On a cold winter night in Ketchum, Idaho, Chicago Stars midfielder Bea Franklin was pulling off a different sort of physical feat than what she usually does on the soccer field. Under the eyes of taxidermied animals at the Pioneer Saloon, she deftly balanced martinis as a cocktail waitress, wearing cowgirl boots and ensuring the olives didn’t drip when she walked down stairs.
Franklin did not take a second job as a cocktail waitress in a Rocky Mountain ski resort town not out of necessity, but as a way to think about more than just the sport that has dominated much of her life.
“It was just so much fun, and a really great way to kind of disconnect from soccer,” Franklin said.
Hardly half a decade ago, a player like Franklin, a 25-year-old in her third pro season, might have needed a job like this just to get by.
Five years ago this summer, NWSL players organized the “No More Side Hustles” campaign to highlight the league’s low pay and the need for players to get second jobs while playing, training and working as full-time professional athletes.
At the time, a third of the NWSL Players Association’s members made the league minimum salary of $22,000; 75% made $31,000 or less. Jessica McDonald, a World Cup winner, worked at Amazon packing boxes for 10 hours a day while running training sessions for young players at night. Kristen Hamilton, a three-time league champion, drove for DoorDash. Others cleaned homes, worked as receptionists or mopped floors.
It spoke to a major problem that the league has, by and large, addressed successfully. The NWSLPA agreed to its first collective bargaining agreement with the league in 2022. Under the current CBA, reached in 2024, the minimum salary for players is $50,500 for the 2026 season – nearly the same amount as the maximum in 2021 ($52,500).
Now, with the security of a living wage, players are free to take on academic, professional and entrepreneurial pursuits. Not because they have to, but because they want to.
Washington Spirit defender Gabrielle Carle is working on becoming a doctor after her playing career wraps. She said she briefly considered doing both until realizing that was too ambitious, even for her.
“I was like, ‘Oh, this is gonna be complicated,’” Carle said. “These two don’t really work together.”
Nevertheless, Carle was not deterred. During the 2025 season, a career year for the full-back from Quebec, she studied during the season for the MCAT and then took the exam in January. The 27-year-old said she passed the score she hoped to reach and plans to take advantage of the three-year window to use the score in a medical school application.
“I’m going to be 30 years old. I can decide if that’s a good time for me to retire or if I want to keep going. But if I do decide to move on with my career and retire from soccer, then I have that score and I can immediately move on to the next part of my life,” Carle said.
Even with a few years between a decision about medical school, Carle has relished the chance to do more than just play soccer and keep herself in what she dubbed her “smart mode”. She is applying for positions where she can conduct sports medicine research.
Carle is not the only player to juggle scouting reports with schoolbooks. Her Washington Spirit teammate, Lucia Di Guglielmo, has a master’s degree in industrial chemistry. In England, Chelsea captain Erin Cuthbert has earned her MBA, while Manchester United goalkeeper Phallon Tullis-Joyce put her degree in marine biology to use by hosting students for workshops at a local zoo.
This year, the NWSL and Syracuse University launched a partnership that allows players to pursue online degrees and certificates in programs ranging from sports analytics and cybersecurity to business management and accounting.
Franklin, who studied finance at the University of Arkansas, took a job last season at Bank of America as a wealth management analyst on afternoons after training and on her off days and helping manage the investments of some extremely wealthy clients. She felt that the skills she learned are helpful for someone like her, even if, as she readily concedes, she does not fall into that income bracket.
“It puts some real-world application into how people get credit and actually going through banking process or, even just seeing the nitty-gritty of opening a bank account on the other side,” Franklin said. “And now, when I do it again, I’ll have a bit more patience for the person on the other end of the phone, because that was me sometimes.”
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Several players have gone further by starting businesses of their own. This summer, two NWSL players on the Canadian national team launched businesses: Chicago forward Jordyn Huitema started Jordyskin, a skincare line, and Denver Summit full-back Janine Sonis created 90Brew, a specialty coffee brand.
Coffee has been a frequent jumping-off point for soccer players looking to go entrepreneurial: Cuthbert has a coffee brand called Ruby Alba; England legend Jill Scott created Boxx2Boxx coffee shop in Manchester; and a group of Kansas City Current teammates opened Pitchside Coffee.
Sonis launched her business in the middle of a career year on the field, where she has scored nine goals for the Summit in their expansion season.
Earlier this month, 90Brew started taking its first orders. Sonis said it was part of a tumultuous 18-month process tied to a lingering problem early in her pro soccer career.
“I actually started drinking coffee because, funny enough, I couldn’t stay awake,” Sonis said.
A self-described coffee fanatic, Sonis followed the lead of her husband Ethan, who launched an athletic training business in 2018. A joking conversation with a friend after the 2024 season became serious when her husband asked her why she would not just go for it and start the business.
Sonis was quick to credit the support network she has had in starting the business. In a turn from the days when teams were indifferent or even hostile to players in the years before the league instituted major reforms, she said that her club has been immensely supportive. It doesn’t hurt that, independently of each other, the Summit and 90Brew share similar shades of green.
“We picked those colors before the logo for the Summit had come out, which is really funny and just really kind of validated what we were doing,” she said. “I remember the moment that the logo came out for the Summit and I’m like, ‘You’ve gotta be kidding me.’”
The 32-year-old Sonis is a full decade removed from her NWSL debut. She knew the darker days of side hustles and second jobs. For her, it is a full-circle moment, and a sign of just how far the league has come.
“Even really not that far in the past, which is crazy that people had to have two jobs and their NWSL salaries weren’t supporting them enough not to have to do something else,” she said. “And now here I am being able to support myself in multiple ventures because of the direction that the game has moved in.”
