On the field or on the screen, Trinity Rodman always comes to play. After becoming the youngest player, at 18 years old, to be drafted into the National Women’s Soccer League in 2021, she went on to win Rookie of the Year that season and help the Washington Spirit lift the NWSL championship trophy.
Four years later, the 23-year-old forward has already established herself as a household name, and she’s using her platform as one of the sport’s biggest stars to help grow the women’s game, including partnering with EA Sports FC.
“It reaches a bigger audience,” Rodman says. “Obviously, there’s people that watch sports and support women’s sports, but I also think it’s bigger than that. There are a lot of people who know nothing about soccer but are heavily into video games, so being able to connect those two worlds is putting more eyes on soccer for sure.”
Now, when she gets recognized, it’s not just for her on-field performance, but her in-game performance as well.
“It’s been a really cool thing to be a part of because even when meeting people, they tell me that my EA card is really good,” she says. “Sometimes I’ll make the joke that honestly, my game version is better than I am in real life!”
As part of the lead-up to EA Sports FC 26, Rodman got to unveil her in-game player rating, but before she got to see it, she braced herself for the possibility that she’d want it to be higher.
“I think no matter what, every player will always be mad about their rating and always want it to be higher, even if you’re at 99,” Rodman says. “But as I’ve grown as a player, the game has done a good job of updating it as the years go on.”
This year, Rodman will debut at an 85 overall, putting her in the NWSL’s top 26. Although she’s pleased with most aspects of her rating, she was secretly hoping her defensive rating would be a little higher.
“I need to talk to them about my defensive rating because I do believe it should be higher,” Rodman says with a laugh. “I pride myself on being a forward that defends more than most!”
With only a few weeks left in the regular season, Rodman won’t be swapping her cleats for a video game controller anytime soon. As she puts it, “I’m just really bad, I’ve accepted that video games are not my best thing.” However, that doesn’t stop her from appreciating the game’s reach, especially with its more recent inclusion of women’s players. She’s happy to be a small part of such a massive piece of gaming and sports culture.
“It’s exciting,” she says. “I love being recognized for that because it’s never something that I thought I could be a part of or even be in the game, so this being real life is really amazing.”
On the field, Rodman is showing exactly why she’s in FC 26’s top 26 NWSL players. After being sidelined for nearly four months due to injury, Rodman entered the Spirit’s Aug. 3 match in the 76th minute and scored a stoppage-time winner to secure a 2–1 win over the Portland Thorns.
“It was a long journey for me, being a player that hadn’t dealt with any long-term injury, it was definitely a new experience with challenges and emotions I’ve never faced, so that game was amazing,” Rodman says. “Going into the game, I didn’t have expectations for how much I was going to play, because I truly didn’t know. I just was really excited to hopefully go into the game.”
Winning the match was just the icing on the cake for Rodman, whose emotional catharsis was immediately palpable to the fans who made sure to show her love in her triumphant return to the field.
“Even if we had been down 6–0 and I scored that, I still would have been just as happy, I still would have cried,” she says. “Just being back on the field, being myself, having fun, not being in pain and showing why I play, and how excited fans were for me, not just because we won, but because they saw the emotions and the joy that I felt playing a game that everybody loves to watch and everybody loves to play.”
During her recovery, Rodman kept her “why” at the forefront of her mind. Through the grueling process of returning to play—the hard work and repetitive drills—she never stopped remembering what she loved about the beautiful game.
“It was an interesting experience for me, but it showed me a different side of myself that I didn’t think I had,” Rodman says. “I think I also surprised the people that I worked with just how hard I worked and how committed I was to getting back on the field.”
She tuned out the outside noise, the chatter of those who thought she was just out having fun or relaxing when, instead, she was grinding every day to get back to the game that she loves.
“In reality, every single day I was getting up early, doing hours of physical therapy, working out to the point where I was throwing up in certain sessions,” she says. “I had never been through that, and I’m really happy with the experience I got because I learned a lot about myself and grew as both a player and a person.”
Now, Rodman can turn her focus to helping the Spirit win another NWSL championship. The group came close last season, losing 1–0 to the Orlando Pride in the final, and Rodman is determined not to let another opportunity pass them by.
“We have a lot of good players, a lot of talent, creativity, hard workers, but I think at times we can get disconnected on the field from game to game,” she says. “Even going back to last year, we had so many amazing performances as a team, but once the championship came, we were all very disappointed in the way that we carried ourselves and, I would say, the mental weakness we had in that moment, because we weren’t carrying each other and we weren’t uplifting each other in the way we had before.
“Once we have that consistency, those connections, and we’re meshing together on a game-to-game basis, we’ll be unstoppable for sure.”
