It’s May 30, two hours before the Portland Thorns kick off against the Utah Royals. A mother and her young daughter stand next to the players’ entrance outside of Providence Park in Portland. They’re among the throng of fans waiting behind a barricade hoping to get an autograph from Portland Thorns players as they arrive at the stadium.
Olivia Moultrie, the 20-year-old garnering NWSL MVP attention this season, walks over to the start of the line to greet the fans.
“That’s Olivia,” the mother tells her daughter, directing her attention to Moultrie.
She’s dressed in a blue long-sleeve Nike shirt and red and blue patchwork-style drawstring shorts. She wears her long brown hair down, with the exception of a headband braid.
“She works so hard,” the mother says of Moultrie. “She never backs down from a challenge.”
It’s been the story of Moultrie’s young career.
The day before the match, as we sit on the field of Providence Park, Moultrie tells me about the unlikely and even impossible situations she has faced so far in her career.
“It’s like, ‘No, I’m going to do it. I’m going to do it because I know what I’m capable of, I trust in God, and I believe in myself to be able to overcome this thing,’” she said. “I think that has set me up for who I am.”
At just 11 years old, she committed to the University of North Carolina on a full-ride scholarship. Two years later, she signed a Nike endorsement, and she and her entire family uprooted their lives to move to Portland so she could train with the Thorns.
Her lawsuit against the NWSL at age 15 paved the way for her to become the youngest player in the league and open the door for the wave of young players who followed in her footsteps.
Now less than two months shy of her 21st birthday, Moultrie is one of the best players in the NWSL and is carving out a role on the U.S. national team ahead of the 2027 FIFA Women’s World Cup as she pursues the goal she set at 7 years old to become the best soccer player in the world.
“Trust me when I say, you can drop a million kids in the exact same situation that Liv was in, and it wouldn’t have ended like it ended for Liv,” her father, KC Moultrie, said. “She’s just very special in a lot of ways.”
‘I trust in God, and I believe in myself’
It’s the sixth grade graduation at Sulphur Springs Community School, located in Canyon Country, California, a suburb of Santa Clarita. An 11-year-old Olivia Moultrie stands behind a pulpit and addresses her classmates. Quoting the legendary boxer Muhammad Ali, she said:
“Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they’ve been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It’s a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.”
Moultrie then dispensed her own wisdom to the crowd of students and parents.
“In the future, we will all face challenges, and they will be hard,” she said. “But difficult challenges never stopped Michael Jordan, Serena Williams, Bill Gates, and they shouldn’t stop any of us because we want to know that what you achieve in life, you achieve because you earned it, you worked for it.”
Sixth-grade Olivia made that argument herself and basically manifested her career in her speech.
“We will be no different from these great champions,” she said. “We will all go on to do great things. We will be challenged beyond anything we can possibly imagine. We will face situations that literally seem impossible.”
The Thorns midfielder remembers wanting to deliver that speech like “a boss,” and she thinks 11-year-old Olivia did truly believe what she was saying. I have no doubt that she did, either.
Asked what’s the next “impossible” she’s chasing, she says, “I don’t know if anyone puts ‘impossible’ in front of anything Olivia Moultrie’s going to do anymore. They’re probably like, ‘Why would I put that there? She’ll just go after it extra hard.’”
How does someone so young have so much confidence in herself?
She credits her parents, KC and Jessica, who taught her to be comfortable in the uncomfortable, to not accept failure and to view her mistakes as learning opportunities. They backed that up by going all in on her dream with her.
“It was just — ‘Know what you can accomplish, and if you feel like you can get to something, we’re going to help you get there. We’re going to take whatever the steps are that are necessary for you to get better,’” she said.
KC Moultrie, a lifelong basketball fan, played basketball at Montana State University Northern and was drawn to Michael Jordan, specifically his “mental toughness.” He has spent his life researching what he described as “high-level, strong mental characteristics” in elite athletes and passed those lessons on to his daughter.
“That was just so soaked in by her as a little girl, that it’s almost irreplicable,” he said. “She was just so unique in the way that she soaked that in and then applied it.”
Her self-belief can also be traced back to her faith as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. For KC and Jessica Moultrie, the most important thing they could teach their three daughters — Olivia, Gabi and Bella — was that they are children of God.
“We really focused on that, like, you are capable of anything, so it just depends on what you want to focus on, what you want to put your effort into, what you want to be disciplined to lock into,” Jessica Moultrie said. “But you’re capable of anything, especially when you include the Lord in that equation, and so, he’ll magnify all the efforts that you put in.”
Doing what’s never been done before
Olivia Moultrie began playing soccer, the sport her mother played at South Carolina, at 3 years old. She tried basketball for her dad but quickly realized that soccer was the sport she loved.
“As soon as I got on the field, I just felt like that was the thing for me,” she said.
Now a six-year NWSL veteran, she appreciates the sport through a different lens than she did as a child.
“Those moments when you’re on the field with your teammates and you guys just pull together a play that ends in a goal, and then especially with this crowd and this stadium, feeling that reaction, there is just something super, super special about that,” she said. “The feeling you get when that happens is just — it’s truly unmatched. I’ve never experienced anything like it.”
KC and Jessica Moultrie realized how talented their eldest daughter was when a stranger, who had been watching Olivia and KC practice in the park, approached them and told them that Olivia needed to work with one of the sport’s top trainers.
That would be a catalyst in a journey that would include becoming the first girl to play full-time with boys in the U.S. Soccer Development Academy and the youngest player in the U.S. to commit to a full-ride college scholarship, and getting recruited by top European clubs — all before becoming a teenager.
When Olivia turned 13, the Moultries were looking at her next steps, including seriously considering a move to Europe, where she could begin training and playing professionally sooner than she could in the U.S.
Then the Portland Thorns provided an alternative. In March 2019, Olivia Moultrie joined the Thorns developmental academy, where she trained alongside the team that had reached the NWSL championship the season prior and whose roster at the time included Canadian legend Christine Sinclair and U.S. national team stars Lindsey Horan (now Heaps) and Tobin Heath.
She had already forfeited her collegiate eligibility the month prior when she signed her endorsement deal with Nike, so professional was logically the next step.
Her father flew to North Carolina to tell head coach Anson Dorrance in person that his daughter would not be coming to the school after all. It was a gesture that further endeared the Moultrie family to Dorrance, he told the Deseret News. He occasionally texts the young superstar to compliment her on her performances, and she always sends a prompt reply.
No one knew what to expect from the arrangement. So much so that 13-year-old Olivia showed up to her first day of training with her own soccer ball.
“You are walking into a situation that is walking into the best team — one of the best teams in the world — when you’re 13 years old, and you got people that don’t want you there,” Jessica Moultrie said. “You have people that don’t understand why this is happening. It’s not really set up for someone like you to be there because it’s never been done.”
It was far from easy.
“I look back on it now, and you see all the success and the things that went well, but it was hard,” Olivia Moultrie said. “It was really hard. It was hard to come train with the team when I was 13, and at the end of the day, I wasn’t ready to play in a professional game when I was 13.”
Seven years later, she says she doesn’t “regret any of it.”
“I think it truly built me into the player I am today. I don’t think I’m the same without those experiences.”
Faith, fasting and the lawsuit that changed everything
Over 20,000 fans sit inside Providence Park, the 100-year-old minor league baseball stadium turned soccer stadium, hoping to watch the Thorns beat the Royals and leapfrog Utah to the top of the NWSL standings in the final match before the midseason break.
Twenty-one minutes into the match, Olivia Moultrie gives Thorns fans a treat, stealing the ball from Utah’s Narumi right in front of the net and shooting the ball past goalkeeper Mandy McGlynn for a goal. She leaps up and punches the air in celebration. The stadium erupts. Fans wave their scarves, and a red smoke bomb goes off behind the goal.
But before that electric moment and before the match started, Olivia Moultrie took the time to pray as part of her long-standing prematch tradition.
“I pray a lot, honestly, and it’s nice to always be able to feel like I can just like take that moment to quiet my mind,” she said.
Before kickoff, she prays to “stay healthy, do my best, help my team win the game, and let’s get after it.”
Her prematch prayers are no surprise when you learn faith is one of three pillars in the Moultrie home, along with family and soccer, the latter of which she views as a platform to share her beliefs.
“I’m not who I am without the soccer aspect of it,” she said. “I think it has been a blessing, obviously, but I feel like, at the end of the day, I’m a child of God. And that is what centers everything in my life and that is what I believe.”
While soccer can consume her focus on the pitch, faith helps her realize there are “things that are so much bigger than me and what I’m doing right now,” she said.
She’s leaned on her faith throughout her career, especially during the lawsuit she filed against the NWSL in her teens.
“One thing about Liv that we’ve really tried to instill is that it’s all God’s timing,” Jessica Moultrie said. “Everything you go through or every obstacle you face will be a part of this big picture of who you’re supposed to be.”
Olivia Moultrie said she feels “like I’ve been put here for a reason, and I want to take advantage of that,” so when those obstacles arise, she likes to think of the “coincidences that are really just blessings” in her life.
“I love what I do,” she said. “I literally get to live my dream job every single day, and I don’t feel like that is a coincidence. Obviously, there’s hard work that goes into that, but I feel like of course my faith has played a big part in that.”
At 15, Olivia Moultrie felt she was ready to make her pro debut, but at the time, the NWSL didn’t allow the signing of a player under the age of 18. So, she took the NWSL to court, filing an antitrust lawsuit against the league.
“I felt ready to play and help my team and influence winning, and also wanted to do what I love at the highest level,” she said.
The entire family prayed and fasted more than they ever had before over a period of time for peace, direction and “just that assurance that our course was lined up with the Lord’s will,” according to her mom.
“I think a lot of it was just that leap of faith that we feel like this is the right thing,” Olivia Moultrie said. “Prayed about it: ‘What is the best step?’ We felt like the lawsuit was just kind of the last thing and that was the path forward.”
Jessica Moultrie described that time being full of “miracles,” including how they met their team of lawyers. Around that time, her daughter’s agent had been invited to speak at his alma mater by Len Simon, a professor and attorney. There, Simon learned of the 15-year-old’s predicament and decided he wanted to help.
“All the pieces came together in such a miraculous way,” Jessica Moultrie said. “It helped us to keep going and to get that clarity that we needed, and it was really the right people were put in our path. And that makes all the difference.”
“She is pretty much everything we’re looking for in a player.”
— Thorns head coach Robert Vilahamn
For Olivia Moultrie, the way her team of lawyers came together is an example to her of God “pulling the strings up there.”
“Not to say that we don’t make our own decisions or anything like that, but I do feel like, yeah, just trying to do the right things to be able to be put in situations that are benefiting you,” she said. “I definitely think I found myself in quite a few of those.”
The 15-year-old testified in court, and the judge ruled in her favor, issuing a temporary restraining order to lift the NWSL’s minimum age rule for two weeks. Half the league’s teams submitted requests for her rights, which were awarded to Seattle’s OL Reign, who then traded them to the Thorns, according to The Oregonian.
The Thorns signed her to a three-year contract, and two days later, she played in her first NWSL match when she was subbed in on the road in Louisville with her parents in the stands.
Olivia Moultrie’s arrival
The “Mission Impossible” theme song plays from the spin class at the Multnomah Athletic Club, which overlooks the field at Providence Park. Olivia Moultrie waits for a shooting drill to start. Her hair is pulled back in two braids. She’s dressed in her black-and-red Portland Thorns training kit and wearing blue Nike cleats.
Even though it’s just a drill, every time the ball touches her feet, it finds the back of the net, which can’t be said for the majority of her very talented teammates. That’s not a knock on them. Olivia Moultrie is just that good.
The only time she misses is when the pass goes high and fails to connect with her feet and instead bounces off her thighs, ending her run. She throws her head back in frustration but smiles before heading to the back of the line to wait for her turn to go again. She makes her next one.
“I think Liv is pretty much the identity of what we want to build: the passion, the high quality, the mentality,” Thorns head coach Robert Vilahamn told the Deseret News following the draw with Utah and another Moultrie goal. “She defends, she wins the ball, she scores goals, she assists, she’s pressing.”
Last season, Olivia Moultrie broke out with eight goals and an assist. One of those goals helped her break the record for most goals by a teenager three days before her 20th birthday. She has carried that momentum into 2026 with five goals and five assists, the third most in the league.
Teammate Jessie Fleming said “something was missing from the Thorns” during Moultrie’s two-game absence due to a calf injury.
“Aside from the obvious, what she does in terms of goal scoring and chances created, I think you can see how much passion she plays with, how much passion she has for the Thorns, and I think that really shows up in her game,” Fleming said.
It’s Moultrie’s sixth season, and she’s still younger than the Thorns’ rookies this season. But in May, she became the youngest NWSL player to appear in 100 regular-season games. She has endeared herself to the Thorns’ fanbase.
“I think her character is important for the team and the community,” Vilahamn said. “She is pretty much everything we’re looking for in a player. So I’m really happy to have her here.”
Last season, the Rose City Riveters, the Thorns’ official supporters group, awarded Moultrie with the Player of the Year award. The honor made the young star emotional and showed her and her family that she had finally won over the fans.
“It just took a while to win the city over, and she did,” her mother said. “It didn’t happen in some glorious moment. It happened by living her principles, staying true to who she was, putting her head down, getting to work, giving it her best all the time, being willing to wear her heart on her sleeve as she gave everything she had every day of practice, every game.”
Olivia Moultrie, who is under contract with Portland through 2029, says she’s only just “scratching the surface” as a player. She knows she’s capable of scoring and assisting more. She’s hungry to get better and continue to perfect her craft in what she described as an “ever-evolving process.”
But the style of play fans are seeing from Moultrie this season is “how I want to play,” she said, and her next step is to play that way consistently.
She emphasized that she’s not perfect yet, but professional soccer has become natural.
“I’m just so comfortable in who I am and what my role is and feeling out, just moving off people’s movements, reading teammates,” she said. “Everything has just become easier. I feel like it just processes faster in my brain, like the game has slowed down for me a lot.”
While soccer dominates Olivia Moultrie’s life, she is more than a soccer player. She’s an avid reader who also enjoys cooking (her go-to are “bowls”) and playing games with her family. Monopoly is banned from the Moultrie household, but they love to play Cover Your Assets, UNO and Rummikub, where each of their competitive natures comes out.
“I think having those things to be someone else outside of who I am on the field makes coming back the next day even more exciting, because it’s like, I’m not defined by what happens in an hour-and-a-half span on the turf at Providence Park,” she said.
Her fierceness on the pitch extends to her love for her sisters. She helps them with their goals and training for their respective sports. She rebounds for Gabi on the basketball court and ensures Bella gets her soccer training in and has food waiting for her afterward.
Gabi Moultrie, Wilsonville High School’s all-time leading scorer — men’s or women’s — moved down to Utah this summer, where she will play basketball at UVU. She had only been gone for two or three weeks when her older sister tried to convince her to come home for the Fourth of July and their dad’s birthday. Unbeknownst to Olivia, Gabi already planned to fly back with their mom, who commutes to Utah for work every week. Gabi told her mother that she wanted to keep it a secret from her sisters.
That weekend, Jessica Moultrie pulled up to the family’s home in Oregon and asked Olivia and Bella to help her grab her bags from the backseat, where Gabi was hiding.
“They opened the door and she popped up, and it’s the sweetest thing I’ve ever seen as they all just started bawling,” Jessica Moultrie said. “My husband’s like, ‘We did something right, because they really love each other.’”
From a late-night email to the World Cup’s doorstep
It’s 9 p.m. on a random Wednesday in October 2023 at the Moultrie home in Wilsonville, Oregon, a few weeks after Olivia Moultrie’s 18th birthday. She was sitting in the living room with her parents when she decided to check her email before going to bed.
One email in particular caught her attention. She read it three or four times to make sure it really said, “Confirming your call-up to the U.S. Women’s National Team.”
She sat in silence for a moment before her mother asked her if she was OK.
“I just got called to the national team,” she said.
It was a moment she had been dreaming of since she was 7 years old and made her goal to become the best soccer player.
“OK, this is amazing, but we knew this was coming,” she recalled her father saying.
“‘Just enjoy the moment. Jeez, Louise,’” she recalled telling him. “He’s good at keeping things back on track, but I’m like, ‘Let me just soak this in for a second.’”
The first stop of that national team camp was Sandy, Utah, not far from where Moultrie was born in Salt Lake City. But she wouldn’t make her national team debut there or in the next match in San Diego.
Her debut wouldn’t come until the next camp in December 2023. The next two months, she was named the 2024 U.S. Soccer’s Young Female Player of the Year and announced herself on the international stage at the CONCACAF W Gold Cup in her first start, scoring two goals and joining Cindy Parlow Cone (now the president of U.S. Soccer) and Mia Hamm as the only players to have a multigoal game for the USWNT at 18 years old or younger.
Her ascent to the national team is so remarkable that Dorrance, who coached some of the team’s best players, including Heath and Hamm, doesn’t think UNC could have gotten Moultrie there any faster.
“To be completely honest, Olivia is so young, I’m not sure we would have accelerated that opportunity for her any greater than what she has already done by going pro early in Portland,” he said.
She has scored five goals and assisted twice in 18 matches for the U.S. Ahead of the team’s two matches in Brazil in June, U.S. head coach Emma Hayes told the Deseret News that Moultrie is “someone who’s still very much an important part of our squad.”
Hayes subbed Moultrie into the second and final Brazil match in the 61st minute. It didn’t take long for Moultrie to impact the game. In just four minutes, she nearly put the U.S. up 2-0, but her shot bounced off the goalpost.
“I believe that in any situation that I am put in with this team, I can help us go win a game,” she said.
She’s not alone in thinking that.
On a Monday morning in April, Moultrie found herself on a video call with national team legends Julie Foudy and Abby Wambach, the USWNT’s all-time leading scorer, and tennis pioneer Billie Jean King for their “Welcome to the Party” podcast.
“I just want you to know that you’ve got it, kid, and you have the ability to play on our women’s national team and score every single game,” Wambach told Moultrie.
That was a “pretty sick” moment for the young star, who next year could be suiting up and scoring for the national team in Brazil at the 2027 FIFA Women’s World Cup. It would be her first major international tournament after a knee injury kept her out of contention for the 2024 Paris Olympics.
KC Moultrie is confident his daughter will be on that roster, he tells me, but both he and she know that she has to continue to put in the work for that to happen.
“I want to be in Brazil in 2027,” Olivia Moultrie said. “What really lends itself to that is taking care of business, of course; when I’m at camp, learning, grasping as much information as possible, but doing what I got to do with the Thorns; staying healthy, obviously; and just continuing to take it step by step.”
Playing in a World Cup would put Olivia Moultrie closer to her goal of being the best player in the world.
“When you say that at 7, I don’t know if you quite know what that entails, but now that I’m here, I definitely feel like I have a little bit of a sense of kind of what I hope to accomplish in this game,” she said. “Being one of the best players in the world and competing for World Cups and championships with my club, that’s super important to me.”
Her father thinks that goal is on the horizon.
“If you ask me today how close are we to the ultimate goal, I mean, I see it standing there,” he said. “I think she legitimately has a chance to achieve that.”
She’s still only 20 years old and has a lot of soccer ahead of her, but what would Olivia Moultrie have to accomplish to truly feel like she is the best player in the world? She admits it’s “a very subjective” title.
“Of course there’s like the personal accolades of having an MVP season or winning a Ballon d’Or or winning a championship MVP,” she said.
Moultrie has plenty of time left to accomplish that. But first, she and the Thorns travel to Utah to face the Royals on Sunday in a rematch, looking for a different result than their 2-2 draw in May.
She’s already an NWSL champion, but she hopes her legacy will be more than that. She wants to leave a lasting mark.
“I want to be able to just walk away with it being like, ‘That was one of the most exciting players I got to see and I’m going to be sad when she retires,’” she said. “Just kind of leaving a mark on the game where I can walk away and know I put out the best version of myself.”