3, but continued to struggle with illness on and off the rest of the season, playing more than 45 minutes just three times and never a full 90 minutes. 

“With diabetes, my symptoms are a lot worse, and it takes me a lot longer to recover,” says Mathias. “To have diabetes of any form and be an athlete is very hard.”

“Diabetes can impact somebody’s energy levels,” explains Velazquez. “It can impact somebody’s stability with energy sources in the body… and they have to be more conscientious of their eating times.”

One thing Mathias has struggled with is the appetite-suppressing effects of her medication, something that makes it difficult to meet the high caloric demands of her sport. For any patient, “it's a balancing act between appetite suppression, sugar control, and trying to achieve your health outcomes,” Velazquez says.

As the season went on, Mathias increasingly wondered if all the effort it was taking to stay fit enough to play was worth it. And, she realized, after 12 years in the league, she was worn out. “To come up and in the league when I've come up into it—it's always been hard,” she says. “It's a grind on the field and it's a grind off of it. There wasn't any form of luxury to it. And that is exhausting.”

“I am ready,” she says, “for a softer life.”

As one of just a handful of remaining NWSL originals, Mathias has been a trailblazer in multiple ways. She’s been a powerful force for progress in the NWSL, serving on the bargaining committee for the first-ever CBA between the league and the Players’ Association. She plans to continue pushing for progress after her retirement, saying, “I want to be in the rooms where decisions are made. I want to be the one that drives this league in a direction that I believe it should go in.”

Eventually, she says, “my goal is to own a team in the NWSL.”

On the field, perhaps Mathias’s biggest contribution has been her role in redefining what success looks like for female soccer players. “When I was growing up, success was being on the national team and winning world championships or gold medals,” she says. “And I think it took me a long time to look at my club career and really appreciate it and hold my championships and Shields and the minutes I've played on a similar pedestal.”

No one would hesitate to call a male player who had won as much as Mathias has in the toughest league in the world successful, but it’s only recently that club accomplishments in the women’s game have been considered similarly significant. “I sit here incredibly proud of what I’ve done,” says Mathias. “This league is starting to be a place where you can actually create a career and be deemed successful, so to give that blueprint to future generations is something I’m really proud of.”