Lauren Holiday is a player well-known not only for her outstanding achievements on the pitch, but her long history of service off of it. It’s fitting then that the National Women’s Soccer League will rename its yearly player service award, formerly the Nationwide Community Impact Award, to the Lauren Holiday Impact Award.
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It’s an honor that doesn’t sit lightly with Holiday, even amongst her litany of trophies for club and country. “It makes me feel a lot of gratitude for what I was able to create in the amount of time that I was in the NWSL,” she said in a call from her home.
The award, which has been presented in partnership with Nationwide since 2021 will “now prominently focus on and celebrate the community involvement of individual player nominees,” according to the league. NWSL will announce the finalists in the coming months with one winner receiving $30,000 for a charitable organization of their choice.
Every club’s community partner will receive a $5,000 donation from the league and Nationwide.
The decision to rename NWSL’s service award was virtually unanimous; players who were asked for input on the decision repeatedly brought up Holiday as their top recommendation.
Holiday spoke with The Athletic the day after husband Jrue helped the Boston Celtics win their first NBA conference finals games against the Indiana Pacers, throwing down 28 points in their 133-128 win. Jrue Holiday has spoken previously about sometimes receiving halftime texts from Lauren to psych him up, particularly if it looks like he’s struggling.
“I do, do that,” she said with a laugh. “Sometimes I feel like he just needs a reminder. It’s never to critique him in a bad way. But just like, ‘Hey, I see you.’” If anyone is qualified to send someone a halftime pump-up message, it’s World Cup winner, two-time Olympic gold medalist, two-time national champion, 2013 NWSL MVP Lauren Holiday.
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And yet for all her accolades on the field, the near-unanimous consent to rename a service award for Holiday signals her enormous contributions off of it, the quintessential exemplar of people perhaps forgetting what you said, but always remembering how you made them feel.
“When they first told me, it’s like almost you don’t know how to react to that,” Holiday said. She was shifting in her seat, visibly uncomfortable. “It’s just never been about that for me. I’ve never really cared if anything was named after me, or even if my name was known. I only cared about being a good teammate.”
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It was the hardest part of retiring.
“Losing that community of friendships of support of validation, all of those things,” she said. “Community is super precious to me.”
Holiday has acutely felt how precious community can be. In 2016, she had surgery to remove a benign brain tumor, surgery which she had to delay until after she gave birth to her daughter. In a 2017 Instagram post, Holiday said “I have never quite known suffering like I experienced the last 6 months.”
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“When I was retired and then I had the brain tumor, I stepped away from soccer a little bit,” she said. “And I kind of stepped away from everyone. I hid, and it was like, ‘Wait, that’s not who I am. And that’s not what I want.’”
Now she tries to create community wherever she goes. She wants her children to be a part of where they live, to thrive, and learn with their neighbors. She goes to NWSL games to keep up her ties to the sport. She also told a sweet story about visiting longtime friends and former USWNT teammates Christen Press and Tobin Heath in Los Angeles.
“I went to Christen and Tobin’s house, and we had dinner together,” said Holiday. “It was like, ‘Hey, we’re not always great at keeping in touch, but this matters and we miss each other and we love each other. So what do we need to do?’ And then I got a sweet text from Christen the other day like ‘This is me, keeping in touch.’”
That’s been a lesson for Holiday too, the intentionality it takes to keep bonds strong. Sometimes community can spring up spontaneously or can be maintained by circumstance, like being on the same team. But mostly, it’s about putting in the work.
“Someone told me once, ‘Cause creates community, but contribution creates belonging’,” she said.
If Holiday privately contributes to her personal relationships, she gives just as much, if not more, publicly to her service work. The Holidays created the Jrue & Lauren Holiday Social Impact Fund to contribute to programs combating systemic racism and socioeconomic inequality, particularly in Black and Brown communities. They’ve spoken to after-school program kids at the Roxbury YMCA.
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Holiday advocated passionately for legislation to close the racial inequality gap in maternal health outcomes. Even her brain tumor has made her reflect on what more good she could have done through her own experience.
“What if I would have shared more while I was going through it?” she asked. “What kind of impact could I have had? But now it’s like, well, how can I share as much as I can and continue to live life that way so that I don’t ever go back into hiding.”
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It seems like a heavy responsibility to live with, but Holiday said that her service energizes her, like working out a muscle that gets stronger over time. She wants to see young NWSL players embracing that mindset, not just for the good they can do, but for themselves.
“For a player, I think leadership is service,” she said. “For a player to excel to the next level, it’s like, not only do they have to be aware of themselves and their strengths and weaknesses, they have to be aware of every single player on the field, or court or whatever around them to know what their strengths and weaknesses are.
“It doesn’t mean that you have to solve everybody’s problem. But you have to be able to listen, and then to encourage is huge. … You’re not going to be able to change the circumstance, but you might be able to give them a little hope for the future.”
Holiday hinted at wanting to get more involved in NWSL as well. With Jrue having recently re-upped his Celtics contract through the 2027-28 NBA season, that might mean getting more hands-on with the upcoming NWSL Boston team, scheduled to debut in 2026. Holiday didn’t rule it out. It would probably require her to divest from any stake in Angel City FC, but that’s all still too far in the future for her. At a joke about “Lauren Holiday, Boston GM,” she smiled and said “TBD, TBD.”
“I’m working on some things and hopefully they come to fruition,” she said. “I’m interested in, I think, more the business and soccer side, I would say. My passion is really about building culture. I think that women’s sports deserve the world. But I also believe that we deserve to have organizations built with integrity.”
For someone who used to live with a host family in Boston and described her old FC Kansas City home field as a surface where you never knew if the ball would just bounce over your head, NWSL’s progress is not lost on Holiday. She said she almost grew emotional at her first Angel City game as she walked into the stadium and the atmosphere hit her. She also shouted out the WNBA, another women’s league currently riding a surge of interest. (“Jrue loves the (Ionescu) shoes and he loves Sabrina.”)
“We’ve always known that we were valuable and we always knew that the product that we put out there was top of the line, so watching the NWSL and then seeing it grow is incredible,” she said. “There’s so much more.
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“We’re going to have billion-dollar valuations. I know it and I can’t wait for that day.”
Holiday has a future vision for herself and her family too. At the end of Jrue’s current contract, with an NWSL team in Boston and a World Cup in the United States, she knows exactly what she wants life to look like: one big cherished community. Boston, frequently described as a city of neighborhoods, is an easy place for people to stay in their own little patch, whether it’s Harvard Square where Holiday lived as a Breakers rookie, or Newton where her husband went to the same ramen shop so many times the owner worriedly warned him they would be closed tomorrow, and offered him a second bowl because he wouldn’t be able to come in and eat the next day. Holiday doesn’t want to just bop around her neighborhood forever.
“I think my dream, and what Jrue and I love to do is, we want everyone together,” she said. “Everywhere that we’ve been, we’ve had such great friends outside of basketball or soccer, and we’ve had really good friends inside and the Boston Celtics are a phenomenal organization. So my dream would be to mix all the worlds. And how exciting for it to be women’s soccer too, coming to Boston. To be able to mix all of those worlds together, I think would be the dream.”
(Photo: NWSL)
