In January 2020, Madison Hammond was riding a train from Sevilla to Madrid during the National Women’s Soccer League college draft in Baltimore. The defender from Wake Forest University had worked diligently to finish her undergraduate degree by the end of fall 2019 ― a semester early ― in order to declare her draft eligibility.
Minutes later, she got a phone call asking her to attend a preseason camp for a team in the NWSL. Then Hammond received a text message from one of her coaches: The Seattle OL Reign had picked up her rights. She hadn’t been drafted exactly, but the team would work with her in the preseason and see if she was ready to join the league.
That year, Hammond, who is Navajo, Pueblo and Black, became the first Native American soccer player in the NWSL. Being “the first” has taken on a life of its own, she said, and given her so many opportunities. Hammond worked with Nike on its N7 collection, honoring Indigenous traditions and craftsmanship. She participated in a panel discussion at Sundance about Native storytelling, and set foot in the White House. Going into her fourth season, Hammond said she’s ready for her identity not to be her sole identifier.
“I think that a lot of people of color, a lot of Black people, a lot of brown people are judged because of who we are and not what we do. I’m ready to show people what I can do, as opposed to just talking about who I am,” Hammond said. “The two can happen in tandem and can work in conjunction with each other. The thing that I’m looking forward to most this season is reclaiming my love for this sport.”
Following the July tournament, Hammond took to the field as a professional athlete for the first time in the fall of 2020. The OL Reign was competing against the Utah Royals FC, and the rookie survived her first eight minutes of play in the NWSL.
Hammond was in disbelief. When she kicked her first soccer ball two decades ago, representation and visibility were not on 5-year-old Madison’s mind. She didn’t even think of playing collegiate soccer until her freshman year of high school. (By then, her peers were already committing to play Division I NCAA soccer.) She was just a hypercompetitive kid who really wanted to be the best, taking every opportunity to level up.
“I actually started playing soccer with boys. That is what really lit my fire because I was not as good as them when I was 5 years old, but I was very committed to being better than them,” said Hammond. “I’ve always been very competitive, and I think that was instilled in me from my family. We’ve had a lot of athletes come through my family.”
Hammond’s uncle played golf on the PGA tour for 20 years, and her older sister, Michaela, played volleyball at New York University. She and her sister were raised in Albuquerque by their single mother, military veteran Carol Lincoln. She wrapped them in her love and that of their tribal community.
When Hammond wasn’t chasing a ball down a field, she was participating in ceremonial days, attending powwows and enjoying the company of her Native American peers. Hammond returns home each year on May 1 for San Felipe Pueblo Feast Day, a 400-year-old tradition celebrating family and food, replete with traditional dances and hundreds of onlookers.
But upon moving to Alexandria, Virginia, at the end of elementary school, Hammond felt a disconnect from her community and her culture. While most people in her New Mexico neighborhoods were either Native, Latino or white, Alexandria was a melting pot of cultures and ethnicities. From a young age, Hammond was tasked with explaining what Indigeneity means to people who had no frame of reference.
“Having this total change at 9, 10 years old, it was definitely a struggle,” Hammond said. “For a long time, I shied away from who I was because it was easier than having to explain. I remember it was Native American Heritage Day, I was in middle school, and I wore a traditional dress. This little boy looks at me and he goes, ‘You kind of look like an old lady.’ I felt super embarrassed. I went home and I told my mom and she was pissed, obviously, and went and talked to my teacher about it.”
Hammond said her teacher did nothing to rectify the situation. Instead, the teacher gave herself a pat on the back for merely acknowledging Native American Heritage Day, despite ignoring the feelings of her lone Indigenous student. The remarks, comments and questions from classmates continued, including, “What are you, Madison?”
“It has given me a sense of comfort in just understanding that, in the same way that being Native is not a monolith, being Black is not a monolith. There are so many different Black experiences that look like mine and also don’t look like mine,” Hammond said, acknowledging that her lived experiences will not mirror those of someone brought up in a household with one or two Black parents.
Search for community is what drove her to find a new soccer team in Virginia when she was growing up. She found a girls’ team — one that was far better than the boys’ — and made her mark on the field, eventually playing at the club level. More often than not, Hammond was one of few people of color on her predominantly white soccer teams. However, she leaned on the diverse community of friends she made at school for solace and community.
“I had a really, really hard culture shock and identity shock of being Black, being brown in these really white spaces and what that feels like,” Hammond said. “The prickly anxiety that you feel, and you can’t quite name why you’re feeling it. Over the course of my three and a half years at Wake, I really took a journey of just being really proud of being Black, being brown.”
“I called the coach on the way to the campus,” she said. “And I was like, ‘Hey, I’m just coming to look at the campus, blah, blah,’ and he dropped everything he was doing. And I fell in love with that school in 13 minutes.”
The final straw was when one of her teammates wanted to host a Pride Night, and the team’s request was declined because it would make “too much of a political statement.” Hammond let her frustration fuel her. Scared but determined, she penned a letter to the university president: “These recent events are relevant examples that have caused students to question the authenticity of the university’s goal to promote diversity and inclusion unconditionally.”
Little did she know that speaking truth to power would prepare her for joining the NWSL, a league known for its progressive activism and advocacy. Hammond was thrust into the spotlight as a biracial Black and Native player in the league. In 2020, one of the biggest points of contention was kneeling for the national anthem, which Hammond and her teammates on the OL Reign were dedicated to doing.
“A lot of the time, especially as athletes, we’re reduced to ‘shut up and dribble,’ like stick to your sport. That incident really instilled a lot of confidence in me,” she said, referring to the letter she sent to the Wake Forest president. “I can say what I want to say, and I can say it in a way that’s meaningful. Suddenly, you have this huge platform and this huge voice from 10-year veterans in the league.”
“They’re like, ‘Oh, my God, I can’t believe that you’re right here! We drove all the way from Ohio to come see you! We’re from Navajo Nation as well!’” Hammond said, noting the fans were from the same reservation that her mom was born on in Arizona. “It all just puts it into perspective. I could never step on a soccer field ever again and the impact that I have been able to have and the inspiration that I leave with people doesn’t feel real, because I feel like, ‘Oh, I’m just me.’”
Becoming a pro, Hammond said, meant dealing with a lot of things she had never dealt with prior: impostor syndrome, anxiety and performance anxiety. She said that such visibility and responsibility is a constant push and pull of being responsible to who you are as a person, but also protecting your own space.
“I’ve gotten to do a lot of cool things because of who I am, and I would never want to change that. Now, I’m ready to evolve into the next thing,” she said. “I don’t want to just be the first Native American to play in the NWSL, I want to be the first Native American to make it to the NWSL’s Best XI First Team and get called to the national team.”
This content was originally published here.
