Assembly Insights: Alex Morgan, the Power to Influence

Assembly Extract from Mr Alex Frazer, Head at Bancroft’s
Presented on Monday 16 September 2024

You may remember I concluded my assembly on the first day of term with an extract from a novel. I’m a keen reader, of all sorts of material – novels, history books, books about ideas, newspaper and magazine articles, and more besides.

Two shorter pieces of writing I’ve read in the last week or so have given me pause for thought – they actually go together, but it will take me a moment to explain why. 

The first was written by our own Mrs Channer, the Deputy Head (Pastoral), and you should have heard her deliver it as a Chapel address in the second half of the summer term – unless, of course, you were a Fifth Former on exam leave or preparing for the end of Year 6 at the time. Mrs Channer’s theme was pro-social behaviour – attitudes which people display, and the actions that they take, because they are actively trying to be of help or benefit to others outside themselves – whether those are people they know personally, or a wider group they’re aware of, or even society at large. 

The second piece of writing was a newspaper article about the very recent retirement of the US footballer Alex Morgan, aged 35 and now expecting her second child. Here she is in the colours of the US Women’s National Team. 

I’m not someone who knows a huge amount about football, and I’ve never been a passionate supporter of a particular club, but I do enjoy watching the game. So I’ll admit that I had never heard of Alex Morgan before the 2019 Women’s World Cup, which was played in France, highly televised in a way that hadn’t really happened before for a women’s football tournament – and was, I think, the moment when women’s football captured the public imagination, in this country, achieving a widespread visibility and appeal that has only continued to grow.  

The England team did well in 2019, building much of that excitement around women’s football and making household names of many players. You may remember the team progressed to the semi-finals, where they were beaten 2-1 by the United States, the winning goal being scored by Alex Morgan, herself a stand-out player in the team that went on to win the championship. 

In the USA, women’s football has benefitted from serious financial investment and strategic development for longer than has been in the case here at home, and Alex Morgan has been pre-eminent in a golden generation of American players who have, at the top level, been extremely successful for their league teams and their country, become highly recognisable in the public eye and done a lot to encourage girls and women to play the game. They have also become personally wealthy as a result of their professional achievements and the celebrity endorsements that have followed.  

It has taken a lot of hard work as well as talent. Morgan didn’t start playing competitive soccer until she was 14, but by age 17 she was called up to the national U20 team and a year later she entered the University of California, Berkeley, one of the most academically competitive universities in the US, where she played college soccer – college sport being a big deal over there – and completed a degree in Political Economy.   

Until her retirement 8 days ago, she spent nearly 20 years in the top flight of women’s football, playing for top US teams and winning the National Women’s Soccer League, serving short stints at Lyon and Spurs, and scoring 123 international goals in 224 senior appearances. She is a two-time World Cup winner, and a three-time Olympian with gold and bronze medals. She has enjoyed an enormous domestic fanbase and driven up attendance in every stadium she’s played in. Unlike rather too many of her male counterparts, she has also had the reputation of being a well-behaved player, on and off the pitch – although she did annoy England fans in that 2019 semi-final by appearing to mime drinking a cup of tea as her goal celebration. 

Good for her, you might say – Alex Morgan is a rich and famous footballer, newly retired and living a comfortable life. What’s the connection to being pro-social, you are wondering? Well, I think there’s a pretty big one – because there is good evidence that Alex Morgan has used her prominence, her platform, to make things better for a wider group of people. 

Alex Morgan had the great good fortune to spend her whole playing career at the top level of women’s soccer. But for there to be a top level, there must be levels that aren’t top, and a whole lot of players working very hard in those levels, often for little reward, with questionable job security and highly vulnerable to the whims of their coaches. 

That didn’t have to be Morgan’s problem – her fame insulated her from it, and she could have just ignored it, had fun and spent her money. But she made it her problem, and over many years invested a significant amount of time and energy trying to improve conditions for all women playing the professional game. 

Still in her early 20s, Morgan advocated to National Women’s Soccer League officials on behalf of a teammate who had allegedly been the victim of sexual coercion by a former head coach. Multiple investigations into inappropriate coach behaviours followed, and Morgan was successful in helping persuade the league to adopt better policies to protect players.  

She played a significant part in a successful campaign to establish equal pay between the US men’s and women’s national teams, and worked behind the scenes to secure the right to paid maternity leave for players in the league and the national team.  

Most recently she has served on the bargaining committee of the league players’ association which has negotiated a new standard contract, approved just two weeks ago, which will improve working conditions and salaries for all players in the league and abolish the draft, allowing individuals significantly more choice in the teams they end up playing for. 

On retirement, Alex Morgan is someone who is respected as much for her actions off the pitch as on it, and it will be interesting to see where her next steps take her in American public life. I think she is a worthwhile example of someone who knows her power and uses it pro-socially – in other words, for some kind of greater good. 

So what? You might be tempted to say. We’re not famous like Alex Morgan, so how can we use her as a model for our own choices and behaviour? Actually I think we can, in two ways.  

First, because we all have people around us to whom we relate – as friends, classmates, brothers, sisters, cousins, parents – and these are people we all have the power to affect directly, and to influence, through our own behaviour.  

Second, because we all have the potential to think outside of ourselves and the empathy, assuming we choose to use it, to sense when someone else is not in a good place and could do with some support. It’s actively good for us, in fact, to spend a bit less time dwelling on ourselves and what we might think is going badly for us, and rather more time thinking about what we can do to be of help to others. 

At the Lower Sixth parents and students’ welcome evening last Tuesday, we were lucky enough to have a guest speaker – Sharath Jeevan, who is a world-renowned expert on leadership and motivation. One of his key pieces of advice on how to seek fulfilment and a sense of purpose, particularly although not exclusively when you’re feeling less confident about yourself, was to get involved in a problem that’s bigger than you, and see what you can do to improve it – and that, by definition, is doing something for the greater good.  

Thank you for listening.