Brett, number 15, celebrates with her teammate after her first collegiate goal. (Photo by Emmett Campbell | Student Life)

Maggie Brett dribbled up the field in the fifty-fifth minute of the Washington University Bears’ season home opener, the game still scoreless. Fifteen yards away from the goal, she looked left, then right. Her teammates flanked her, but they were blocked by defenders.

Brett forged ahead. 

She cut left, right, and then rocked her weight back and kicked. The soccer ball shot in front of the keeper’s outstretched hands.

Brett’s teammates bolted towards her before the ball had settled into the back of the white netting of the goal. WashU keeper Sidney Conner sprinted all the way up the brightly lit field to join in the celebration.

It was a lot of firsts for the senior: first career goal, first time being at the bottom of the dog pile, and first time playing a game for WashU on Francis Field where she didn’t leave with a torn anterior cruciate ligament, or ACL. 

Leandre Pestcoe, her teammate and roommate, subbed her out of the game. Before she ran onto the field to replace her best friend, Pestcoe gave Brett a long hug. 

“Not everyone on the team fully understands the whole story,” Pestcoe said. “I don’t even understand the full story…but everyone on the team was so unbelievably excited. You couldn’t have asked for anything better than that.”

The goal was more than four years in the making. 

It was three torn ACLs, 28 months of rehab, plus a last-minute medical clearance. Maybe more than anything else, it was a stubborn refusal to quit the sport that she loved.  

***

When asked for a fun fact about herself, Brett tells me that she once broke her brother’s arm. Not on purpose, she clarifies; they were wrestling and, somehow, her brother landed at the bottom of the pile. What isn’t her fun fact — and maybe should be — is that she has tissues from two different cadavers in her body, one for each knee to replace her ACLs. Her only concern about having dead people’s tissues in her knees? “I hope they were athletic,” she grins. 

I realize that Brett is my next-door neighbor when I follow her down the block to the coffee shop where I’m meeting her. After three torn ligaments, three surgeries, and three bouts of rehab, I expect Brett to have a limp. She doesn’t, at least not one that I can see. All I learn is that Maggie Brett, if nothing else, is a fast walker.

Brett’s story is the comeback narrative, the persistence that paid off. She scored the first goal of the season at home to the cheers of her teammates. Every time WashU has won 1-0, Brett was the one to make the successful shot. Yet the odds were consistently against her: 23% of athletes under 25 re-rupture their ACL, a fact that a research paper from the Orthopaedic Journal of Sports Medicine said “may end the careers of college athletes”. The authors described uninjured ACLs as “surgery-naïve knees,” a suggestion that establishes two time periods in an athlete’s life: before-surgery and after.

But where does an athlete draw the line between optimism and accepting the reality of their individual situation? For Brett, her decision to play soccer again was a choice that she made knowing that she only had four months left of her collegiate soccer career.  It’s a choice that she made without the guarantee that she would even get playing time in the first place. And it’s a choice that she has a hard time articulating; despite medical retirement being the easy choice, she chose to make the comeback again and again.

Brett grew up in Chicago, and her soccer career started as just another after-school activity. Her parents put her on a team as a kid, and she stuck with the sport. She rotated around the field, trying different positions, but she gravitated towards the forward line.  

As a freshman in high school, Brett was a self-described B-team player for Loyola Academy until she got the chance to play with an older age group. The seniors were bigger, stronger, and more physical, which pushed her to improve. “It definitely changes your mindset,” she said. 

As early as her sophomore year, her high school coaches encouraged her to begin thinking ahead to collegiate soccer. She started to look at Division III programs, and WashU was in the spotlight after the team’s 2016 national title. She began peppering WashU’s head coach Jim Conlon and assistant coach Rebekah Roller with emails every time she would play. After a positive recruiting visit, Brett committed to WashU, contingent on her admission. 

The summer after her junior year of high school, Brett spent a week in St. Louis at WashU’s campus for a training camp. On the last day of camp, while playing a game of counselors vs. campers, she took one bad step. Afterward, it was described as a non-contact injury; at the time, though, it was just an odd shift of her weight. In retrospect, she remembers a small pop, but she wasn’t expecting the injury to be anything catastrophic. She thought that she had tweaked something. 

After a hospital visit in the following days, an MRI confirmed her diagnosis of a torn ACL. About to start her senior year of high school, the beginning of her collegiate soccer career was already in jeopardy. Brett called Conlon, cognizant of how this might impact her recruiting process. Without missing a beat, he told her, “You’re still coming here,” even though he knew it might mean that she would have to miss her freshman year. 

“It was the ‘we still want to have you if you want to type of thing,’ which also really solidified why I wanted to come [to WashU],” Brett said. It solidified the beginning of her relationship with her coach; without really knowing her as a player, he still had her back.

“Going back to Maggie’s character, we knew that injury wouldn’t set her back,” Conlon reflected. “I mean, it was hard, and she needed support, but she handled it with grace and determination and really attacked that rehab to get herself back on the field.” 

That summer before her senior year of high school, she had her first surgery. The doctors took a portion of her patella, making a small incision and removing the torn ACL. The new ligament was fixed to the bone with screws to hold it in place while the suture healed. Then, a new graft had to integrate itself with her original knee.

She was at home in Chicago, which made the post-surgery period easier for her. After spending a few weeks on crutches, she started doing physical therapy for her knee, relying on her support system at home. The first three weeks alone were spent trying to bend and straighten her knee straight — “the most painful thing ever,” she described. “It was like nails on a chalkboard.”

Nine months later, Brett was cleared in time to play in time for her last season of high school soccer. But in a midseason game with her team, she collided with another player while running downfield and tumbled onto the turf. This time, she knew right away what had happened — she knew what a tear felt like. Once again, she went to the doctor, and after another MRI, the doctors confirmed that she had torn the same knee again. Just months after building up strength and confidence, one tumbling crash destroyed nine months of building strength and muscle.  This time, there was no uncertainty about the timeline: she would definitively not be able to play her freshman year of collegiate soccer. 

Statistics on ACL injuries raise the question of whether Brett should have been back on the pitch at all. Teenagers are vulnerable to re-injury, and athletes with college prospects face the added pressure of securing — and keeping — their place on their college team, along with the social elements that come with being part of the group. But they also face heightened risks. Athletes younger than twenty years who returned to sports within a year of an ACL injury were fifteen times more likely than uninjured players to suffer a second ACL tear, according to a study from orthopedic surgeons Timothy Hewett and Christian Nagelli. 

But at the time, Brett was medically cleared to return to play, a goal she had been working towards for nine months.  The repeat injury she described as a natural risk, really a freak contact accident.

The high school injury immediately defined her rookie season at WashU.  Once practice started, she sat on the sidelines for the entire season. She got to practice an hour and a half early to do her own physical therapy sessions before watching her teammates on the field. “There are definitely moments where you’re sick of shagging balls, or you’re just like, ‘I want to be in there so bad,’ but it comes in waves,” she said. 

I asked Brett’s best friend and current roommate, Pestcoe, about her first impression of Brett. She paused a little before answering. “So honestly, we weren’t really friends freshman year,” she told me, and then she trailed off. “Obviously, if you’re injured, you don’t travel. So, she wasn’t really playing, so we weren’t really…Yeah.” Even while on the roster of a close-knit team who spent upwards of thirty hours together a week during the season, as a freshman, Brett never got the opportunity to play with her team. 

Instead, the two became friends in the offseason. On Mardi Gras, Pestcoe, Brett, and their friends never made it to the downtown parade. They spent the day in their room together, Pestcoe said, and it was the first time they spent together outside of a soccer setting. Six months later, as COVID-19 shut down the sport that they dreamed about playing, they became roommates. 

Francis Field held a strange curse for Brett, as the site out of two out of three of her ACL tears.

She walked onto the field on September 11, 2021, as a junior, prepared to play her first game on the gritty turf field. She had put hours of training in front of the same concrete stands and old Olympic concrete press box. Still, this was her first time in the number fifteen jersey while playing at home.

Brett’s game is about speed. “She’s the fastest person on the field at any time. Like, that’s just what’s gonna happen,” Pestcoe said. But five minutes into the game, Brett charged towards the goal. She cut left, and then touched to the right. The goal was wide open. Then, she collapsed.

“I knew right away, because I knew what it felt like. Everyone’s like, ‘You don’t know until you know.’ I was like, ‘I knew’,” Brett said.

The athletic trainers attempted to have her jog around anyways. Brett sat through 85 minutes of the game on the sidelines before she went to the hospital and an MRI confirmed what she already knew. 

“Obviously, you go home and then you cry,” she said. “But it was like one of those things where I was just like, ‘Yeah, right now, if I can be happy and it’s contagious, then their energy will fuel me.’”

The results came back the next week, confirmation of the tear that Brett already suspected. The next weekend was Brett’s twenty-first birthday. While her friends departed for a game in Memphis, Tennessee, Brett spent her birthday weekend sitting in her apartment away from her friends combating a nightmare injury. 

The third rehab was the hardest. Her mom came down and helped for a week, and then Brett was on her own to get to her appointments. The logistics were a challenge because she couldn’t drive to the physical therapy buildings in the Central West End, unable to use her foot to drive. She couldn’t use the metro because she couldn’t get down the steps. 

Brett had to make a decision about whether she wanted to try to play soccer for one more season. Statistically, she knew she had a much higher chance of re-injury, and the rehab was so mentally challenging that her parents couldn’t help but be protective. She didn’t want to go through it again to have it not pay off. Plus, there were complicating factors. She was planning on going abroad to Madrid during the spring semester, and she was worried about her mobility in a foreign country.

“When she was in a team setting, you wouldn’t know that this was the worst thing that could have happened to her,” Pestcoe said. “Very much a team first attitude. But like, obviously at home, it was a tough semester.”

She left for Spain weeks after surgery. She did her hour-long rehab program in a hostel in Seville and then tromped all over the city. She spent a weekend in London, where she got to go to Wembley Stadium, and she visited Valencia with some friends. Over the summer, she talked with her coach, parents, and doctors about what her return to soccer might look like.

“I think an athlete is always all-in on competition. And Maggie’s no different. I think the conversations Maggie and I had were about being intelligent about making sure she was truly healthy, making sure she was ready from a physical standpoint as well as the mental standpoint,” Conlon said.

Still, it wasn’t a clear cut decision for the rising senior. She didn’t know if she would be disappointed again — if all the work that she put in would ultimately be validated. She wasn’t sure if her knees would hold up under the stress of ninety minute games on match day.

“I think that was kind of a big thing: like, is this even worth it?” Pestcoe said. “I know she was thinking about it…early in the summer, we were talking, and she said, ‘Yeah, I don’t know, yet. We’re still working.’”

Over the summer, Brett started to get into her practice routine, and she slowly joined the preseason workouts. But even after she returned to practice, returning for gameday was never guaranteed. The day before preseason, Brett’s doctor called her and said she wouldn’t be cleared for two months.

“It was a devastating phone call,” Brett said. “I was like, I’m going to be retired by the time they clear me.” 

Brett continued to work in the weight room, gaining strength and mobility. She had one final hurdle before she could return to the pitch, a return-to-play test, which she had difficulty scheduling. Her doctors, she said, “told me you’re not gonna pass this test if you take it right now. Like, straight up, you’re not gonna pass it.”

But just days before her first game, she got the green light to play in the season opener. Before texting her parents, she texted Conlon. “I almost crashed my car,” she remembers him saying. “What do you mean you passed it?” 

“I was elated for her,” Conlon said. “You know, when she had done all this work, continued to try and put in all this time. I was just elated for her that she would have the opportunity to play the game she loves with her teammates.”

She plays with a big black knee brace that reaches from her upper thigh to her shin. The straps aren’t delicate—they’re thick and abrasive, and they were the first thing I fixated on when I saw her bolt down the field.

“She wanted two [braces, one on each leg],” Pestcoe said. “And her doctors were like, ‘No. You can’t.’”

And despite it being her first complete collegiate season, Brett has been a weapon for a team that has struggled to get goals in the back of the net. Through the first nine games, WashU only scored seven goals, and Brett had the last touch on five of them.

“As you can probably see from our stats, we’re not scoring that many goals — our forwards aren’t really converting, but somehow, when she gets in the game, she finds the ball,” Pestcoe said. “With everything that she’s gone through, she could have so many excuses, but she’s the best player on the field right now.”

 This season, Brett’s really trying to figure things out for herself. She had as much experience in collegiate soccer as a freshman. Before this season, she’d never been able to prove that she had what it took to play at the collegiate level.

For the team, though, there’s no upperclassman intimidation factor with Brett. The team has seen the adversity she’s overcome, and they respect her even more for it. “She has that respect, of a person before a soccer player…I think her leadership style is just, like, people respect the shit out of her. What she says goes.”

When I ask Pestcoe about a core Maggie Brett memory, though, it’s not on the soccer pitch. Instead, Pestcoe tells me that about a week after her third surgery, she and Brett went to a Luke Combs concert. They had to trek all the way to the top of the top row of seats in the massive hockey arena. Brett hobbled up the stairs on one crutch; the girls were dressed for the concert, but Brett was also wearing her big knee brace. After the concert, they traversed back down all the stairs and walked three blocks east to a restaurant and music venue. There, Pestcoe reported, Brett was “the life of the party.” At one point, she started passing her crutch around, and her friends could see it bobbing among the crowd among the bright neon lights. 

 “I see the crutch over there,” Pestcoe said. “She’s over here. I was like, hello. The next morning, she wakes up, and she’s like, ‘Oh my god, it hurts so bad.’ I was like, ‘I wonder why.’”

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