'Call Her Daddy' Host Alex Cooper Used to Play Soccer, but Why Did She Quit?

Playing soccer can be lucrative, but so can starting one of the world's biggest podcasts. Alex Cooper went on that second path when she launched Call Her Daddy, which has become a genuine phenomenon. When she was in college, though, Alex played Division I soccer.

Obviously, she left soccer largely in her past, but many fans want to know why she decided to stop playing the sport. That story is relatively complicated, but here's what we know.

There are a number of factors that might have played a role in Alex's decision. Even many Division I soccer players discover that they aren't quite talented enough to make it as a professional, and while women's soccer is ascendant, it's not the kind of sport that makes you tons and tons of money. It's possible, then, that Alex just realized that she had reached the ceiling of her abilities with the sport in college.

In an interview with Cosmopolitan, though, Alex explained that her experience in college had also been a traumatic one. Alex didn't go into specifics, but said that she had gone through something with her college coach.

“With this specific thing, it’s so personal to me and it took such a toll on my mental health,” she explained. “Recently, I reconnected with a lot of the people that I played soccer with who were around when things were happening, and it’s been pretty cathartic."

“I met up with one of my teammates in Santa Monica who I hadn’t seen since we graduated — we didn’t even say hi, we just both started crying. There’s another woman that went through it with me, and we finally saw each other recently and it’s just wild to talk about it together," she continued. She also said that some of the other women on the team had the same "scars" she did, and said that she would eventually talk about it on the podcast.

“I will definitely discuss it on the podcast. I just don’t know when,” she explained.“This one topic just sits in a drawer in my brain, and it’s slightly opened now and I know it’s there, but I’m not going to force myself to go there until I’m like, ‘All right, I’m really ready.'”

She added, though, that she won't be discussing the topic in question through a purely personal lens.

“It’s not just going to be about what happened to me — it’s going to be about rallying other women together," she said. Alex left the team prior to the beginning of her senior year, but she didn't say for sure whether what happened to her was the reason why. It seems likely, though, that she felt she couldn't be around this coach anymore, for whatever reason.

We might not know exactly what happened to Alex, but what seems clear is that she left the team because of her coach. Hopefully, one day she'll be able to talk in more detail about why.