After she entered the NWSL in 2020 and became a professional, though, she found herself with more time. So she picked up Colleen Hoover’s “Reminders of Him,” a romance novel about a mother who comes to terms with her troubled past.
From there, books started to feature on her packing lists for road games and U.S. national team camps (usually one for a quick NWSL trip, and two or three for international duty).
“It just makes me happy,” Smith said. “I feel like reading is kind of my escape from reality. It helps my brain get out of the competitive soccer world and into a relaxed mode. Those books do it for me.”
She’s not alone. By several measures — from surging sales to the explosion of BookTok — reading is on the rise again. That holds true for the U.S. squad, which is seeking its third consecutive World Cup title.
For many players, reading is a way to pass the time on long road trips, find a calming escape in high-pressure environments and bond with teammates.
“When you’re out of practice and you’re out of meetings, the last thing you want to do is talk about soccer,” midfielder Ashley Sanchez said. “It is nice to be able to have something in common. Sometimes it’s, like, eight of us reading the same book at the same time.”
A glance at the U.S. roster for the World Cup shows a team with a wide range of ages, backgrounds and experience levels. Their reading interests also stretch across genres: romance, mystery, science fiction, nonfiction, motivational, historical fiction, memoir.
Smith mainly sticks to romance. (“I definitely could not read, like, self-help, motivational, any of that,” she said. “It’s too much happening in my brain.”) Hoover is a favorite author, along with Mia Sheridan, Lucy Score and Liz Tomforde.
By showing up to camps with a bag full of paperbacks, she helped turn other players like her — those who had previously never enjoyed reading — into bookworms. (When asked whom she had personally converted: “Trinity Rodman and Ashley Sanchez. I will gladly say their names.”)
“It’s something for us all to connect over outside of the sport and have fun little conversations off the field,” Smith said. “When you’re in a stressful, high-intensity environment, it’s nice to have something a little more chill and relaxing to go back to and a group of people to be interested in doing the same thing.”
Midfielder Rose Lavelle once admitted she had two hobbies outside of soccer: “buying books and reading books.” In a pandemic-era book club, she reread the Nancy Drew mystery series; ahead of last summer’s Concacaf W Championship, it was Lemony Snicket’s “A Series of Unfortunate Events.”
Naomi Girma, a 23-year-old center back appearing at her first World Cup, has been an avid reader since she and her brother filled out reading logs as kids at their mother’s behest and is now among the members of the U.S. team’s “Kindle crew.” Her interests stretch across genres, but the novels of Lucy Foley and Kristin Hannah are some of her recent favorites.
“If people have physical books, we pass them around. If someone’s reading on the bus, you’ll be like, ‘Oh, what are you reading?’ — and it’s always something to talk about,” Girma said. “It’s definitely brought the team together.”
Smith and Thorns teammate Kelli Hubly have been reading Sarah J. Maas’s “A Court of Thorns and Roses” series this season. When Tierna Davidson, a member of the 2019 World Cup squad, tore her ACL last year, a Red Stars fan who works for Chicago’s public library system sent her a handwritten list of book recommendations. Sam Mewis, a standout midfielder in 2019 who is now recovering after undergoing knee surgery, occasionally shares what she’s reading on “Snacks,” her podcast with forward Lynn Williams. (A recent review of Prince Harry’s “Spare”: 4½ stars.)
“There are a lot of voracious readers in the group,” said Williams, a World Cup first-timer who does not qualify herself among the group. “Sometimes they’ll get together and talk about books and I’m like: ‘You guys are all boring. All you do is read.’ ”
This World Cup also includes a number of published authors. On the U.S. team, there’s Megan Rapinoe (“One Life,” a memoir that came out in 2020), Alex Morgan (“The Kicks,” a 12-book series about middle-school soccer players, and “Breakaway: Beyond the Goal,” a 2015 memoir) and Rodman (“Wake Up and Kick It,” a children’s book created with Adidas last year).
After winning the European Championship in 2022, five English national team players published books. Australian star Sam Kerr wrote “Kicking Goals,” a four-book children’s series. Canada captain Christine Sinclair published her memoir in November — in a podcast this spring, she said she wrote it because she was sick of seeing only men’s sports autobiographies fill the shelves at bookstores.
Discussion of the U.S. national team’s reading habits isn’t complete without mentioning one of its biggest bibliophiles: Becky Sauerbrunn. The captain was ruled out of the World Cup with a foot injury, but her love for science fiction and fantasy is well-known. Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials,” Brandon Sanderson’s “Mistborn” and Patrick Rothfuss’s “The Kingkiller Chronicle” are some favorite series.
As a player for FC Kansas City from 2013 to 2017, Sauerbrunn struck up a friendship with a fan over a love for reading, exchanging conversations and packages of books. Years later, she made a similar connection — this time with Emily Fox, a fellow defender on the U.S. national team.
At 38, Sauerbrunn is more than a decade older than Fox, with a significant advantage in experience. But they share a passion for science fiction and fantasy romance novels.
“We formed a relationship around discussing books, and it was actually really lovely because there’s an age difference and we never really played on any teams together,” Sauerbrunn said. “So how do you start learning about somebody and forming that relationship? I trained with her in L.A. over the offseason and it’s just like … one small thing like talking about a book that you both read turns into a pretty cool relationship.”
Jesse Dougherty contributed to this report.
