Alex Cooper is certainly a polarizing figure. She shot to fame and fortune as the host of the podcast Call Her Daddy talking candidly - and unashamedly crassly - about sex from a female perspective. This past March, the NWSL announced a partnership with Cooper’s Unwell. On June 10, Hulu released a documentary about her. In it in she discloses publicly for the first time about the sexual harassment she faced from her coach, Nancy Feldman, while playing soccer for Boston University.   

The documentary is in two parts, and the last fifteen minutes or so of part one is when Cooper, her parents, and a BU teammate (named Alex Schlobohm) talk about BU and Nancy Feldman. Cooper starts by saying that one of the draws of BU for her was that the coach was a woman and her parents concur, then they go into how this female coach abused her power. Cooper says her sophomore year is when her relationship with Feldman really shifted out of bounds with Feldman fixating on her and explains how Feldman would invasively asked about her romantic life, make inappropriate comments about her body, and contrive ways to be alone with her.

One example Cooper gives is Feldman calling her into a private meeting to ask if she had sex the previous night. Cooper says whenever she would try to resist the harassment, Feldman would tell her that there could be consequences. One such consequence was in the penultimate game she ever played for BU. The team was playing in the NCAA tournament and Feldman wouldn't play Cooper. After relenting and subbing Cooper in, she scored the tying goal in the 78th minute (the only goal she scored at BU) and the team went on to win the game in overtime. 

Cooper discusses the power coaches have over players, not just in whether an athlete sees the field, but how college coaches decide whether athletes keep their scholarships. Cooper and Schlobohm each recount how they were unable to finish their college soccer careers but each were allowed to keep their scholarships - which is a huge red flag. In Schlobohm's case, Feldman called her into a meeting and kicked her off the team without warning. Feldman then brought Cooper in the next day and told her that she could no longer live with or even see Schlobohm and that Feldman would be choosing her new roommate. 

The clip that has been making the rounds is of Cooper recounting a lawyer's discussion with her and her parents, saying that he said, "You could absolutely sue this woman. This is full sexual harassment, but if I am going to be real with you, they will drag this on for years and this will be your life. You're the girl that's suing the coach and they will do everything to protect this woman." BU did just that. Cooper and her parents went to the athletic director, Drew Marrochello who still holds the position (he isn't named in the documentary but Cooper named him in an Instagram post), and they told him about the sexual harassment she had endured. Cooper's mom (who is a psychologist) had hand written notes about the details her daughter had told her in real time and brought them to the meeting with Marrochello. Marrochello had no interest in reading the notes, instead Cooper was asked what she wanted. Cooper wanted to play her senior year, but could not play for Feldman. She was told that Feldman would not be fired, but that she could keep her scholarship, and that was that. Cooper was forced into walking away and did not play her senior year. 

Part one of the documentary ends with Cooper going back to the Boston University soccer field for the first time since she stopped playing. Watching her step onto the field while trying and failing to hold back tears is heartbreaking (especially after already seeing Schlobohm crying while telling her story). In voice over, Cooper says, "I don't think anyone could have prepared me for the lasting effects that came from this experience. [Feldman] turned something that I loved so much into something extremely painful. When I look back at that time in my life, I was sacred, hopeless, I had no resources, and no options, and the minute I left that campus I was so determined to find a way where no one could ever silence me again." This makes it all the more jarring when six minutes into part two of the documentary Dave Portnoy shows up to discuss Call Her Daddy’s time being under the Barstool Sports umbrella. Barstool is synonymous with misogyny and racism. Portnoy (its founder) has been accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women. He sued Business Insider for defamation for publishing two articles detailing the accusations, but the suit was dismissed.  

The partnership between Alex Cooper and the NWSL has been roundly criticized on social media by the league’s most fervent fans in part due to Cooper’s Barstool past and her unwillingness to distance herself from the company and its founder. Is it fair criticism, though, when coming from fans of the NWSL? Or is it self-righteous indignation from people who continue to support a league that has in the past and to this day continues to cover up the abuse of its players and staff? The same fans also were more outraged by the league and Cooper launching Unwell FC, which is billed as a fan hype group, due to their (somewhat justifiable) territorial feelings that it is a slap in the face to the league's organically built supporter groups. However, the majority of people who show up to watch games are not in supporter groups, and it is doubtful that there is major - if any - overlap with the people who would take part in Unwell FC and the people who take part in supporter groups. The league should have been able to deduce in advance that Unwell FC would be met with disapproval from this subsection, but it is doubtful that it would have stopped the league from going forward with it. Unwell FC is a marketing gimmick that the league hopes will bring in new fans and Cooper hopes will help her electrolyte drink have higher brand recognition.  

Fans’ criticism of the partnership has also been echoed by media who cover the league, yet they are the same people that have failed to meaningfully cover the continued abuse and silencing of victims by the NWSL and its clubs (the NWSL has always suffered from people's lack of desire to criticize it - even when criticism is warranted).  Though there have been instances of nuanced analyzing of the Unwell partnership, for the most part it has amounted to little more than smugness. To boot, NWSL media has largely ignored Cooper speaking out about the sexual harassment she faced in college despite it inherently being a women's soccer story that is made all the more relevant by the NWSL's own history of abuse. In a YouTube video titled, My College Soccer Trauma, Cooper said one of the things she worried about in coming forward was that "people would downplay or dismiss the severity of what [she] experienced..." Turns out she should have also been worried that those who like to act like crusaders in the women's soccer world - a world she left through no fault of her own - would by and large ignore her because she doesn't neatly fit into their required box.   

The NWSL is not a bastion for smashing the patriarchy and progress has only been achived after scandal. The Attorneys General of New York, Illinois, and D.C. announced a settlement in February with the NWSL for allowing systemic abuse of its players. The NWSL and the San Diego Wave FC are currently being sued by six former staff of the Wave, and both are benefiting from the rippling silencing that has been caused by Jill Ellis' defamation lawsuit against Brittany Alvarado (a former Wave employee who blew the whistle on rampant misconduct occurring at the Wave). The NWSL is allowing Bay FC head coach, Albertin Montoya, to continue to coach while he is under investigation for misconduct. Former NWSL player Carly Nelson revealed she quit playing soccer because of the abusive environment of the Utah Royals. Denver NWSL just announced Curt Johnson as their GM (who had a hand in hiring now disgraced Paul Riley without proper due diligence) and Peyton Manning as a part of their ownership group (who, though he has always tried to downplay it, sexually harassed an athletic trainer while in college - including putting his rectum and testicles on her face). Throw a stone randomly at the NWSL and you will hit misconduct, so NWSL fans and media shouldn't throw their own stones while living in a glass house, and should instead focus on ridding the people actually causing harm within the NWSL.       

The ironic part is that Alex Cooper actually seems like a good fit for the league after looking past Cooper's salacious façade (though skepticism is warranted of how many of Cooper's millions of gen z female listeners will actual make their way to being long term NWSL fans). The league has played up that she is a former DI soccer player, but more than that her brand of female empowerment similarly mirrors that of the NWSL. Although she has stated in the past that she didn’t want to talk about her political views and questioned whether feminist was a fitting term for her podcast, Cooper’s current approach is less surface level than the whitewashed feminism projected by NWSL leadership.

In the wake of Roe v Wade being overturned, Cooper did an episode titled “An Abortion Story” in which she went to A Preferred Women’s Health Center in North Carolina. She stated the goal was "to make abundantly clear the real-world impact of anti-abortion legislation and how its ripple effects are poised to affect every person in the U.S.” On Call Her Daddy’s website there is a webpage dedicated to abortion information (it is unfortunate that she added her raunchy shtick to it by labeling the link to the webpage as “Free Nudes”). In contrast, the NWSL didn’t even say the word abortion in their statement decrying the Supreme Court’s ruling, and then proceeded to grant an expansion team to a state (Utah) with strict abortion laws while the expansion and college drafts still existed (thus creating a scenario of players being forced to choose between moving to a state in which their fundamental human rights are denied or not playing in the league).   

Cooper’s Unwell Foundation “supports organizations making mental health more accessible to women who need it most” and she regularly discusses various mental health topics on her podcast. In contrast, the NWSL stands accused of being damaging to the mental health of staff and players – the most notable recent examples being Brittany Alvarado and Carly Nelson. Cooper interviewed Vice President Kamala Harris while she was running for president (it was startling hilarious to hear the phase "Daddy Gang" come from Harris' mouth). In contrast, the NWSL told people to check their voter registration after the deadline to register had already passed in many states and in conjunction with an attempt to shake more money out of their fans.

Listen to episodes of Call Her Daddy (for the more puritan there is one with Jane Goodall) and there is more distinct feminism (even if it doesn’t come with a flashing neon sign shouting “This Is Feminism!”) than one could ever hope to get out of NWSL leadership. Furthermore, it is a pretty safe bet that Alex Cooper has caused less irrevocable harm to women than NWSL leadership. Jessica Berman, the NWSL's embattled commissioner, and Co are still allowing sexual, verbal, and emotional abuse to run rampant – even after the league was previously literally brought to a standstill because of it.

Cooper should be criticized for her failure to completely excise herself from Barstool and Dave Portnoy while also claiming that her focus is to uplift women, but she is not the first woman to have contradictory thoughts and actions on gender equality - she isn't even the first in connection to the NWSL. While this doesn't excuse Cooper's Barstool connections, it should be noted that she is in-between a rock and a hard place seeing as how criticizing Barstool is met with an onslaught of harassment from both Barstool staff and their fans and that would surely go double if a former member came out against them. Additionally, Alex Cooper left Barstool for Spotify in June of 2021, while Business Insider first reported on Portnoy’s sexual misconduct in November 2021. 

Any flaws of Cooper's should not preclude her from being commended for bearing the weight that comes with coming forward about sexual misconduct. Cooper isn't the perfect victim - no one is - but by speaking out she just leapfrogged the NWSL in combatting violence against women. Cooper said she decided to come forward because she found out misconduct similar to that which she endured was still happening at BU by her former assistant coach (Casey Brown – although Cooper didn’t name her) who became the head coach after Nancy Feldman’s retirement in 2022. Casey Brown resigned in November 2024 after the team made the NCAA tournament for the first time since 2018, with BU’s student newspaper reporting that “BU athletics has no further comment regarding the resignation”. It could be a coincidence, but it also could be that Brown and BU knew what was coming from Cooper and were trying to get ahead of it.    

In her interview with Kamala Harris, while they are discussing sexual abuse, Harris says to Cooper, “Thank you for talking about it, because part of the issue is that people don’t talk about it, and I don’t mean the survivors of it, I mean nobody does. And the more that we let anything exist in the shadows, the more likely it is that people are suffering and suffering silently and we need to talk about it.” Fighting the system is Sisyphean, so even if Cooper isn't able to back up her words that "this is DAY ONE of changing the system, flipping the script and finding justice", she has already done enough to show she is exactly the type of partner the NWSL needs. The question now isn't whether Cooper is the right fit for the NWSL, but rather if the NWSL is the right fit for Cooper (and whether the NWSL would have even partnered with her if they knew this was coming). 

There is a clip in the documentary that shows Cooper during her 2023 Unwell Tour where she is dressed in her Boston University soccer uniform. She is stripped of the uniform by Chippendale-esque dancers, leaving her in lingerie. It's not clear if Cooper meant this to come across as her own version of Take Back the Night, but hopefully somehow she has found a way to mollify the pain Nancy Feldman and BU caused her.