"You Just Have to Play"—Rocky Rodríguez's Long Road from San Jose to LA

Angel City midfielder Rocky Rodríguez has been nominated for the Lauren Holiday Impact Award alongside ACFC community partner Las Fotos Project. You can cast your vote for Rocky and Las Fotos here.

As a kid, like so many girls in so many footballing countries, Rocky Rodríguez—Raquel, or just Raque, at the time—was the only girl she knew who played soccer. Occasionally someone’s sister would show up at the pickup games that broke out wherever there was open space, or to the lessons her dad ran for kids in the area, but they never lasted long.

“It was looked down upon,” she says. “It wasn’t a women’s sport.”

That message was ever-present, both from the broader culture and from the people immediately around her. Playing the game she loved, they said, wasn’t normal—not for her. “People were like, ‘if you play sports, it’s going to turn you gay,’ and stuff like that,” she says. “In some ways, I didn’t feel like a girl, because everything I liked was ‘for boys.’ That was very tough.”

It didn’t help that she was the best one on the field more often than not. “Moms of my friends would see that I was better and they didn't like that,” she remembers, “so they would kind of throw shade at me.”

But her dad, Sivianni—who had played professionally for Costa Rican club C.S. Herediano and had a few caps with the national team—was different.

“He never saw gender or anything,” Rodríguez says. “He was very supportive—he was the only person who was really consistent with that. It was counter-cultural for my dad to be like that, but I think he just loved me so much.”

“And he knows soccer, so he saw the talent,” she adds.

When Rodríguez was 10, a cousin saw an ad for tryouts for Deportivo Saprissa’s U-15 girls’ side. Players were supposed to be at least 11 to try out, but Rodríguez was turning 11 on the first day of training, so Sivianni convinced the club to let her in. “They were like, ‘all right, but if something happens, it's on you,’” she remembers. She made the team, and not long after that was invited to train with the U-17 national team.

Being just 11 at that first camp, Rodríguez didn’t play a game with the U-17s until she was invited back two years later. Even then, she was the youngest player in the group, making her debut for the senior national team when she was just 13.

As the end of high school loomed, Rodríguez needed to figure out how she was going to keep playing. Not only were there no professional women’s clubs in Costa Rica, but full professionalism anywhere in the world was out of reach for all but a handful of top players. The best option for a young player who wanted to continue challenging themselves was the US college system.

“As I grew older, I knew I wanted to come to the US on a scholarship,” she says. “But I didn't know how to do that or which college to go to.” The collegiate recruitment system can be opaque even to American kids playing high-level club soccer—for a foreign student in an era when little information was available online, it was downright inscrutable.

And then, “either the planets aligned or God must have had a plan,” continues Rodríguez. “I was in the U-20s and we got invited to a tournament for the ODP regionals in Boca Raton.”

Penn State Head Coach Erica Dambach was coaching one of the clubs and spotted Rodríguez right away. “She said, ‘who’s the player with the over-developed quads?’” Rodríguez laughs.

Rodríguez and her dad, who knew little about college programs, went home and googled Penn State. They learned that Dambach was also serving as an assistant for the USWNT at the 2008 Olympics. “I loved that, of course,” says Rodríguez. “And she wanted me.”

Actually leaving for school, something she’d been dreaming about for years, was harder than she expected. On top of moving thousands of miles from home, the recruiting process, which had been fraught with uncertainty since the beginning, had lasted until the last few days before she was supposed to leave, thanks to an issue she had getting her high school credits approved.

“I was crying on the plane when the time came to actually go,” she remembers. “I was really close to not leaving, and I had put all my marbles into leaving Costa Rica, because I wanted to play and I couldn't do that at home.”

Once she arrived, there were highs and lows. “Some days I was like, ‘oh my gosh, I have to pinch myself, I can't believe I'm here,” Rodríguez says. “And other days I was like, ‘how am I going to even finish college? I can’t do this.’”

Despite her talent and international experience, NCAA soccer was a challenge—faster-paced and more physical and transitional than she was used to. Off the field, although she’d gone to an American school back home, where she took some classes in English, she still had a hard time with the more casual language her teammates used.

She also didn’t have the fitness level required for a full season of college soccer, something that remained a struggle even a few years in. Between her sophomore and junior years, she spent the summer in State College. “I was lifting so much and I was eating so much, but I was so anxious,” she says. “I remember just being bloated. My heart rate in the morning was up and down, I would take three-hour naps during the day. I was burned out.”

Rodríguez was feeling a lot of pressure, and it was taking its toll physically and mentally. “One time I was walking through the offices and I bumped into Coach,” she remembers. “She said, ‘Oh, hey, Rocky, how are you doing?’ I just started bawling. I was like, ‘I don't know if I can make it. I don't know if I'm good enough to be here.’”

“I wasn’t used to being given all the gear,” she continues, “and I felt like I needed to earn it, and I hadn’t. I was just tough on myself.”

Dambach told her exactly what she needed to hear. “She sat down with me and said, ‘I know what you can give. You don't have to prove anything.’”

She had support from her teammates, too, even if there was a language barrier; it was goalkeeper Britt Eckerstrom, who went on to play for the Western New York Flash and then the Portland Thorns, who gave her the nickname she’s now known by.

“She said, ‘what do they call you at home?’” Rodríguez remembers. “I said, ‘Raque.’ She was like, ‘Rocky?’”

“I loved it. I’d always wanted a nickname.”

Each season on the field got a little easier. By her junior year, Rodríguez was becoming a central figure on the team, and senior year, she was named team captain. That year—2015—was to be her breakout year.

Over the summer, Rodríguez competed with Costa Rica in her country’s World Cup debut, scoring the team’s first-ever goal of the tournament in their opener against Spain. 

When she returned, she helped lead Penn State to the NCAA tournament final, where she scored the winner against Duke. “It felt like the cherry on top to finish my college career,” says Rodríguez. She was also awarded the MAC Hermann Trophy, the most prestigious individual honor an NCAA player can earn. She’s strikingly modest about her contributions to the team.

“I'd been so grateful for them because they took a chance on me,” she says. “Obviously they saw that I brought something to the table, but they could have picked somebody else, too.”

Rodríguez isn’t sure what would have happened to her career if the Nittany Lions hadn’t won the College Cup. The NWSL had only existed for three years, and the draft process was still relatively mysterious even to college coaching staffs. “I remember going to Coach and being like, ‘hey, do you know if anybody's interested in me?’” she says. “‘Because I can't go back home. I need to continue.’ But she didn’t know.”

Rodríguez had wanted to go to Europe, but neither she nor her agent had any connections there. She entered the draft and was selected second overall, by Sky Blue FC (now NJ/NY Gotham FC).

Her early years as a pro were a mixed bag. On one hand, “I had really dreamed of playing with and against the best in the world,” she says. “And I think the NWSL slowly got there.”

Sky Blue were a mid-table team who avoided the bottom of the table thanks largely to the efforts of forward Sam Kerr, who was, as Rodríguez puts it, “becoming Sam Kerr” at the time, scoring a league-leading 17 goals in 2017, single-handedly bringing the team back from a losing position multiple times. “She literally carried us,” she says. “That was pretty cool.”

Rodríguez, for her part, was named Rookie of the Year in 2016 (another honor she’s characteristically modest about, saying she’s not sure she would have won if not for her senior college season).

On the other hand, Sky Blue was infamously under-resourced; the club lacked a dedicated training facility and team-provided housing was often inadequate or unstable. “Part of me was like, ‘it will get better. I'll just wait,’” she remembers. “But I felt kind of trapped.”

After Kerr left for Chicago in 2018, Sky Blue finished dead last, and then second-to-last in 2019. In 2020, Rodríguez’s agent called her about a possible trade, to Portland.

“I was really excited when I heard that they wanted me, because that was the team that I wanted to be drafted to in the first place,” she says.

The timing, though, was terrible—just a few weeks after she arrived in Portland, the COVID-19 pandemic shut everything down. “In the beginning, when we were quarantined and stuff, I was like, ‘What am I doing here?’ Because I had just come from Costa Rica. So it was tough. If I was going to be in the US, I felt like I might as well be in Jersey, because I had my friends there.”

After a couple months, clubs were allowed to start training with strict rules in place, separating players into small groups with no contact between those groups. In June, the league announced that the regular season would be completely canceled, with the inaugural Challenge Cup—an all-league tournament played entirely in Sandy, Utah, and the first “bubble” in professional sports in the US—replacing it.

“I had a lot of fun in the bubble, because we went from being quarantined to actually playing,” Rodríguez says. “It was my first year with Portland, so I was really excited—and nervous, in a good way.” In the group stage, the Thorns came in last place, earning three draws and a loss, but she nonetheless felt she was finally achieving her dream of playing with the best in the world.

“I was playing with really good players at the time,” she says. Players like USWNT midfielder Lindsey Horan, Canadian legend Christine Sinclair, and a young Sophia Smith, then in her rookie season, graced the roster. “I was nervous at first just because everything was new, but as time went by and we played more and more, I was like, ‘wow, this is so much fun.’”

The league had a two-month hiatus before a second tournament, the Fall Series, which the Thorns won—the beginning of a dominant two-year period that was to see the team win the Shield and then the Championship in successive seasons. “I would go into games thinking, ‘who's the next victim?’” she remembers. “It was a winning culture, and I had come from a team that was the exact opposite.”

That dominant period culminated with a championship in 2022, the triumphant end to a playoff run that had seen Rodríguez score a sensational goal against San Diego. “Being part of a championship team, being a starter,” she says, “that felt important to me.”

2023 wasn’t what she’d hoped for. 

Early in the season, Rodríguez sustained an MCL strain, the first major injury of her career. “It was scary, because you never think it’s going to happen to you,” she says. “I had never had anything even close to that. And it happened in a game where I had scored, too—like I was finally getting back in my rhythm—and the World Cup was coming, too, so I was like, ‘oh, my god.’”

She did recover in time for the World Cup, but once she returned to Portland, she struggled to find her footing.

“It triggered a lot of fears,” she says. “Going through the work of [recovering] and just not feeling like I was in my prime was really frustrating for me.”

Then, in January, she learned she’d been traded to Angel City.

“At the time, it was really hard to swallow it because I only saw the things that hurt my ego,” she says. “Like, why don't they want me anymore?”

But that offseason, she now realizes, “as I was about to go back to Portland [from Costa Rica], I was trying to convince myself that I wanted to go back.”

The Thorns had changed enormously since she’d arrived in 2020, going through two coaching changes, significant roster turnover, and—just last winter—a change in ownership. “When I look back, even last year was a different era” in Portland, Rodríguez says. “It was such a different club from the one I was traded to.”

In 2023, looking back, she’d felt like she was being asked to be a player she wasn’t. “When you're just trying to do what you think a coach wants, you forget about what you're good at,” she explains. “There’s a tension, because that is part of the job to some extent, but you can also only change so much about yourself.”

Now most of the way through a season with Angel City, she sees the trade differently. “Looking back,” she says, “getting traded was the best thing that could have happened to me.”

“[The way Angel City trains] took me back to my roots a little bit in the sense that you just have to play,” she says. “It's kind of like, ‘all right, let's go back to basics.’ And in that sense, it allows me to kind of remember what great things I can do—like my creativity and my problem solving.”

Rodríguez sees now that focusing on why her former club didn’t want her anymore was preventing her from seeing that Angel City did want her.

“She understands the game really, really well,” says First Assistant Coach Eleri Earnshaw. “She can assess what the opponent is giving very quickly.”

“Her technical quality,” Earnshaw continues, “is among the best in the league with both feet. She can deliver a ball on a dime. She can recognize gaps to play through and she can play passes with such deception—with the right texture and the right weight, with [any part] of the foot—that you don't even know where she's playing it.”

Rodríguez is characteristically modest when asked what she hopes her legacy will be. The fact that the league has been able to continue because of the resilience of her and her peers is one thing, “but that’s not my legacy, that’s a group of women’s legacy,” she adds—something she feels is true of most of her accomplishments. She’s also reticent to take too much credit for the undeniable impact she’s had on Costa Rican soccer and on young Latinas in the US. “Because I do this every day,” she says, “I think it’s normal, but it’s not. Sometimes when I hear the things girls tell me or see the way they act, they remind me of that.”

“I think just showing up and living my dream, and being resilient—which is normal, everybody has challenges—but I think it’s given continuity, [to the league] and the national team as well. So I hope that’s my legacy.”