Ashlyn Harris Opens Up About The “Really Dark” Side Of Her College Sports Experience

Ashlyn Harris, the two-time FIFA Women’s World Cup champion and former U.S. Women’s National Team goalkeeper, recently opened up about a deeply personal chapter of her life: her struggle with Adderall addiction during her college years.

In a raw and revealing interview on the Question Everything with Danielle Robay podcast, Harris detailed the toll addiction took on her body, mind, and spirit while she was a student-athlete at the University of North Carolina.

“I was getting really heavily addicted to Adderall and misusing it,” Harris admitted. “I was taking it all the time. I would go days without sleeping. It was wild. I felt like I was gonna give myself a heart attack. I was crushing it. I was snorting it. It was so problematic.”

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What began as a way to cope with the intense pressure of athletics and manage repeated injuries—including ACL and labrum tears—spiraled into a dangerous habit. But Harris also acknowledged that her substance misuse wasn’t just about pain management; it was tangled up in the toxic body image standards often imposed on women athletes.

“Then I was like, ‘Oh, it makes me skinny. It curbs my appetite.’ It was just a toxic, toxic time for me,” she said. “It was the first time that I started to have my character tested because I started to get injured.”

Behind the scenes of her athletic success, Harris was sinking. But not everyone turned a blind eye. Her college coach, Anson Dorrance, proved to be a major source of support. Instead of punishment, he offered her perspective—and books.

“It got really, really dark and I had to make some serious adjustments,” she said. “And Anson would have me read books.” One of those books, Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, became a turning point. “It’s about suffering and reframing it, and it changed my life.”

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Now 39, Harris has stepped away from professional soccer, but her journey of healing continues—this time as a mom to two young children, Sloane and Ocean, whom she shares with ex-wife and fellow soccer icon Ali Krieger. “I have a lot of trauma in my life and I have a lot of scars,” she shared. “I do not want to project and place that on my children. When you become a mom and you’re molding young humans, your perspective in life changes. You have to get your s–t together because they see and hear everything.”

Harris speaks openly now about the responsibility she feels—not just as a parent, but as a queer woman in the spotlight.

“I just want to give my kids the best tools to be whoever they want to be,” she explained. “But at the core of them, they need to be good people. They have to be good people. How they serve their community, how they show up for their friends—that matters.”

And as she’s proving, it’s never too late to rewrite the narrative.

Here’s the full podcast episode: