In July of 2022, Madison Hammond was walking the red carpet at the ESPYs. It was called a “historic appearance,” a big moment of representation and recognition for Afro-Indigenous people. Externally, Hammond was beaming. Internally, she was turning a question over and over in her mind: “Am I good enough?”
Hammond’s NWSL rights had been traded from OL Reign to Angel City FC just four months before. She was having trouble cracking the roster, going from a sub to a starter to the bench. At one point before that red carpet, she didn’t play for five consecutive games. At the same time she was getting plenty of interview requests, often to ask about being the first Native American to play in the league.
“It’s this weird dichotomy,” she told The Athletic. “I’m not doing what I want to achieve (as a player). But then everybody is like, ‘Wow, it looks like you’re doing so amazing because you’re doing all these front-facing things. Whereas internally you’re like, ‘I am barely making it through each training session.’”
Hammond is currently promoting her short documentary, “Katishtya Girl.” The film, from a Native woman-led racial and social justice organization, IllumiNative, follows Hammond around San Felipe Pueblo in New Mexico where she spent her childhood. She talks openly and honestly about her Indigenous identity, her family and her desires as a professional athlete in a project that was made and directed by Indigenous people. San Felipe Pueblo gave the documentary special permission to record limited specific images, as the Pueblo is normally extremely restrictive of any outside filming.
It’s about as much as you can thoughtfully cram into a five-minute short film, and she offered even more on a phone call with The Athletic. That’s typical of Hammond: she gives you long, considerate answers that hint at how deep a well she must have internally plumbed in her search for self. It’s a lot of emotional labor too, or so it seems; she brushes it off with an easy “not at all” when thanked for opening up about her insecurities.
But doing the work has taken its toll. Hammond feels an enormous duty to be vocal about being Native and biracial and about how she carries these things with her as a public figure. At the same time, she sees this as an opportunity for her to have a platform to talk about all the things that matter to her.
There is tension between being the first anything and wanting to be able to just be one in a crowd. When you’re the first — and currently only — it’s exciting and illuminating and full of possibility. But it’s also isolating, and a lot of pressure, and it can start to make you question yourself, the way it did with Hammond. Do they only want you to tick a diversity checkbox? Does anyone see you in your totality? Are they accurately judging your playing ability?
“There are days where, if I miss a pass, I’m like ‘Oh my gosh, everyone’s going to think I’m a fraud,” Hammond said in the documentary. “Everyone’s gonna think that the only reason that I’m here is because everyone’s excited they have the first Native American.”
“Katishtya Girl”
Hammond was born in Phoenix, Arizona to an active-duty military mom, Carol Lincoln, who is Navajo and San Felipe Pueblo. In the way she speaks about her mother, a Navy captain and currently Chief Nurse Officer of the federal Indian Health Service, it’s quickly apparent how deeply Hammond respects her. She attended all of Hammond’s childhood club games, nearly all of her college games and never said no to anything Hammond wanted to do with soccer. “I’ve been loved so fervently by my mom my whole life,” she said.
Hammond’s senior English thesis at Wake Forest was in part born out of an adult appreciation and understanding of what her mother provided for her as a child — the sacrifices that children don’t always comprehend.
“There’s this whole idea, especially being an American, being Indigenous, of our home as restricted to these reservations,” Hammond explained about her thesis. “But it’s also where these thriving cultures exist and where our beliefs and our values have lasted for hundreds and hundreds of years. But in order to achieve financial, societal, commercial success, you have to leave home.
“I think that here in this country, there’s the idea of people who immigrate to do the same thing, but we’re kind of the only people that have to do it where our own home is. And so in more of my adult life, I really just had a newfound appreciation for what my mom did in order to provide for my sister and I.”
Hammond’s father wasn’t a consistent presence in her life. When she was born, Lincoln already had Hammond’s older sister Michaela, and she brought the kids to New Mexico to be around their extended family.
Hammond spent her childhood on the 68,000 acres of the San Felipe Pueblo about 25 miles north of Albuquerque. San Felipe — or “Katishtya” in the Keres language — lies in the Rio Grande Valley, a place of broad rolling plains and high flat-topped mesas, where the current enrolled tribal population is approximately 3,700 people.
There Hammond started playing soccer on an all-boys team; she switched to basketball in the winters, then back to outdoor soccer come spring, with dance mixed in. She thrived on routine, and Lincoln encouraged her daughters’ competitiveness. Then when Hammond was nine, her mom explained to her that she’d been stationed in Washington, D.C., 1,800 miles away from everything she’d ever known.
“I just started sobbing,” Hammond said. She loved New Mexico, she loved her life there, she loved her family. What could possibly be better? Nevertheless, when the Navy says go, you go, and so they moved to Northern Virginia. Soccer became a touchstone, something familiar. She tried out for another boys’ team.
“I remember coming home so frustrated because the boys sucked. And I was like, ‘Mom, these boys are bad,’” Hammond said.
If you’ve ever encountered youth soccer in the D.C. area, you’ll know that it can quickly become an internecine world of club politics and competitive teams with even more competitive parents. Hammond called it “a full-on soap opera.”
Still, she started playing on a girls’ team, finding better coaches and peers who were more at her talent level. She started to realize she could get better — a lot better — and quickly. By the time she was 10 years old, she started getting serious: training six days a week, enduring the grueling travel schedule of elite soccer and doing extra training with different coaches. Private weight training started at age 14. At Wake Forest, she was a four-year starter in one of the most competitive conferences in Division I, and an academic standout. She played her way onto the OL Reign squad as a non-roster invitee in 2020. From the outside, Hammond was thriving.
One of one
In middle school, an 11-year-old Hammond got a particularly crass comment that has lingered in her memory.
“Someone asked me what I was,” she said. “And I told them, ‘I’m Black and Native American’, and they were like, ‘Oh wow, you’re the ultimate minority.’”
She rolled with it at the time, unsure of how to stand up for herself. She was a child in the throes of tweendom, without the tools to navigate everyday microaggressions let alone outright racism.
Part of the context of Hammond navigating her identity of course comes from the long and terrible history of the United States’ persistent and violent attempts to eradicate Indigenous people nationwide. One of the more insidious modern effects of this history is a common perception by non-Native Americans that Native people are simply gone, extinct, a relic of the past. There is vanishingly little perception of Native peoples in this country as still existing in their communities and practicing living, breathing cultures.
“The ideas of these reservations being the spaces where people don’t exist, they just manifest themselves in different ways. That is so prevalent,” Hammond said. “A big example being when teams have these really offensive mascots…. If you do a five-second Google search on the actual root meaning of the word ‘R—— ‘ the violence is horrifying. You should be appalled.
“And even just casual phrases. It’s like, ‘Well, why does it matter if I say like, oh, we’re having a little powwow here, right?’ It matters because powwows are really specific and sacred to Plains people…. It’s not just a gathering together, like a town hall meeting. It’s something that’s much more intentional and much more rooted in tradition.”
Hammond spoke out against similar erasure during the 2022 season when Gotham FC midfielder McCall Zerboni used a demeaning phrase about Indians in a Zoom call.
This has to be acknowledged and is really important. Not because I want to call out one person but because it’s indicative of how our larger culture continues to perpetuate harmful stereotypes about Native Americans and Indigenous cultures. (1/3) pic.twitter.com/RGnKEdjGnW
— Madison Hammond (@gohaamm) August 2, 2022
Hammond spoke personally with Zerboni, who later apologized on her Twitter as well. It was an unfortunate encapsulation of how Indigenous people are casually othered every day and another reminder that Hammond is the only Indigenous player in the league as she took on labor of publicly addressing the topic.
Like many Native people, Hammond also navigates a multicultural identity as a biracial woman. In the D.C. area, Hammond said her mother was able to raise her in the presence of Black culture despite her mother not being Black herself. “I was never denied that half of who I am as a person,” Hammond said.
The lens through which she perceived her Blackness shifted at Wake Forest, which lists its current undergraduate enrollment as 67% white, 6% Black, and less than 1% “American Indian.”
“I think that it took me going to college and being in an environment that was predominantly white, where I presented very Black outwardly, so if people didn’t know what I was, they could at least default to ‘she’s probably Black and something’ where I was able to kind of reclaim part of that identity,” Hammond said. “And it sucks that you have to reclaim that identity through microaggressions, a little bit of trauma, and kind of not the best of experiences, but at the same time, it allowed me to have a voice when I came into the league.”
Hammond is currently in her fourth year as an NWSL player. She still gets asked “what’s it like to be the first” and she’s looking to change it up now that everyone has had plenty of time to digest this information.
“I don’t want my tagline to just be that I’m the only Native American to play in the NWSL,” she said. “It’s like, no, I want to be the first Native American to make the best XI. I want to be the first Native American to get called into the (women’s) national team. And so I want to be asked more about what it’s going to take for someone who is one-of-one to get to those places.”
Madison unfiltered
Hammond spoke to The Athletic months after filming her short documentary, and since then, her journey to understand herself hasn’t stopped. In fact, it only seems to have picked up steam.
“I watch the person in that doc…and I’m like, I wish I could add an addendum of an interview now,” she said. “To have done that much work in the last six months has been really positive for me, but it’s also like, it’s sometimes sad to watch yourself when you’re like, dang, you’re going through it.”
Madison Hammond waves from the Zamboni during the second period game between the Florida Panthers and the Los Angeles Kings. (Photo by Juan Ocampo/NHLI via Getty Images)
She’s had to fight hard at both the Reign and now Angel City for consistent playing time. “Every single (Reign) training session was just like fighting for your life, but in the best way” she said.
Right now, Hammond has six appearances for ACFC, with two starts with 224 total minutes. Last season she had 319 minutes over nine games, with three starts. In 2021 with the Reign, she had 852 minutes over 13 games with 10 starts. Across both teams she’s played the entire back line, from left to right as a fullback and a center back. Angel City has asked her to slot in at midfield at times. She’s had to adapt constantly.
“It’s a blessing and a curse,” she said. “Because you can be a Swiss army knife and be really good for a team in that way. Especially in this league where you have players leaving all the time for international duty, injuries, and things like that. But at the same time it makes it hard for myself when you want to specialize. You want to get better, you want repetition, repetition, repetition.”
Going from playing half the season for the Reign to getting just over a third of the minutes in her first season with Angel City didn’t feel good.
“Honestly, last year was a really tough year for me mentally,”she said. “I was really excited to be a part of Angel City. And I think that some of the goals that I’ve had for myself kind of fell short. And I was not in a good place to perform on the field, to be a good friend off the field, to be the best teammate that I want to be for this organization.”
Impostor syndrome crept in. She began asking herself if she was truly good enough to be in the NWSL. She’d go three or four games without playing, and then she’d start, and then back to the bench. At the same time, she was in regular demand for media calls. All the public attention was completely at odds with the pressure that Hammond was putting on herself in private.
Becoming one of XI
“Shout out to therapy,” Hammond tossed this out cheerfully while looking back at where she was while filming “Katishtya Girl.”
She’s found a bit of a mental reset in 2023. For the independent Hammond, the latchkey kid who saw her own sporting potential when she was only 10, therapy used to fell like admitting weakness. But she has a therapist now and is clearly more comfortable talking openly about her mental health, whether it’s in an interview, on camera, or just to a friend.
“I don’t have to do this alone,” she said.
She’s trying to stay focused on loving soccer, loving that she gets to play every day and not pushing aside the mental toll of constantly trying to stay at the peak of performance. The pressure is still there, both external and internal. But there’s also acceptance of the interest in her story and identity, an understanding of where the pressures are coming from.
“There are two parts to the story,” she said. “There’s the part of reckoning with the pressure that I’ve put on myself because of my identity. But there’s also my growth and understanding of, I’m on the right track as a professional athlete, and just need to keep growing. The two will continue to complement each other as I grow into a fifth-year player, a six-year player.”
She understands, deeply and crucially, that she has a lot of opportunity to leverage the attention she gets into something positive for struggling athletes and Indigenous communities and multiracial girls who get asked “What are you” at school. She feels it as a responsibility; perhaps the pressure will never entirely disappear simply because of how she is as a person. But when she meets other Indigenous kids, like the Navajo Nation girl who came to an Angel City home game this season, she feels affirmed.
“I could have been LeBron James in her eyes,” Hammond said. “When you actually see yourself have that impact on someone, you’re like, I’m doing the right thing at the right time.”
On the field, Hammond is working on getting better at distribution out of the back with both feet so she can spray a ball from anywhere on the field, and she’s trying to stay focused on being able to execute through positional switches. She wants to be known for her calmness and composure in games and calls herself “not super flashy.” She wants to be the kind of player a team can depend on to do all the little things right, even if they don’t make the highlight reel.
“I think those are the positions that are always undervalued, but at the same time, they’re the most important,” she said. “And so if I can be an important piece to this team moving forward, then I would be really happy.”
So there’s work, and there’s acceptance. She’s only 25 years old with three full professional seasons to her name so far, and to be a professional soccer player is a constant process of learning, implementing, refining and balancing confidence with the notion that you can do better.
“I have to give myself grace,” she said. “I know my ceiling is a lot higher than where I’m at. But like, that ceiling does not need to be touched tomorrow.”
(Photo: Katharine Lotze/Getty Images)
