October Glory

October is about the postseason. In the American sporting lexicon, the month is synonymous with pressure and potential glory. It’s Babe Ruth calling his shot, Jackie Robinson stealing home, Willie Mays making an impossible catch and David Ortiz and the Red Sox turning the tables.

For more than a century, October has served as baseball’s biggest stage. And for head coach Tim Corbin’s two decades leading the Vanderbilt baseball program, that has transformed October into a month showcasing all that Commodores can achieve. Now, one of Vanderbilt’s best 21st-century traditions is growing beyond the diamond. As baseball alumni again took the field in the Major League Baseball playoffs, Vanderbilt soccer alumni were busy competing for places in the National Women’s Soccer League playoffs. And when Haley Hopkins and the North Carolina Courage host Gotham FC in an opening-round game on Sunday evening, October’s bright spotlight will again shine on a former Dore.

Hopkins and the Courage made good on a return to the playoffs after the team missed out a season ago. In Washington, Maddie Elwell and the Washington Spirit very nearly put the finishing touches on a franchise reboot that would have taken them from next to last to the playoffs. The two teams met Sunday in Cary, North Carolina, with the Courage’s 1-0 victory sealing each team’s postseason fate. And there would be another Commodore on the field in the playoffs it not for the unfortunate season-ending injury suffered by Angel City FC’s Simone Charley, Vanderbilt’s first representative in the NWSL.

Thirty years after pioneering Vanderbilt student-athletes won the SEC’s first women’s soccer championship, and 10 years after the NWSL’s debut opened a new chapter in the history of the women’s game, Elwell, Hopkins and Charley are trailblazers for a new generation. Mentored by a coach who, like Corbin, saw the potential in using Vanderbilt’s unique qualities as a blueprint for SEC success, soccer alumni are helping to shape the growth of the sport.

“You’re going to be a professional something when you leave Vanderbilt, whether that’s on a field or in an office,” head coach Darren Ambrose said. “That may mean you’re going to go be a doctor, entrepreneur or work in consulting—but you can also be a professional soccer player. We have the capacity to develop both worlds for you. And now that the league is established, it is really rewarding to see the kids who have come through and are on that stage.”

Elwell (No. 15), Hopkins (No. 17), Raegan Kelley (No. 4) and Shamburger (No. 22) helped Vanderbilt win the SEC regular season title in 2018. 

Setting the standard

An SEC soccer original and winner of the first two conference championships, Vanderbilt had nonetheless become lodged in a mid-table rut prior to Ambrose’s arrival ahead of the 2015 season. That the coach is now on the verge of his 100th victory with the Commodores speaks volumes about the progress made. As Charley recounted, the seeds of that change took root from the coach’s first preseason. But for outsiders, the first clearly discernible harvest arrived in 2017, when the Commodores finished fourth in the SEC, and the new era reached maturity a year later with an SEC regular-season championship.

It’s no coincidence that Elwell and Hopkins arrived in 2017, the latter redshirting her first season on campus and making her full debut a year later. By the championship run in 2018, Elwell was an irreplaceable constant in the starting lineup and Hopkins was the SEC Freshman of the Year and a third-team All-American who scored 14 goals.

Both were all-conference selections in 2019 as the Commodores finished atop the SEC East and made their third consecutive NCAA Tournament appearance. And both were part of the team that persevered through the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic to win the 2020 SEC Tournament, Hopkins scoring twice in a 3–1 semifinal win against Georgia.

“Vanderbilt pushed me as an athlete and a person, and I’m really thankful because that made a template in all aspects of life,” Elwell said. “I think Coach is really good at instilling these core values that you could go back to and think about and let guide your decisions—even in little essentials, such as picking up your gear when you leave or taking care of your body. ‘Get in there and work harder than they do’—I think he instilled that in me, and I still think back to that to this day.”

In all, four members of the 2018 regular season and 2020 tournament champions would go on to be drafted by NWSL teams: Elwell, Hopkins, Myra Konte and Ella Shamburger. No SEC school has had more players selected in the past three drafts. And that doesn’t include Charley, a fixture in the league since signing with the Portland Thorns as an undrafted free agent in 2018.

“I take a lot of pride in what we accomplished,” Elwell said. “As a team, I think we were able to put Vandy on the map more than we had been prior. There were so many good things, so many accolades, so many accomplishments for individuals as well as the team itself. I’m so full of pride and so nostalgic thinking back on those times because we were trailblazing.”

Building a new future

The successor to a pair of short-lived professional leagues launched in the decade after the seminal 1999 Women’s World Cup, the National Women’s Soccer League played its first season in 2013. The first postseason, which saw Tobin Heath’s and Alex Morgan’s Portland Thorns edge out Sam Kerr’s and Carli Lloyd’s Western New York Flash for the title, concluded around the same time that Elwell was walking into her freshman year of high school. Despite some of the star power on display in the NWSL, it had minimal media exposure. Elwell certainly didn’t spend her days dreaming of playing in a league she barely knew. For most young players, short of dreaming about the U.S. women’s national team, college soccer was the height of ambition.

“I was on cloud nine just going to an SEC school,” Elwell said. “Once I got to college is when I became more aware of the league. I think that probably helps, just going step by step rather than focusing on the league from the jump and then getting messed in my head. In high school, Vandy was so huge for me, so I wasn’t even thinking of the league.”

Elwell in action with the Spirit this season at Audi Field (Breanna Biorato/Washington Spirit).

But unlike the Women’s United Soccer Association or Women’s Professional Soccer leagues, the NWSL found more favorable conditions for survival. U.S. World Cup titles in 2015 and 2019, and the players’ corresponding fight for labor equality, put the women’s game in an ever-greater spotlight domestically. Advertisers, investors and broadcasters finally, albeit still fitfully, saw potential in the league. The WUSA and WPS each folded after three seasons. When Elwell completed her final season of eligibility, the NWSL was still there, coming off its ninth season. Washington selected her with the 15th overall pick in the 2022 draft—the second SEC player off the board.

A year later, after she played a fifth collegiate season at Virginia while enrolled in graduate school, Hopkins was the first former Commodore selected in the first round. North Carolina called her name with the No. 11 pick, again just the second former SEC player off the board.

The odds of making an NWSL roster are arguably longer than in any other American professional sports league. Soccer is second only to volleyball in team-sport participation rates among high school girls. There are more than 300 NCAA Division I programs. It is an enormous pipeline of talent development that funnels down to a league with just 12 teams and approximately 300 players in a given season—with teams also pulling from an increasingly deep international talent pool. More opportunity would be welcome, but the flip side of such a high barrier to entry is a league in which even teams at the bottom of the standings field lineups of former All-Americans and current internationals.

“The biggest difference, hands down, is the speed of play,” Elwell said. “That was something that shocked me when I first came to the league. When I was thrown into training or a game, they were just playing so fast. When you look at it on the screen, I don’t think it translates the way it does when you’re out there. I was like, ‘Holy crap, I need to know what I’m doing.’ There is so much less time to react.”

The road to October

Both Elwell and Hopkins entered the final week of the regular season with postseason aspirations very much intact. Six teams qualify for the NWSL playoffs, with the top two seeds earning byes to the semifinal round.

Washington’s competitiveness—while ultimately settling for eight place, the Spirit were just three points out of third place—is a stark departure from Elwell’s rookie season in 2022. Last year’s team won just three games and had little to play for in October. That, in turn, marked a rapid fall for a team that won the league title in 2021, but it was also emblematic of a franchise that has often struggled for continuity and courted controversy—including the 2021 dismissal of a head coach amid the league-wide reckoning related to abuse and working conditions.

Emerging from that fog in the first full year of tech entrepreneur Y. Michele Kang’s majority ownership, the Spirit won seven games and were in contention until the regular season’s final whistle. The team that not so long ago played in suburban Maryland at a facility with a capacity of around 4,000 now plays all its games at Audi Field and draws more than 10,000 fans per game. A new partnership with French soccer giant Olympique Lyonnaise and plans for a new training facility hint at even brighter days ahead, but in her second year, Elwell already sees a standard of professionalism that even earlier NWSL generations—let alone WPS or WUSA players—never experienced.

At Vanderbilt, she was accustomed to an environment designed to help her reach her full potential on and off the field. She’s now part of an environment similarly intended to help her reach her professional goals.

“Whether you need a nutritionist, someone to talk to about female health or whatever else, people are there to help you be the best athlete that you can be,” Elwell explained. “We have onboarded so many more staff this year, and it’s crazy the resources that they’re inputting here. In college, you have your classes and all these different things—it’s just hard to prioritize as much as you need to be in your best shape. But Vanderbilt did a great job of giving you time for those resources and doing all they can to help you [reach your athletic peak] while also being the best student that you can be.”

Although a role player for the Spirit in the regular season, Elwell was a fixture in the starting lineup during the Challenge Cup—the in-season tournament similar to European-style cup competitions. In or out of the lineup, she’s helped shape a collaborative environment that has allowed the team to build on last season’s experiences, weather occasional downturns this season and enter the final weekend in control of its own playoff destiny.

“At Vanderbilt, our team took things very seriously, but we were able to have fun and find enjoyment,” Elwell said. “I think that it’s very similar here. The team is very close, and I think that helps on and off the pitch—just being able to fight for teammates who you really consider more like family. That was a big thing that was present at Vanderbilt as well.”

A three-time All-SEC selection, two-time All-American and four-time All-SEC academic honoree, Hopkins helped lead Vanderbilt to the 2020 SEC Tournament title.

Even as a rookie, October already marks Hopkins’ second opportunity to chase the same sort of championship glory as a professional that she managed in the SEC.

Sunday’s result gave Courage more points than a season ago—and more importantly, a playoff berth. Last season, the team missed the playoffs for the first time since the Western New York franchise effectively relocated to North Carolina under new ownership in 2017. That disappointment was offset by winning the 2022 Challenge Cup—defeating Elwell’s Spirit in the final. Last month, Hopkins was in the starting lineup when the Courage defeated Louisville 2–0 to again win the Challenge Cup, becoming the first team to win the trophy in back-to-back seasons.

This past weekend, she played 25 minutes in the clinching victory, and she started three of the team’s final five games.

Blazing the trail

The October symmetry with baseball notwithstanding, soccer’s expanding NWSL presence is the latest chapter in a long-running story for women’s athletics at Vanderbilt.

Vanderbilt has long been a place where women could launch athletic journeys, not merely bring them to a close at 21 or 22 years old. Current women’s basketball assistant coach Ashley Earley and chief of staff Christina Foggie were selected in the WNBA draft after playing for the Commodores. Auston Kim became just the latest golfing success story after earning her LPGA card in recent days. Bri Gross represented Vanderbilt lacrosse when she competed in Athletes Unlimited, a burgeoning professional outlet in that sport. The late beloved Julia Ditty Qualls went from Vanderbilt’s tennis courts to Wimbledon’s grass. And the list goes on.

In 2000, All-American Asta Helgadottir became the program’s first draft pick when she was selected in the WUSA draft. But soccer’s next opportunity took time. It took the pioneers of 30 years ago setting the standard for a conference to follow. It took a coach with a vision for what was possible and student-athletes who turned that into SEC championships and NCAA Tournament appearances.

Elwell said she never dreamed of a professional career in this country. Why would she? Such things barely existed in her lifetime, leagues flitting in and out of existence in the blink of an eye. Ambrose concurred, unable to recall any instance in which Elwell approached him about that path. But when the moment came—with a league growing, through fits and starts, into maturity—she was ready for the opportunity because her coaches, teammates, advisers and a community of people prepared her for it. Not to be a pro soccer player, but to be successful.

And as the world changes and opportunity grows, that’s still the path to October glory.

“I’ve had more young women sit in my office in the last five or six years and say, ‘I want to be a pro,’” Ambrose said. “My answer is, I cannot put in you what you’re going to need to be a professional. But what we can do is, if it’s in you, this environment will get it out of you.

“We teach the game, but we teach leadership and awareness. I’m proud of that. I think that’s an important part of human growth, knowing who you are.”