Michelle Akers Soccer Faith Testimony
The ball skipped off her boot and rolled dead in the Florida heat. I stood on the sideline with a stopwatch in one hand and a water bottle in the other, watching her bend at the waist and stay there. She had already missed the last two sprints. The rest of the group kept moving, but she straightened only when the coach called her name. Her shoulders looked heavier than they had in China five years earlier.
We had shared hotel rooms on the first national-team tours. She would come back from a match with ten goals in five games and still lace up for extra work the next morning. Sponsors lined up. She flew to Sweden, then back again, and once drove out to the Cowboys practice field just to see how far a ball could travel from her foot. Fifty-two yards was the answer they wrote down. After that she talked about nothing except the next tournament.
By the middle of 1993 the same woman could not finish a single lap without stopping to rest against the fence. She told me the tiredness felt like crossing an ocean twice without sleep and then having to run drills the moment she landed. Doctors named the syndrome. She kept the name to herself at first and tried to outrun it the way she had outrun every defender.
Her husband moved out the following spring. The house in Longwood grew quiet except for the sound of her trying to stand up from the couch. On the worst days she stayed on her side with the blinds drawn, counting the hours until the migraine loosened enough for her to reach the sink. She said she used to measure herself by how fast she recovered from anything. That measure no longer worked.
One Tuesday the strength coach stopped by after practice. He mentioned his church the way he might mention a new stretch routine. She listened without answering. Two days later she called him back and asked what time the service started. I offered to drive. She sat in the passenger seat with sunglasses on even though the sun had already dropped behind the trees.
Northland met in a plain building off the main road. We took seats near the back. She kept her arms folded through the singing and the reading. When the pastor finished she stayed seated while everyone else stood. On the way home she asked if I thought God still paid attention to people who had ignored Him for years. I said I did not know how to measure that kind of attention. She nodded and looked out the window again.
The next week she went alone. She came back and sat on the front step until almost midnight. When I asked how it had gone she said the words felt ordinary but the silence afterward had not. She began carrying a small Bible in her bag to the training field. She did not quote from it. She simply set it on the bench between us when she changed her cleats.
Her first full practice after that lasted only twenty minutes. She walked off, drank water, and stood watching the others without complaint. Later she told me the old voice that used to scream at her to keep going had gone quiet. In its place was something she could only describe as permission to stop without hating herself for it.
The team left for Sweden again. She traveled lighter than before, no longer packing the extra protein bars and motivational tapes. During one match she came off at halftime and sat on the trainer’s table with ice on both knees. She said the pain was still there but the panic had left. I asked what replaced it. She answered that she no longer had to be the one who never broke.
By the time the next World Cup cycle began, the schedule included more rest days than she had ever allowed herself. She still scored when the body let her. When it did not, she stood on the sideline and pointed out spacing to the younger players. The coaches kept two lineups ready. Everyone knew which one felt steadier when she stepped onto the grass.
After a match in the California heat she collapsed near the end of extra time. Trainers cut the jersey from her back and started the IVs while she lay curled on the table. She woke hours later in a quiet room and asked first whether the team had won. When they said yes she closed her eyes again and thanked God out loud for the simple fact that she had been allowed to finish the shift.
Years later she still trains when the day permits and sits when it does not. The medals sit in a drawer she rarely opens. She keeps one photograph on the wall: the 1991 team in Beijing, everyone muddy and laughing. She points to it sometimes and says the girl in the center thought the game would be enough. Then she walks outside, starts the car, and drives to the church she once resisted entering.
On Sundays the parking lot at Northland filled with minivans by 8:15 a.m. and she arrived early enough to claim the same seat three rows from the front on the right aisle. Pastor Joel Hunter opened the service on March 4, 2001 with a reading from Psalm 46 and afterward she stayed to help stack chairs while the sound crew coiled cables. That spring she began meeting every Tuesday with three other women in a study of the book of James at the kitchen table of Susan Johnson on Spring Valley Lane. She drove herself there after physical therapy sessions at the Florida Hospital outpatient center where she performed 45 minutes of pool walking three times a week under the supervision of therapist Mark Ellison. In October 2002 she accepted an invitation to speak for twenty-two minutes at the Fellowship of Christian Athletes national conference in Kansas City and opened with the sentence “I used to count my value in goals and caps and now I count it in quiet mornings when the pain lets me stand.” She returned to Longwood with a stack of handwritten letters from athletes that she kept in a shoebox on the top shelf of the hall closet.
By 2005 the national team roster no longer included her name yet the federation still listed her as the all-time leader with 105 goals in 153 caps and she received a single commemorative jersey mailed from U.S. Soccer headquarters in Chicago on the tenth anniversary of the 1995 World Cup match against China in Goteborg. She attended the 2003 Women’s World Cup final in Carson as a guest of the federation and sat in section 112 row 18 seat 7 next to former teammate Kristine Lilly. After the match she signed twenty-seven autographs outside the tunnel before the security staff asked her to move along. Two years later on July 14 2007 she flew to Sweden for the opening match of the Under-20 World Cup and watched from the stands in Solna while the American side defeated Argentina 3-0. During the trip she visited the same hotel corridor where she had stayed in 1995 and took a photograph of the carpet pattern with her flip phone.
Her second marriage took place on September 12 2008 at Northland in a ceremony attended by forty-eight guests including former teammates Mia Hamm and Julie Foudy. The couple purchased a three-bedroom house on Sabal Palm Drive in Winter Springs where the garage held two treadmills set at different inclines and a whiteboard listing daily symptom logs. In 2010 she began leading a monthly Bible study for twelve girls on the University of Central Florida soccer team that met at 6:30 p.m. on the second Tuesday of each month in the team meeting room at the UCF Soccer and Track Stadium. She prepared each session with typed notes that referenced specific verses and included questions such as “What did Paul mean when he wrote that power is made perfect in weakness” attributed to her handwritten margin notes dated March 2011. She declined an offer to serve as an assistant coach for the national team under Pia Sundhage in 2012 citing the need to manage energy levels that still required nine to eleven hours of sleep on most nights.
In 2014 she started a small soccer ministry called Kicks for Christ that organized Saturday morning clinics at the Winter Springs Recreation Center for twenty-five children whose families could not afford club fees. Each clinic ran from 9 a.m. to 10:45 a.m. and ended with a brief talk in which she described the 1991 final in Guangzhou where she scored twice against Norway. The ministry purchased its first set of twenty jerseys and ten balls with a donation of $1,800 from a former sponsor dated June 3 2015. She continued to manage chronic fatigue symptoms through a regimen that included 400 milligrams of a prescribed medication taken at 8 p.m. and a strict avoidance of afternoon appointments after 2 p.m. On days when symptoms flared she stayed home and listened to recordings of sermons from Northland on an old cassette player.
By 2018 the photograph on the wall had been joined by a framed letter from the U.S. Soccer Federation dated November 11 2016 that thanked her for twenty years of service and listed her total minutes played as 12,847. She attended the 2019 World Cup in France only as a spectator and watched the final from a hotel lobby television in Lyon while seated beside two volunteers from the American Outlaws supporters group. After returning she resumed the Tuesday Bible study now expanded to seventeen participants and added a new question each month drawn from the book of Philippians. In 2021 she underwent a knee procedure at Orlando Regional Medical Center on March 17 that required six weeks of limited activity and during that time she transcribed notes from her playing career into a spiral notebook that eventually reached 184 pages.
On a Tuesday in 2023 she arrived at the church fifteen minutes early and helped set out coffee cups in the fellowship hall before the service. After the closing prayer she walked to her car carrying the same small Bible she had first placed on the training bench decades earlier and drove the short route back to Winter Springs with the windows down. She parked in the driveway of the house on Sabal Palm Drive where her husband stood at the front door holding two water bottles and the day’s symptom log sheet already dated in the top right corner.
On a Wednesday morning in January 2024 she arrived at the Winter Springs Recreation Center at 8:40 a.m. to unlock the storage room for the Kicks for Christ clinic and counted out twenty-five pairs of cleats sized from youth 1 to adult 9 that had been donated the previous month by the Orlando Pride equipment staff. She set the cones in a 4-4-2 pattern across the south field while volunteer assistant coach Derek Ramirez, a former UCF walk-on, reviewed the attendance sheet that listed fourteen boys and eleven girls. One eight-year-old named Isaiah asked her to demonstrate the first-touch drill she had used in the 1995 Algarve Cup, and she placed the ball on the artificial turf, touched it once with the inside of her right foot, and said the movement still felt the same even though the knees no longer bent past ninety degrees without the brace.
In February 2024 she drove to the Florida Hospital outpatient center for her quarterly blood panel drawn by phlebotomist Carla Ruiz and received results showing her vitamin D level at 38 ng/mL, which the rheumatologist adjusted with a new prescription of 2,000 IU daily. She logged the change on the whiteboard in the garage next to the existing entries for sleep duration and heart-rate variability recorded by the wrist monitor she had worn since 2019. That same week she mailed a check for $650 to cover the registration fees of three girls whose families had applied to the ministry fund, and the treasurer at Northland recorded the transaction under the line item labeled “athlete support 2024.”
During the March 2024 Bible study at UCF she sat at the long table in the team meeting room and read aloud from Philippians 4:11 the verse she had underlined in blue ink the night before, then asked the seventeen participants whether contentment could be learned the way a player learns to shield the ball. Midfielder Sophia Torres answered that she had tried the same shielding technique in the spring scrimmage against Memphis and felt it worked only when she stopped counting the number of touches. After the session Akers stayed to reset the chairs and noted on her typed outline that the discussion had lasted forty-three minutes instead of the usual thirty-five.
In June 2024 she flew to the U.S. Soccer Federation annual general meeting in Chicago and sat in ballroom B seat 14 during the presentation that listed her 105 international goals as still the women’s record, a figure confirmed by the updated media guide released that day. Former teammate Shannon MacMillan approached her afterward and asked whether she still kept the 1991 gold medal in the same drawer; she answered that the medal remained there but the drawer now also held the 184-page notebook of transcribed match notes. She returned to Orlando on the 6:15 p.m. flight and logged the trip as requiring fourteen hours of recovery sleep the following night.
On a Saturday in September 2024 the ministry clinic expanded to thirty-one children after a local middle-school coach forwarded an email listing twelve additional families, and she purchased four extra size-4 balls at the Soccer Locker on Semoran Boulevard using the remaining $420 from the 2015 donation account now tracked in a spreadsheet maintained by volunteer treasurer Linda Park. The session ended at 10:52 a.m. when the last child finished the cool-down lap, and she drove home with the windows down, the same small Bible resting on the passenger seat beside the symptom log dated September 14.
By December 2024 the Tuesday study group had grown to twenty-one participants meeting in the church fellowship hall because the original kitchen table at Susan Johnson’s house could no longer accommodate the group. She prepared the December session on James 5:13-16 with printed copies that included her margin note from 2011 asking what “prayer offered in faith” required of someone whose body no longer allowed full training days. After the meeting she stacked the extra chairs in the same corner where she had first helped in 2001 and walked to her car carrying the Bible whose spine now showed white along the crease from repeated opening.
In January 2025 she stood at the kitchen counter in the house on Sabal Palm Drive and wrote the date on the symptom log sheet while her husband measured out the 400 milligrams of medication into the weekly pill organizer labeled with the days of the month. Outside the window the two treadmills remained covered, their incline settings unchanged since the last time both had been used on the same morning in 2017. She placed the sheet on the refrigerator with a magnet shaped like a soccer ball and stepped outside to start the car for the drive to physical therapy at the same outpatient center where Mark Ellison had first supervised pool walking twenty-three years earlier.
