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New York Times

USWNT's Carli Lloyd reflects on her new perspective following National Soccer Hall of Fame speech

Carli Lloyd had six months to work out her National Soccer Hall of Fame speech. However, ever since fellow Hall of Famer Alexi Lalas told her she would be a first-ballot inductee, in a surprise visit at her home in New Jersey, she has worked to find just the right words. Her speech at the induction ceremony on Saturday was surprisingly unguarded for a player who had built her entire professional persona around her aloof strength. It was a rare moment of vulnerability that almost didn't happen. 'I wanted to stand up there and not explain to people, but just show people that this is all of the things that were going through my mind in my professional career,' Lloyd told The Athletic . 'This is everything that I had to deal with, that I had to navigate from a human standpoint.' Call it whatever you want — explaining, showing — Lloyd revealed more on that stage in Frisco, Texas, than she ever has before. She grappled with many of the same ideas during her final months as a player: what it took to make it to multiple World Cups and Olympics and the cost of a single-minded focus on soccer. 'Everything that I do and say comes from my heart,' Lloyd said, 'whether that's the popular thing or the not-so-popular thing to say. I don't say things for clicks or for likes or for people to write about me. Everything is what I'm feeling in that particular moment.' That's Lloyd, to a T. She hasn't changed, not really. We're just seeing a little more of her these days. 'I'm not all of a sudden a new Carli Lloyd,' she said. 'I was that person pre-professional career. And then had that professional career of just going into another zone for 17 years, of just being that person, that machine, that emotionless machine. 'That was my fight or flight. That was my way of surviving. I didn't want to let people in, and I didn't want to… I couldn't necessarily trust people. I felt like sometimes the environment was an environment where people would chop you up. That's just how I felt. So I think that's why fans and maybe the media and maybe some of my teammates and coaches just maybe had that reluctance with me, of really not understanding me.' Lloyd has grappled with this tension of wanting to be understood before. In 2021, during her final days as a professional athlete, she told The Athletic , 'I think what people don't understand is to reach the heights that I have, I almost had to be emotionless.' She compared it to fight or flight then too, and spoke about being emotionally numb. There's more clarity now, though, almost four years on. Lloyd's still a runner, and she used the alone time on her runs to get her thoughts in order, including preparing a mental draft of the speech: 'My love for the game, and all that stuff,' she said, calling it obvious. 'I love the game. I work hard. I do this, I do that. Everybody knows that about me.' She was on a flight when she realized what she wanted to accomplish with her speech. She started writing it in her notes app: 'Was it all worth it?' 'That was something that I really wanted to share because I've never spoken about it,' Lloyd said. 'You know me, I was never vulnerable. I've never shown any type of weakness.' In that same 2021 interview, she was asked if she was happy — a related, but fundamentally different, question from whether it had all been worth it. 'What I kept coming back to again and again was one simple question,' Lloyd began in her speech before a litany of questions to her past self. ''Was it all worth it?'. Was it worth dedicating my entire youth to soccer? Was it worth being so ruthless on myself when things didn't go well? Was it worth having my life be consumed by the game? Was it worth the guilt of taking time off, or feeling like I hadn't trained enough? Was it worth all the sacrifices — missing funerals, birthdays, holidays, weddings and other important milestones? Was it worth allowing a trainer into my life that, over time, created a wedge between me and my family for over a decade?' At this question, a moment of levity interrupted: Lloyd's six-month-old daughter let out a happy squeal in the audience. 'Thank you, Harper,' Lloyd said with a smile. 'Was it worth putting my husband second? Was it worth being so intense, so obsessed every single day of my career? Was it worth not allowing myself to fully enjoy some of the most meaningful moments, out of fear that I might slip backwards? And the biggest question of all: was it worth putting off starting a family?' Lloyd's rift with her family has been well documented, a 12-year estrangement that came to a close when she cut ties with her long-time personal trainer James Galanis. The shutdown prompted by the Covid-19 pandemic helped her hit pause and opened her eyes. 'The control, the manipulation, the brainwashing, driving a wedge through my family. All of these things that I didn't see or I didn't have the opportunity for life to slow down for me to see, I saw it all. I was going back and back, and the person you trust with your life, you think someone that is in your life for that long is going to do right by you, and it was the total opposite,' Lloyd said about Galanis in an episode of Kickin' It in 2023. Only four years before, in an article for The Players' Tribune, Lloyd had detailed how Galanis had become her personal coach in the wake of being cut from the U.S. youth national team ahead of a minor international tournament in 2003. 'I'll train you free and won't charge your parents anything,' Lloyd recounted Galanis saying at the start of their relationship. 'But you have to dedicate your entire life to this. If I call you at 10 p.m. on a Saturday, and I tell you to come to the field, are you going to come?' For years, she did. 'The truth is,' Lloyd said in her Hall of Fame speech, 'the path of a professional athlete can be incredibly lonely.' Even her mother, Lloyd said, hadn't fully understood what she had struggled with throughout her career, how deeply she had felt the sacrifices. 'It felt freeing,' Lloyd said this week. 'It felt so good to be standing up there, on my terms, in one of the biggest moments of my career, being able to share.' In some ways, the boundaries between Lloyd the person and Lloyd the player have collapsed, but mostly she is not afraid of any consequences anymore — even if, for years, they probably wouldn't have happened, or worse, been self-imposed. Lloyd called herself a 'black sheep' of the USWNT plenty of times over the years, but she revisited one of the early moments in her national team career this week — the fallout from the 2007 World Cup goalkeeping selection by then head coach Greg Ryan — as a defining moment. The short version: Hope Solo had started the first four games of the tournament but Ryan made the call to start Briana Scurry in the semifinal against Brazil, and the USWNT lost 4-0. Solo criticized the decision in public comments after the match. Lloyd was still new to the team; she's entirely uninterested in litigating who was right and who was wrong, but on the human level, she felt sad for Solo. 'Everyone shunned Hope. We didn't allow her in the team meal. We didn't allow her to fly home with us. Nobody stood next to her in a pool recovery workout. We're talking about some public comments, but that was the length of it,' Lloyd said. She felt awful, seeing Solo without any support network. So she supported her, because she felt like it was the right thing to do. But she still feels like that sets her apart from the rest of the team. 'I became the person that didn't follow the crowd, and didn't support everybody else,' Lloyd said. Maybe it was self-inflicted, she noted, but that's where she started thinking she was on the outs with the USWNT. Teammates looked at her differently, and the coaching staff handled her a little more hesitantly. The barrier came up as protection. 'I just need to figure out how I'm going to survive and perform and help my team without draining any other ounce of my mental energy on anything else.' Lloyd felt every slight, real or perceived, coming her way. She was never good enough. She didn't play well enough. She had to prove people wrong. None of this will be all that surprising to people who have watched her through the years, but she's had more time to reflect on it. 'I wouldn't say I have regrets,' Lloyd said in her Hall of Fame speech, 'but if there's one thing I do wish, I wish I had let more people understand me. Over the years, I operated like an emotionless machine. I was intense, and I truly believe that the only way for me to survive in such a cutthroat environment was to be that way. So to my teammates, I want to say this: I'm sorry I wasn't always able to give you all of me.' A few days later, she did say that by the end, she had let in more teammates — when she was benched later in her career, there were a few that also saw her in a deeply emotional state. But this wasn't an apology where she was expecting people to text her after or anything. 'I just wanted to address — not necessarily the elephant in the room — but maybe certain teammates that didn't understand why I was the way that I was.' She pointed out several times that she has no ill-will towards anyone in the U.S. program — she was never angry at teammates, she said, she was just trying to survive. 'Whatever comes of it is awesome,' she said. 'We all had our unique journeys. I'm open to anything.' There are certainly more conversations for Lloyd to have on that front, but maybe that apology opened the door a bit further. After all, what's more human than wanting to be understood, even as the barriers to being known are of your own making? The twist is that Lloyd has changed. 'We are so blessed to have Harper. She is my greatest accomplishment. I always knew I wanted a child, but I had no idea how this little baby could completely change me as a person. Unlike during my playing career, I have been present. I have allowed myself to be vulnerable, emotional and fully engaged in every moment I get to spend with her.' So yes. In the end, it was worth it. Sporting her new red Hall of Fame blazer, her family in the audience, Harper watching on, Lloyd was ready to do it all over again if it got her to this moment. 'There was nothing I loved more than winning, but winning comes at a cost. I paid that price, yet in return, I gained more than I ever could have imagined.' (Top photos: Getty Images; design: Will Tullus)