The lifelong education of USMNT goalkeeper (and Ha...

Before we start, there's something that Matt Freese would like you to understand. Yes, there's going to be a lot of stuff in this story about his father. He gets that. It's sort of inevitable. The medical genius father of the starting U.S. men's national team goalkeeper, who frowned on his son's career choice and then died too young -- it's narratively irresistible, and we won't be resisting it here. But his mom, Marcia Geary Wolicki, was the one who supported his soccer dreams, the ballast to all the academic and social ambitions projected onto him; the one who mostly raised him and his three older siblings while their dad worked endless hours, after his parents divorced when Matt was 8; the one who ended the fights and dealt with the boys throwing blueberries against the wall at dinner, or sliding down the stairs in sleeping bags; the one driving him to his high school at 5 a.m. because Matt wanted to get extra reps and workouts in. "A lot of stuff is about my dad," Matt Freese says in his deep, slightly husky voice. "I really owe so much of it to her. I would not want her to not get those words about her because of the more optically pleasing story about my dad and his passing." He just wants you to know that before we get into his story. Dad was Dr. Andrew Freese, the "noted neurosurgeon and pioneer of gene therapy," per his obituary in The Philadelphia Inquirer. The former chief of neurosurgery and the neurological medical director at Brandywine Hospital, who attempted the first gene-therapy surgery to heal a neurological disorder, successfully. Dr. Freese operated on gunshot wounds and healed paralysis; helped a 3-year-old boy with a rare genetic disorder that deteriorated his brain, Canavan disease, become the longest-living person with that condition; allowed patients to outlive their life expectancies by more than a decade. Dr. Freese had been publishing groundbreaking medical research since he was at MIT for his PhD, where he was advised by the founder of Moderna. He worked endlessly and then, at dinner, talked to his children about an exciting new development, mRNA, many years before that technology helped to bring a global pandemic to heel. His own parents had been scientists in the National Institutes of Health and his sister, Dr. Katherine Freese, is a physics professor at the University of Texas, who studies theoretical cosmology and astroparticle physics. He was abundantly brilliant, never once losing an argument to any of his children. He loved art and culture and antique cars, but wasn't as bothered about sports. Andrew Freese watched Matt leave Harvard in 2018 after three semesters to become a professional soccer player with the Philadelphia Union and had deep misgivings about the choices his youngest son was making. He died from kidney failure at 61 in July 2021 and never got to see Matt make a success of his goalkeeping career after moving to New York City FC in 2023 and earning the starting job. It would be several more years before Matt got a chance with the U.S. men's national team, let alone got into a FIFA World Cup year as the team's No. 1 goalkeeper. His dad didn't get to see that either. "My father was an incredibly intelligent person," Matt Freese says. "A lot of his family, going back generations, were very established professors and scientists and doctors. The off-the-charts kind of intelligence. And my dad certainly had that brain. He was so talented, hard-working and caring. As a doctor he dedicated his life to helping others." Andrew Freese expected his children to do the same. To do useful work. To serve society. Matt, the youngest of four children all born within six years, was an effervescent kid, bubbling with humor and energy and an outsized sense of self. In the second grade, Matt dressed up as a cheerleader of the rival school for Halloween. "He was just like a very funny kid," says his sister, Dr. Lyssa Freese, an assistant professor of earth system science at the University of California Irvine who, like her father, got her PhD from MIT. "He knew how to see things, and learn from things that he'd seen, and how to make impressions. For being the youngest kid in the family, he was a pretty big leader. There was no tamping down of his voice and what he thought should happen." Matt was the kind of child who had a ton of nicknames. "Booger" was the one that, well, stuck. Jack, Matt's oldest brother, arrived at that one because, as he put it, little Matt was annoying like a booger. Early in Matt's life, the family moved a lot for his father's work. From Philadelphia to Minneapolis, to South Carolina for a year, back to Minneapolis, and finally back to Philly. Soccer was how he made new friends wherever he went. When they lived in South Carolina, an 8-year-old Matt idolized a neighbor who was a goalkeeper. Before long, Tim, the middle brother who is 3 years older than Matt, was taking endless shots on him on a goal in the backyard. "Obviously, he was very athletic," Tim recalls. "He was saving stuff where I was like, 'What the heck, why can't I score on him?' But I don't know that I would have [said], 'Oh, yeah, he's definitely the next national team goalie.'" They were smart kids, the four of them. They made boats out of tinfoil and dropped them into a full bath. Then they would see whose boat could hold the most pennies without sinking. Which is to say that they did physics for fun. They were all bookish but for Matt. "I'm the oddball in the family," he says. All four siblings were athletic, too. Both of Matt's brothers are an inch taller than Matt, who stands 6-foot-3. Jack rowed crew at Harvard. Lyssa was on the sailing team at Georgetown. Tim, the middle brother and another Harvard graduate who went on to get a master's from Cambridge, recently ran the Austin Marathon. And then there was Matt, who was not only the drummer in his high school's jazz band, but also played many sports, breaking his school's record in the 200-meter sprint and the 300-meter hurdles. They probably got their physical gifts from their maternal grandfather, Jack Geary, who was drafted by the NFL's New York Bulldogs in 1949 as a tackle out of Wesleyan. He separated his shoulder during the preseason and never played a regular-season game. Besides, Geary's future father-in-law felt that pro sports wasn't steady enough to support a family. So that was that. It's just as well -- the Bulldogs went 1-10-1 that year. Still, Matt reminds his mother of her father -- the athleticism, the natural leadership, the love of clothes. And she likes that the Bulldogs practiced at the old Yankee Stadium and that Matt now plays for NYCFC at the new Yankee Stadium. All the moving to different homes drew the children and their mother close. They were also bound by their father's absence. "He was more focused on saving lives than his own life," Matt says. "It's not a complaint. It's a proud statement because it shows how thoughtful he was about others. "He, at points in a self-detrimental way, focused on his career, which was giving other people life," Matt adds. "As his son, sometimes it was maybe hard to see and sad to see, but it came from a place of selflessness and altruism." After his siblings had moved out of the house, Matt and his mother settled into a routine that included rewatching "Miracle," about the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team, hundreds of times. (Aptly, since the recent discovery of the film became a mild obsession to USMNT head coach Mauricio Pochettino.) They would watch it on the tiny TV at the foot of Matt's bed, again and again. Matt particularly loved the scene in which Kurt Russell, as coach Herb Brooks, makes his team do endless conditioning after a lackluster game until they finally grasp that it's about the whole and not themselves. "The 'Miracle' movie I truly feel is an integral part of him today," Geary Wolicki says. "It's probably Hollywood corny nonsense, but I truly feel that's him." She had a sense by then that Matt might have a future in sports as well. Or, looking back, she feels that she should have. "At the time, you're in that day-to-day. You're just trying to get a meal on the table, get the homework done," says Geary Wolicki. "When I look back, absolutely the signs were there." In elementary school, Matt and his classmates were asked in a video who they would have dinner with if they could pick anyone in the world. Freese picked then-USMNT goalkeeper Tim Howard. In middle school, he came home one day and claimed to have received a letter from Real Madrid, inviting him to join the club's academy. He produced it, on letterhead with a logo and everything. It contained lots of particulars about what his life would look like in the Spanish capital. "He blew it because it said in the letter, 'Our students and trainees go to church every day at St. Kathleen's,'" Geary Wolicki says with a laugh. That's not a very Spanish name for a church. He came clean when his mom called it out. He and his buddies had spent an entire study hall forging this letter -- which she still has somewhere. It was part prank and part trial balloon. "He wanted it so badly, I think he was kind of testing the waters," Geary Wolicki says. Sure enough, by the time he was in high school, Matt Freese was not only in the Philadelphia Union academy but going on training stints with world-class clubs, spending a few weeks with Manchester United. He took his craft seriously and considered his career carefully, engineering moves to ever better club teams, and mimicked the work ethic his family modeled. When he was 14 or 15, he would have his mom bring him to school at 5 a.m. so he could practice out on the soccer field by himself, or lift weights in the gym. He would eat scrambled eggs from a tinfoil packet, work out, shower, and then start school at 7:45. "I wasn't thinking, I'm doing this to earn something or to deserve something," he says. "It was just fun. In my family it was expected that you were going to work hard." His mother was supportive of his soccer aspirations, as evidenced by those crack-of-dawn school runs. "My dad didn't feel that way, necessarily," Freese says. "I wouldn't say he had a vision of how he wanted me to live my life, but I don't think he saw a great social altruism in professional sports. He thought that it was potentially a selfish career." Freese could have played college soccer just about anywhere. He picked Harvard, his father's alma mater. And Jack's. Tim is still there, too, going into his senior year. Matt was comfortable there, and it represented something of a compromise. It wasn't exactly big-time college soccer, but it was a way of satisfying his father's academic expectations while continuing his soccer career. "It was me trying to strike the balance of making my father proud and adhering to his suggestions and encouragement as well as respecting his wishes," Matt remembers. "He's your father." At Harvard, Freese planned to double-major in economics and computer science. He was a member of the Investment Association and the Key Society -- the latter is just fancy Harvard-ese for working as a campus tour guide. When he left school, he made good use of the free time afforded to soccer pros. Freese audited several masters-level sports business classes at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton business school. He had cold-emailed some professors, who let him sit in on their classes, and would hang around after class to ask them questions. "I was bored and I lived in the city of Philly and at 7 o'clock I wanted to go listen to a lecture instead of doing something I shouldn't be doing that would mess up my practice the next day," Freese remembers. After a year, he reenrolled at Harvard, scaled down to a single major, in economics, and took a full load of classes either online or by flying to Cambridge, Massachusetts, whenever he had to sit for an exam. "It was hard, but it was super beneficial," Freese says. "When you're a 20-year-old professional athlete, it's a little bit difficult to stay focused. Me being in classes, on my computer every single day, forced me to be super focused and not be doing things I shouldn't be doing. It kept me to a schedule and a regimen that I otherwise don't know if I would have." He didn't tell his professors that he was a professional athlete -- to them, he was just an extreme commuter student. He graduated from Harvard only a year late, in May 2022. Within a year of the passing of his father, who had, by then, resigned himself to the life Matt had picked for himself. "It took some years and some convincing, but we finally got there and he was more supportive of the career choice in the last year or two before he passed," Matt says. There was an added benefit to being both a full-time college student and professional athlete. "It really allowed me to thrive on the field," says Freese. "There's also a lot of research about the development of the brain in the classroom and how the neural pathways can allow you to learn more quickly on the field. Certainly the problem-solving that I learned in the classroom and the social element as well as from the emotional quotient perspective, working on group projects." He was also studying under the Union's star goalkeeper Andre Blake. Rather than resent his status, Freese saw opportunity to learn from the starter. "To work with him for 4½ years, learn under him ... as well as push him and help him, was such a blessing at age 20," he says. "And I knew it was a blessing then, too. I didn't take it for granted." At the same time, Freese was elected onto U.S. Soccer's Athletes' Council, which serves as a bridge between the federation and its athletes, and became a team rep in the Major League Soccer Players Association after just his second season as a pro. He also interned with a private equity group in the summer of 2022. And yet, for his ample accomplishments, Matt still sees himself as the jock among his siblings. His family, for what it's worth, rejects Matt's perception of himself as an outlier. "I don't agree with that, but absolutely he views himself that way," his mother says. "All three boys went to Harvard. He has the exact same degree. I think to be able to get to where he is, that is an intellectual pursuit." Freese undertook a research project at Harvard. He won't talk about it. He rubs his head with both his hands and leans back in his seat when it gets brought up. It's about tendencies in penalty takers. Stopping penalties is his specialty -- he parried three in the USMNT's shootout against Costa Rica in the Gold Cup quarterfinals last summer. "I'll talk about it in 13 years when I'm done playing when I'm 40," Freese says. "I want to keep that to myself because it's still kind of a competitive advantage, if other people are reading it." Has he worked out some kind of edge? "Yup." In mid-February, Freese sits on a hotel patio in Palm Springs, California, lined with palm trees and purple lights and a row of fire pits as New York thaws out of a historic cold snap and a triple helping of snow. Over the course of almost an hour, he never once seems burdened by the weight of being the USMNT's incumbent goalkeeper at the outset of a World Cup year. He isn't thinking that far ahead, he says, or won't admit to it publicly at any rate -- he's no fool. There is a lot of soccer to be played. In that sense, he's just another soccer player who knows what not to say. In another, he remains highly unconventional not only in his lineage but in his long-term view. He sees his soccer career not as the final destination, as the culmination of his sporting life, but as a stop on a route that will lead elsewhere, too. He's already thinking about a second career on the business side of sports. In March 2025, he joined U.S. Soccer's board of directors as one of two elected athlete representatives. He campaigned for it. He thought he could learn a lot. Mostly though, he does Normal Athlete Things, like keeping a rigid pregame routine. "Yeah, I'm a psycho," he says. "For goalkeepers, the routine is probably the single most important part of preparation for a game. I would argue it's even more important than practice. For a goalkeeper, you get three moments to show yourself in a game and you have to be ready. Me doing the same stuff and the same routines, that I know after eight years of perfecting it have worked for me, makes me very confident going into the game that I've done everything I need to do to be in the right mindset and to be fully present and not be distracted by anything." The routine starts two days before a game. He watches lots of film, meditates. Ice and compression boots. As much sleep as possible. At least nine hours. Because the research he has read -- because of course he has -- shows that sleep two days before a game is actually more impactful to performance than sleep the night before a major, stressful event. He eats the same thing, too. "I can't tell you how many times I ate spaghetti, red sauce and sourdough toast last year, it was a little bit atrocious," he says. Before the game, he eats the leftovers. When he was with the Union, Freese -- who describes himself as "quite religious" -- would volunteer in a local soup kitchen the day before a game whenever they were on the road. Within a few days, Matt would be back east. Back into his routine. Training. Playing. Recovering. Working at his craft. Learning. Striving. Serving his country in goal.