Mary (McVeigh) Connor and The Power Of Soccer
By Melissa Karen Sances | Photos by Nikki Gardner Photography
Published in Northampton Living August 2025
After Brandi Chastain launched the penalty kick that won the 1999 Women’s World Cup at the Rose Bowl in Los Angeles, California, the 31-year-old ripped off her jersey and fell to her knees. In the iconic photo that ended up on the cover of three magazines – Sports Illustrated, Time, and Newsweek – her fists are clenched, and her mouth is wide open like a window, caught somewhere between a laugh and a scream.
In Northampton, Massachusetts, a 17-year-old Mary McVeigh understood Chastain’s complicated joy, because she had felt it herself. As a female soccer player who grew up in the 1980s, she had felt both unstoppable and invisible, navigating a field exclusive to men and boys, even besting them, only to be reminded that there was always another pitch where she’d have to prove herself.
When Mary was in the second and third grades, her father, who taught German at Smith College and rotated as lead of the department’s study abroad program, moved her family to Hamburg, Germany. She couldn’t speak the language at first, but in a soccer-obsessed country, she began to fall in love with the sport. At recess, her brother convinced the boys to let her play soccer with them, and her dad talked her onto a boys’ club team, as there were no options for girls her age. “I look back at that as such an important moment in understanding how soccer can help kids feel a sense of belonging,” says Mary, now a retired professional soccer player and the executive director of Common Goal. (Today Mary is married to Annie Connor and shares her last name.) “In retrospect, it was my first memorable experience of inequality. If it wasn’t for my dad’s advocacy, I would have been sidelined.”
Upon the family’s return to the States, Mary discovered that the Northampton Soccer Club didn’t have a girls’ traveling team for her age group. Her dad stepped up again, scouting the recreational league for parents who had likeminded daughters. Mary excelled at soccer and academics through high school, where she was the valedictorian of her class.
By the time Brandi Chastain opened up the world to women’s soccer, Mary was reaping the benefits.
“I graduated amidst all of this momentum for women’s college soccer and during that iconic moment that launched a women’s professional league in the U.S.,” she says. “I didn’t pick a college because of the possibility of playing professionally, yet all of a sudden there was this new pathway.”
The midfielder blazed her way through Dartmouth College and was the seventh pick overall in the first round of the 2003 Women’s United Soccer Association, where she went to the Philadelphia Charge. “I grew up in the ‘90s watching these athletes and suddenly I’m playing with and against them, my heroes, I’m trying to win the ball for them,” she says. “Looking at where women’s soccer is now, I feel like I was part of something special.”
Unfortunately, the pro league was shut down after just three years because it wasn’t generating enough revenue. (It took the professional men’s league, Major League Soccer, 16 years for the majority of clubs to become profitable). It was both a wake-up call and the echo of a familiar story: “Equality is really fragile.”
Mary enrolled in graduate school at Lehigh University, where she studied sociology; specifically, the sociology of sport and “what it means to a person, to a community, to a country.” She soon learned about Soccer Without Borders, which a fellow student imagined as using soccer as a vehicle for positive change in the lives of underserved youth. Joining forces, they built what is now a global organization serving 8,000 youth regularly across three continents. Mary served for 16 years as the organization’s co-founder and first executive director.
When Soccer Without Borders was invited to start a girls’ soccer program in Granada, Nicaragua in 2008, Mary realized that she was building on the momentum that Chastain and others like her had started. At the same time, she was a little girl again, in a new country where she didn’t speak Spanish but was already fluent in a universal language. “I would go out to a field with a soccer ball and start juggling, and people would come,” she says.
A generation of women grew up under her watch and carry forward the mission of Soccer Without Borders. Since 2024, Mary has helmed Common Goal USA (common-goal.org), the North American branch of the largest global network devoted to using soccer as a force for good in the world, where she supports 194 organizations – including Soccer Without Borders – that span 104 countries.
Still, there is always work to be done, and Mary sees soccer as a game changer. The Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) estimates that over four billion people will watch the 2026 Men’s World Cup, slated to take place in the United States for the first time since 1994. “What would the world be like if we could take this thing that so many have made a part of their lives and use it to address things like gender inequality?” she asks. “Because it can. Soccer is not about winning World Cups. To a person, especially to a young person, it’s a place to find belonging, a space to connect across differences, and a way to express yourself, even without words.”
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