Four years away: Megan Reid's road from the firehouse to Denver Summit FC

Photo courtesy of @fiddle.fotos

What you're doing right now has a shelf life": Megan Reid on the four years she spent away from soccer

Megan Reid was near the end of a paramedic internship with a fire department in Sonoma when she sat down at the station table with the captain and asked him what she should do.

The department was close to putting her on a short list for a firefighter job. At that point it was what she wanted most. But she also had a chance to go play again, in the WPSL and then in Denmark, after years of not playing at all.

The captain's name was Ted. He loved soccer, and they used to play together. He didn't need long.

"He was like, do it," Reid said. "He's like, fire and EMS will always be here. You can always re-up your certifications. Doesn't matter. But what you're doing right now has a shelf life."

Reid is in her fifth NWSL season now, a center back for Denver Summit FC on a contract that runs through 2028. She was on Angel City FC's first roster in 2022 and didn't miss a minute that year. She has played for Canada since December 2024. Before any of it she was a firefighter, an EMT, an ER tech and a paramedic, and for most of four years soccer wasn't part of her life.

"It wasn't the same without him"

She left because of her dad.

He raised her on his own and was in the car for most of her soccer life. He arranged the carpools and got her to every tournament he could. He was afraid of flying, so if the team was going to Oregon, they drove. "I was just co-pilot," Reid said, "and we spent years and years and years doing that together."

He also never let a performance go by without a review. "If you scored three goals but you left one on the table, he's gonna tell you about it," she said.

He died in March of her junior year at Virginia, right after spring break. That week they had been talking about what came next for her, including whether she could take her politics degree into the military. "I was leaning on him for so much at that moment, about where am I pointing my arrow of my life," she said, "and to have him go, I basically lost all direction."

She played her senior season anyway, because she knew what he would have said. "You committed to playing soccer, so you're gonna finish out your season, you're gonna finish out your commitment," she said. "That is who you are. That is who I've raised you to be."

He had also pointed her toward fire and EMS just before he died. She took him up on it.

"I know it sounds weird, but without him critiquing every performance," she said. "It was really weird not to have those conversations with him. I was going through a pretty depressed time for me, and so fire was the thing that made me happy."

Part of what she liked was starting from zero: how a fire hydrant works, what each tool is for. Learning it let her stop thinking about everything else. After graduation she earned Firefighter One and her EMT, then spent a year as an ER tech at a hospital outside San Francisco. That's where she found out she loved the medical side, so she went back for her paramedic certification. That's how she ended up at the internship in Sonoma.

She doesn't talk about those years like a detour. When she gets a bad result now, she has a different scale for it. "I've been sitting next to someone on their worst day possible," Reid said. "There are people going through a hell of a lot worse than you or I, for starting, for not starting, for having a good day, for having a bad day. That really doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things."

"How do you feel about outside back?"

Soccer was never the obvious pick for her, which makes the four years away a little less surprising.

She grew up in Orinda, California, behind a sister five and a half years older and a brother two years older, and she signed up for whatever they played. By high school that was four varsity sports. She doubled up soccer and basketball in the winter, ran track in the spring and played water polo in the fall. A friend named Erin got her into water polo. She calls it "by far probably the hardest sport I have ever played in my life," and she was good enough at it that letting it go took a while.

Basketball was the one she pictured herself playing in college. Her high school team had Sabrina Ionescu on it. "When you have a team that was structured with players like that, it was so much fun to be a part of," she said. "So in my mind I was like, I'm gonna play basketball. But little did I know I was probably a little too short."

The switch came on a soccer trip to Sweden and Denmark going into her senior year. She didn't commit to Virginia until that March.

She showed up in Charlottesville as a nine. Steve Swanson moved her almost right away. "Steve was just like, how do you feel about outside back?" Two seasons there, one of them with the team's highest assist rate, "because I was like, I know how to go forward, but I don't know how to defend." When Emily Sonnett and Kristen McNabb left, she moved inside. She did the math out loud and landed on this being her seventh year at center back.

The defending, she says, came from basketball. "Where can I force this player to go, and where is my cover?" she said. "Once I figured out how to take my one v one defending from basketball to soccer, it actually became one of my strengths. I was like, I actually just have to move like I did in basketball."

She scored twice in her whole college career. One of them was a game-winner against West Virginia, and when it came up in the interview she had to think about it. An opponent caught her in the temple with an elbow on the play. She scored, felt off after the game and slept most of the bus ride home.

"I honestly forgot that I scored against West Virginia in that manner," she said. "I was like, what do you mean a game winner? The only one I remember is kicking it in from half field on accident."

"Should I just go home?"

Ted's advice didn't get her a contract. It got her a trial.

While she was playing in Denmark, Swanson called with a tryout in San Diego. She made it three or four months into that preseason before the Wave let her go. Reid's first move was to ask the head coach straight out.

"One of the first questions I asked Casey was like, do I have what it takes to be in this league, or should I just go home?" Reid said. The answer was yes, she could play in the league, but San Diego didn't have the numbers for her. "And I was like, great. Okay, that's feedback I can take."

She was about to load her car and drive home when Swanson called again. Angel City's back line was falling apart in preseason. Sarah Gordon had torn her ACL and M.A. Vignola had torn her labrum. Reid had never stopped training the whole time she was away. "I didn't know how to turn that off," she said. She was in shape. She just hadn't had a ball at her feet. Three days after she got to Los Angeles, she played 90 minutes against San Diego in a scrimmage in Chula Vista.

She says there was no chip on her shoulder. She'd been watching the league grow from the outside, and she wanted in on that. "I wanna be able to write my name at the bottom of this page and say, I helped to create a better environment for women's sports and a better place for young players to step into," she said.

She had a specific young player in mind. While she was home, Reid coached, and one of her high school players was Natalie Means, who grew up in the same town. Means is now her teammate in Denver. "She didn't have to go through anything that I had to go through, for the most part," Reid said. "But at the same time, I didn't even have to go through half the stuff that Abby's gone through." She finds the locker room stories funny now: the veterans tell theirs and Reid can't believe it, then Reid tells hers and the rookies can't believe it.

Denver sold her two ways. At Angel City, she said, it took three or four years to get a training facility. "I was here for six months and we've got one of the state-of-the-art facilities," she said. "That's insane to me." The other reason was her sister, who has lived in Denver for ten years and has her first son. Reid had spent years missing bridal showers and baby showers. Now she can help out with her nephew, and she thinks a life outside the stadium shows up on the field. "You play free," she said. "We play happier."

She has opinions about who gets credit for the culture in Denver's first season, and it isn't only the veterans. She named Devin Lynch and Means, rookies who have played big minutes, and Olivia Thomas, who put together two strong performances in a row with goals that mattered.

"Yeah, we can tip our hats to the vets," Reid said, "but if there's no one to listen and to follow through on that culture, it doesn't really mean anything, does it? So I think this team is pretty darn cool from top to bottom."