Haley Carter Will Never Play It Safe
From the Marine Corps to the NWSL, she’s made a habit of choosing the harder road—even when it meant walking away from a championship team.
Everyone keeps saying women’s sports are having a moment. But it’s more than that. On and off the court, women’s sports are changing culture, conversations, and even our personal style. For Marie Claire’s Women in Sports series, we talk to the athletes, executives, and industry vets who are at the top of their game.
In Exit Interview, Marie Claire has a candid conversation with someone who’s left their job. We learn all about their experience—both the good and the bad—plus why they decided to leave and what life looks like on the other side.
Haley Carter left the Orlando Pride last year after building the club from a perennial underdog into National Women's Soccer League (NWSL) champions. Before that, Carter served as a Marine Corps officer, deployed to Iraq, played professionally in the NWSL, coached the Afghan Women’s National Team, and helped evacuate over a hundred people from Kabul when the city fell in 2021. She’s now president of soccer operations for the Washington Spirit, where she’s working to do something no women’s professional soccer team has done: break even.
For our series Exit Interview, Carter talks about building a championship system, the values she refuses to compromise on, and why she thinks the women’s game has moved well past “having a moment.”
You’ve been a Marine, a lawyer, an MBA, a player, a coach, and now a club president. How does all of that fit together?
I think when some people lay out my resumé, oftentimes they will sort of treat soccer as this surprise at the end. But I think they have it a bit backwards. Soccer has been a constant in my life and the rest is just what I bring to it. With my career, it’s really the same job in different settings and a different uniform. For 20 years, I’ve been building teams that perform under pressure. The Marine Corps taught me how to plan under uncertainty, how to build leaders. My experience in law taught me how to do deals and how to structure contracts and how risk actually works. My business experience and my MBA taught me the economics of sports. And then playing and coaching taught me what it looks and feels like from inside the locker room.
You built the Orlando Pride into champions. What did that take?
Building a system. I think external opinions and viewpoints of what happens behind the scenes can tend to isolate things. They’ll think, “Oh, well, you built a strong roster, or you had a clear identity in how you wanted to play, or you created a performance environment where players could succeed.” The reality is it wasn’t just one thing. It’s about creating a system that has a clear identity, has disciplined recruitment, and has a roster that’s constructed to a plan instead of just this wishlist. The emphasis in Orlando was: Can we get the culture right? Can we get the performance environment right? Could we start to develop this codified game model, plan, and roster construction strategy that allowed us to be successful not just in one season but in multiple seasons?
I know what it costs when a room isn’t built for you. I know how much talent gets missed when it stays that way. So my job is to not be an exception—to make sure I’m not the last one.
In 2021, you helped evacuate over a hundred people from Kabul, including members of the Afghan women’s team you’d coached. What did you learn from that experience?
Feeling accountable for empowering these women, and the work that we did to empower them and give them opportunities, is the very work that’s then going to threaten their lives—that is tough to struggle with. But I would say that coordinating the evacuation of those players and staff—and I will never offer it as a career highlight because I think it belongs to them and not to me—but it is the clearest answer for why I believe this work matters. We can’t forget that sport is what gave those women a team and a flag and opportunity, but it’s also what made them targets. Perspective is a hell of a drug, and being able to offer that to the people that I work with, to the athletes that I work with day in and day out, to remind them of what a privilege it is for us to get to wake up and do this every day, is truly incredible.
You’d just built a championship team in Orlando. What pulled you to Washington?
Michele Kang [Washington Spirit owner] is a force. The opportunity to work for Michele and her organization and her commitment to investing in women and women’s professional sports—not as this philanthropic effort or moral high ground to stand on, but treating it as the business it is—is exciting to me. Kynisca, our parent organization, is the first multi-team global organization built specifically around female athletes instead of just borrowing things from the men’s game. One of our big goals is to be the first National Women’s Soccer League team to break even and to run a sustainable business. I love that, because I appreciate that we’re talking about financial discipline and precision and transfer economics and these really advanced concepts in the women’s game. We’ve been asking for years to be treated as professionals, and a lot of things come with that. It’s just an opportunity I couldn’t pass up.
Our friendships remain, and I think that’s really important, and I think it’s something that’s underrated and we don’t talk enough about when we talk about successful women.
What’s the hardest part of being a woman in sports leadership right now
I’ve spent a lot of my career being the only woman in the room, whether it was in the Marine Corps, whether it was in corporate America, or here in sports. That experience shapes how I build teams now. I know what it costs when a room isn’t built for you. I know how much talent gets missed when it stays that way. So my job is to not be an exception—to make sure I’m not the last one. The biggest challenge that I see is other individuals not necessarily thinking that way. I get asked frequently, often by men: “We posted this position but no women applied for it. Where are all the women at?” Well, they’re everywhere. You have to go look for them, you have to do the work. I think the biggest challenge for me is convincing the stakeholders that are making hiring decisions to do the work to find qualified women, because they are plentiful—and then to make the investment in them once they give them the opportunity, so that we’re ensuring that we’re developing people as much as giving them opportunities.
Who do you lean on?
I have a village. I have a village of women in the game. I’ve got Lesle Gallimore, she’s the general manager in Seattle for the Reign. Amanda Vandervort, she’s the president of GameBridge Super League. Lisa Cole, she’s an assistant coach with the U.S. Women’s National Team, longtime coach, has coached internationally in developing member associations as well and brings a lot to the table in terms of international experience and commitment to values and being very serious about that. Missy Price, who works at US Club Soccer. And Yolanda Thomas is an assistant coach in Orlando. It sounds like a large circle, but it really isn’t—it’s quite tight.
It’s been hard to get into certain rooms because of that, but the benefit of sticking to my principles and sticking to my values has come through tenfold in other ways.
What does that village do for you?
Jobs come and go, especially in women’s sports and especially at the highest level. I can get fired any time, and most of my friends have been fired at one point or another. We’ve found that it doesn’t matter what job we’re in—there will be times when we’re opponents, there will be times when we’re in adversarial positions, there will be times when we’re for interests that aren’t necessarily aligned. But our friendships remain, and I think that’s really important, and I think it’s something that’s underrated and we don’t talk enough about when we talk about successful women. There’s very few women in the world that can relate and understand what you’re going through in this industry. Having that maturity and the perspective to be able to call and know who to lean on and when to lean on them and who to embrace when you need to bring them in and help them out, I think is really important.
What are you proudest of?
Being committed to my values and leaning into those two values of service and reliability—and, even when it’s hard, sticking to that. I have a 14-year-old son and I know how much he values women athletes and women in business and women in the law, and it’s come from the work and the opportunities that I’ve had and my dedication to my values. Those values dictate how I lead and how I make decisions, even when things get hard, like when we were navigating the sexual assault and sexual harassment claims with the Afghan Football Federation with FIFA and being adversarial with the world’s governing body. Standing for the things that are right and doing it in uncomfortable ways and vocally, and sometimes being a bit outspoken and being a bit of a pariah and somewhat polarizing figure—I think I’m most proud of that. It’s been hard to get into certain rooms because of that, but the benefit of sticking to my principles and sticking to my values has come through tenfold in other ways.
Any advice you’d give your younger self—or any woman coming up behind you?
Say yes to everything that comes your way because that is what is going to open doors and opportunities, and feel really good about that. But when you get to your 40s, no is a full sentence. And feel really good about that too. Be excellent at your craft, not just present in the conversation, and be unapologetic about being excellent in your craft. Know your numbers, know your contracts, know your operations—be the person who can actually run the damn thing, and then bring people with you. I’ve had doors open for me because of other women, and I take the job of opening them for the next person just as seriously as anything else that I do. The goal should never be to be the woman who made it, but to leave a path that is wider than when you found it. And for me, that’s the part I care about the most.
