At 1 p.m. on Sunday, Trinity Rodman was starting at forward for the Washington Spirit at Audi Field. A few hours later she was inside Arthur Ashe Stadium in Queens, wearing a shirt with Ben Shelton’s face on it, watching the last games of the US Open men’s final. She had played most of a professional soccer match, left the stadium, covered 225 miles, and walked in while her boyfriend was losing the biggest match of his life.
“She kind of showed up as I was losing,” Shelton said afterward, “which for her probably sucked.”
That sentence is the whole story, and it is a better story than the outfit.
Two calendars that were never supposed to fit
The US Open lands in the back half of the NWSL season, and the Spirit are not coasting. They sit second in the table on 43 points, five behind Gotham, with a playoff seed still to settle. Rodman is the reason a lot of that is true: 10 goals and 6 assists in 24 starts this year, and the league’s Player of the Month in the summer. She is 24, an Olympic gold medalist, and arguably the most watchable attacker in American women’s soccer. None of that comes with a lighter training week.
Shelton, meanwhile, was having the tournament of his career in New York. Rodman’s problem was that every big night of his fell on top of hers.
The week, in order
Sunday, September 6. The Spirit are in Portland, on the other side of the country, and win 2-1 at Providence Park. Rodman starts and sets up a goal.
Tuesday night into Wednesday morning. Shelton plays the defending champion, Carlos Alcaraz, in the quarterfinal. It becomes an all-time match: 6-7, 6-1, 6-3, 1-6, 7-6 (10-6) over four hours and 28 minutes, his first win over Alcaraz in three tries, and the latest finish in the history of the US Open. The final point lands at 3:33 a.m. Rodman is in the stands for all of it. Two days earlier she had been on a flight home from Oregon.
Friday. The semifinal, against Frances Tiafoe. Shelton drops the first set and wins the next three, 4-6, 6-3, 6-3, 7-5, with 20 aces. It is the first Grand Slam semifinal ever contested by two Black American men, and Shelton becomes the first Black American man in a US Open final since Arthur Ashe in 1972. No American man has won a major since Andy Roddick in 2003, and he is one match from ending it.
Sunday, September 13. Both of their days. The Spirit host Boston Legacy FC at 1 p.m. in Washington. The final at Flushing Meadows starts an hour later. She cannot be at both, so she does what she is paid to do first: she starts, gets behind the Boston back line early, and creates chances that do not go in. The game stays 0-0 until the 81st minute and then falls apart, three Boston goals in the last nine, a 3-0 loss that hurt the Spirit’s afternoon a lot more than any tennis result was going to.
Then she left. Washington to New York is a short flight and a long car ride, and by the time she reached Ashe, the top seed, Alexander Zverev, was closing out a 6-3, 7-6 (2), 5-7, 6-2 win. She got there for the end. The cameras found her, emotional, during the trophy ceremony. Zverev found her too, during his speech: “Trinity, I thought you have a game today. Well done to you as well.”
Why the internet noticed
Part of it was the wardrobe. For Shelton’s second-round match she wore a black shirt that said “I love my boyfriend,” which went exactly as viral as you would expect. For the final it was his face. That is the fun, shareable layer, and there is nothing wrong with it.
The layer under it is the one worth writing about. Two athletes at the top of their sports, in season at the same time, in different cities, and one of them keeps showing up for the other without missing her own work. She did not skip a game. She played, then she went.
Shelton has been unusually direct about what that means to him. “Having a partner, a girlfriend, who understands all the same things, knows when to support, what to say in tough moments, is selfless enough to be there for me in my moments and actually enjoy my big moments and vice versa, has been really cool,” he said during the tournament. He also said this: “Her path to being a professional athlete and being one of the best soccer players in the world hasn’t been easy, and she’s dealt with more adversity than me.”
He is right about that, and it is the part of Rodman’s story that gets flattened whenever the coverage is only about who she is dating. She grew up without her famous father in the house and without much money, left college without playing a game to turn pro at 18, and was a league champion and Rookie of the Year at 19. We wrote earlier this year about what the game gives a kid who needs somewhere to put everything. Rodman is what that looks like at the finish line.
What happens next for both of them
Shelton goes home without the trophy but with the tournament that changed how people see him. Rodman goes back to a team that just lost at home and has a playoff seed to protect. The Spirit are at Chicago on Sunday, September 20 at 5 p.m. ET on ESPN, and the regular season is winding down toward the playoffs.
If you are new to the NWSL and this is the story that got you curious, that is a good place to start. Watch the No. 2 in the green and pink. She is worth the flight.
