New Year, New Faces: Mackenzie Pluck

Angel City's newest signing is rookie midfielder Mackenzie Pluck out of Duke. After going undrafted in the 2023 draft, Pluck came to LA to join the team as a preseason trialist. Within two weeks, the coaching staff decided they'd seen enough and offered Pluck a contract, and the club announced her signing two weeks ago.

Like ACFC midfielder Lily Nabet, a teammate at Duke, Pluck opted to take the extra year of eligibility the NCAA offered to students who had a season interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. During that final season, she began a master's degree in marketing and management at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, which she is still finishing up as her pro career gets started.

By the end of her college career, Pluck was a fixture for the Blue Devils, having played a school-record 107 matches, including 78 starts. She notched 21 goals—six of them game winners—and 29 assists during that time, and appeared in the NCAA Tournament quarterfinals for three straight years in her junior, senior, and graduate seasons. She has the fourth-most career assists of any player in Duke history.

Pluck has also been named to a handful of camp rosters for the U-16 and U-14 US women's national teams.

Every year, a new crop of players, most of them draft entrants who went unselected, join NWSL teams for preseason training, hoping to impress coaches enough to earn a spot on a roster. Most of them don't succeed, but a handful do manage to make teams via this route. Pluck joins other Angel City players, including Simone Charley, Megan Reid, and Madison Hammond, who have gone pro after starting as trialists.

Moving from a college environment to a professional one isn't an easy transition. Coaches aren't necessarily looking for players who could start right away; rather, they're focusing on players' potential upside and their attitude in training.

'One of the big things when you come in from a college environment is the gap between the speed of play, the physicality,' said assistant coach Becki Tweed. 'We look to identify the players that can come in, and it's not a huge gap. It's still that transition period where you're moving from college, but what does your ceiling look like? How are you going to look in a year or two's time? It's not necessarily about an immediate impact, but it's being able to hold your own, knowing that you also have more potential to give.'

Pluck, who got a taste of a professional environment when she spent summers in college training with the Gotham reserves, matched that description.

'Mac came in and she fit straight in,' continued Tweed. 'She had all those qualities. She could hold her own. The gap didn't look like it was crazy big. She put her head down, she worked hard. Bringing that to the table from day one was really important, because ultimately it's difficult to come in as a trialist.'

Pluck handled the pressure by taking things one step at a time. 'I came in with the mindset of, just play, don't put pressure on it,' she said. 'I told myself, 'I'm going to go for it and see what happens, but not get too down on myself if it's not the right timing. Just show what you can do and see if it's good enough for them'—and it was.'

Head Coach Freya Coombe was impressed with Pluck's levelheadedness from the beginning. 'For someone who was on a tryout with us,' she said, 'she was unfazed and she played like she was already used to the environment. She took on information really well and was really coachable when we gave her feedback.'

Pluck attributes that confidence, in part, to her time training with Gotham. 'I felt so confident there,' she said. 'The level of play, I loved it. I think it made me better, and I picked up on it pretty quick. Stepping into a new environment with such high pace, such intensity, great players, all very skilled, it only made me feel more confident, because I knew if I can keep up with them, I can grow quick for sure.'

Pluck is an attacking player who's played various positions in the midfield and on the front line throughout her career. 'I grew up as an attacking mid and I have a lot of love for that position, just the distribution aspect,' she said. At Duke, however, she played as a winger on both sides of the field.

Naturally right-footed, she's found success playing on the left as an inverted winger, where she can both cut inside and use her dribbling and passing abilities to create chances centrally, or go to the endline, drawing defenders out wide and opening up space for teammates.

Though her 21 goals at Duke are nothing to sneeze at, it's her 29 assists that say more about who Pluck is as a player—and which direction she wants to continue growing in. 'I've always been a forward/midfielder and scoring hasn't been my number one,' she said. 'It's always been assisting.'

Some highlights from college give a glimpse at what she's capable of as a creator. In a clip from an October, 2021 match against North Carolina State, Pluck cuts inside, beats two midfielders on the dribble, and threads a pinpoint pass in for Tess Boade, who scores. Be sure to watch the replay in that clip to get a good look at the apparent casualness with which she lays off the pass using the outside of her right foot.

Another clip, from a September, 2021 game against Eastern Carolina, shows what she can do in a moment of transition: with plenty of space to work with on a breakaway play, she flicks a looping through ball between the opposing left back and center back, which bounces a few times before landing perfectly in the path of Michelle Cooper's central run, leading to another goal.

Looking ahead to the upcoming season, Pluck says there are two major areas she wants to 'get really, really good at.'

The first is crossing. As exemplified by the clips above, her current strengths lie more in her dribbling and passing abilities, but she says she wants to get more dangerous sending the ball in from wide areas. 'If I can find girls who can put it in the back of the net well,' she says, 'that's my goal.'

Second, she says, she wants to focus on her defending. That's a necessary skill for all but the most dangerous goalscorers in the rough-and-tumble NWSL. 'It's just working my ass off on defense and trying to win the ball higher up the field, to save the defense from running a lot,' she says. 'Save their legs, make our jobs easier, make their jobs easier.'

Pluck says Nabet, her teammate and friend from Duke, has been a role model as she makes the transition to professional play. “Lily is one of those players that constantly proves people wrong and she has a workhorse mentality,” says Pluck. “I think where she is now sets the tone for where I want to be.”