Everybody outside the Seattle Reign locker room thinks Jess Fishlock is scary.
“It’s funny talking to some of the older players because they were so scared and intimidated before meeting her,” Reign midfielder Ainsley McCammon told Ride of the Valkyries after training this week. The 19-year-old, who joined the Reign in the summer of 2024, never got that impression. Fishlock was sweet to her from the start, made her feel so welcome, and has become an important mentor to the rising young player.
But when Fishlock steps onto the field, the intimidation turns out to be extremely well-earned. The Tiny Dragon packs a big punch.
Phoebe McClernon’s introduction to Fishlock came before the defender ever wore a Reign kit. While playing for the Orlando Pride in 2021, Fishlock's name came up on the scouting report before their summer matchup. McClernon admittedly didn't follow the NWSL closely in college and didn't know much about the Reign midfielder. She certainly remembered her after, in McClernon's own words, Fishlock diced her in the 18-yard box. Fishlock would score on the play.
“She absolutely did me dirty. I was mortified, and that was my first impression of Jess.”
The next year, McClernon signed with Seattle, walked onto the training field, and found out that experience wasn’t a one-off. Five years later, she said nothing has changed. Fishlock still makes her look like a fool regularly.
“I’d rather get beat by her than anybody else,” McClernon said.
Teammate Sofia Huerta had a similar experience facing Fishlock and the Reign when she started her NWSL career in Chicago.
“I was definitely intimidated by her because she’s so intense, but that’s what makes her so good. Jess was always the main reason why Seattle was so hard to play against,” Huerta said. “She’s such a winner; nothing else matters, which is really good to have in a leader.”
This is where Fishlock is a bit of a paradox. The ferocious intensity is authentic, but so is the softie, the gentle mentor, and the person who, according to Huerta, will always be the life of the party. Her teammates noted that Fishlock walked into this year's team Halloween party dressed as a minion, but she had stuffed herself into a youth-sized costume and couldn't close the Velcro on the back.
She still rocked the look, and at 39, she’s still chopping up players in training and in games. Her September brace against the Boston Legacy to keep the Reign in the playoff hunt is proof of her ongoing impact on the field.
And on Sunday, she'll do it at Lumen Field one last time.
The Reign host Orlando at 2 p.m. PT on Decision Day in Fishlock’s final home game. A win guarantees the team a playoff spot. A draw or a loss means checking the other results. Whatever happens, the Reign can't earn a home playoff match, so Fishlock's sendoff happens this weekend. Her teammates are motivated to extend her final season as long as they can.
Fishlock is the last of the three Reign originals who signed with the club in their inaugural season and stayed for more than a decade. Megan Rapinoe retired at the conclusion of the 2023 season, and Lauren (Lu) Barnes retired after the 2025 season. Barnes is now on Laura Harvey’s coaching staff.
Fishlock will be honored before Sunday’s match as the 2026 winner of the Lu Barnes Award, which recognizes excellence on the field, leadership in the locker room and impact in the community. Fishlock said it meant a great deal to receive an award carrying the name of someone she shared the field with for so many years, especially in her final season. She selected Lambert House, a Seattle nonprofit serving LGBTQ+ youth, for the award's donation.
“It was like the triumvirate of Lu, Jess and Pinoe. And you just looked at them in awe,” said McClernon, who was a finalist for the award this year, about her time with all three OGs.
Fishlock will depart the Reign as the club’s all-time leading goal scorer, having passed Rapinoe in September. She’s also Wales’ all-time leader in goals, men’s or women’s, with 48.
And almost none of it was supposed to happen.
The girl from Llanrumney
“Jess wasn’t supposed to be who she’s become,” Huerta told Ride of the Valkyries, noting how much she's been reflecting on her teammate's impact this week. “No one knew who she was, and she just always had that belief in herself.”
Honoring a Seattle and @nwslsoccer.com icon 🔥 This Sunday, we celebrate the immense career of the club's remaining OG – Jess Fishlock.
— Seattle Reign FC (@reignfc.com) 9:20 AM · Oct 30, 2026
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Fishlock is a Llanrumney girl, “through and through,” as she told WalesOnline. Growing up in the suburb of Cardiff, she was one of six kids in a neighborhood full of grass, and one of an enormous extended family of Fishlocks. Her dad has six brothers, all of whom lived nearby, so she couldn’t misbehave for long before her parents got a phone call.
But she nearly didn’t make it that far. Born exactly seven years after her brother James, on January 14, 1987, Fishlock arrived more than three months early, and she told The Athletic in 2021 that things were “touch and go” for both her and her mother. She weighed less than 3 pounds at birth, and her mother lost a lot of blood. These days, she jokes that she never buys James a birthday gift, because she was the best one he could have gotten.
Football chose her, mostly by accident. Her older sister Kathryn wanted to go to a summer football camp, and 7-year-old Jess wasn't interested. She had a choice: join her sister or stay in her bedroom, so she went. By the end of the week, she was playing for Cardiff City Ladies.
By the time she was 12, the club let her train with the adults. Around that same time, Fishlock knew she was gay, and she said football was the one place she could always be herself. So she committed to it earlier than most people commit to anything. At 16, she left her studies and worked about 40 hours a week in customer service to pay for her football gear. At 19, while playing a friendly for Wales, an assistant manager approached her about moving to the Netherlands to play for AZ Alkmaar. She moved a year later, and after three months, she called her mom in tears. But she stuck with it and ended up signing a two-year deal.
Her belief in herself continued to grow.
She then moved to Bristol in the Women's Super League, where she was shortlisted for the inaugural PFA Women's Player of the Year honor in 2012 (Kim Little would win that year). But Fishlock had always dreamed of playing in the United States, where women's football was celebrated, and in early 2013 Laura Harvey called, inviting her to try a new opportunity in America.
Building a league and a club
When Fishlock arrived in Seattle as a 26-year-old, the NWSL was barely a league. Minimum salaries were $6,000. She joked to ESPN that she nearly quit after her first game, played at an amateur venue in the Chicago suburbs, until Harvey laughed and reminded her there was training the next day.
Fortunately, just as she did when her career began, Fishlock stuck with it. She scored her first goal for the Reign on April 21, 2013, in front of about 16,000 fans in Portland, unheard-of attendance at the time. She celebrated by proudly slapping the Reign crest on her jersey, cementing herself as a legend in the best rivalry in women's soccer.
Over the next 14 seasons, Fishlock played through stadium changes, ownership changes, and some truly rough pitches, including a match on the outfield of a baseball field in Rochester against the WNY Flash that she still calls “diabolical.”
But those were the rough patches, and she has plenty of happier memories. Her résumé with the Reign makes a strong case for Fishlock as one of the league's best, and likely the best in club history. Her awards and accolades include a 2021 NWSL MVP, seven NWSL Best XI selections, three NWSL Shields, and three championship appearances. She now holds the club records for both assists and goals.
But her teammates talk less about the numbers and more about how she sees the game and shows up for them.
“The way that she sees the game is really cool,” McClernon said. Sitting in film with Fishlock and hearing her break things down “has been really instrumental.”
McCammon said she’s learned the most from Fishlock's attention to detail and, on the field, from how Fishlock problem-solves and gets others to do the same. “She’s just so smart, and she reads the game super well.”
Harvey has shared much the same thing, noting that Fishlock’s football brain sets her apart, that she sees things others don’t, and that she has carried this club when they most needed her. Fishlock knows how to win, and while her role has evolved over the past two years—sometimes coming off the bench to make an impact rather than starting—her teammates still see her the same way.
“She is just one of the best women’s soccer players to ever play, and the Reign had her for her whole career in the U.S.,” Huerta said. “She’s the greatest player to come out of the Reign.”
Mike Russell
Leaving things better
When Fishlock arrived in 2013, the Reign were a club figuring out how to exist. She’s leaving it in a very different place, and her teammates credit that to far more than her play.
“The level of pride that she takes in the Reign, you would think she owns the club,” McClernon said, noting that it has motivated her to step up as a leader. “You have so much more influence than you realize.” She also points to how much Fishlock cares about the Reign's future, helping with “fail-safes” like mentoring McCammon. “She has been consciously thinking about the time when she’s not going to be here.”
“Her and obviously Lu and Rapinoe, as the three OGs, have really just built something special that I think will continue on," McCammon echoed.
Fishlock has done the same for Wales. She retired from international football last October as the country’s all-time leading goalscorer, after captaining Wales to its first major tournament at EURO 2025, where she became the tournament’s oldest goalscorer.
She has said she wanted to leave Wales with the right pathways and the ability to keep competing, and that’s being tested in real time. Wales is chasing a place at the 2027 Women's World Cup. They beat Albania 4-0 on aggregate in the first round of the UEFA qualifying playoffs. Fishlock will be with the coaching staff for the round-two matches against Norway in early December.
For Huerta, Fishlock's journey to the top from the tiny country of Wales—with a population smaller than the Seattle metro area—stands out the most. “It's not like she was meant to be the best,” Huerta said, pointing to how much work she had to do to make a name for herself. “There were so many things that she had to mentally work through to be the best, and I got to see that front and center.”
On days when Huerta didn’t believe in herself, she looked at Fishlock. “I know she believes in me. She’s said that to me, and so I can believe in myself.”
Fishlock probably won't stray far from soccer after retiring as a player. She holds her UEFA A license and is working toward a master’s in sports leadership, and Huerta expects her to stay involved in the game. But Jess Fishlock, the player, is leaving, and "there’s just never going to be another Jess Fishlock,” Huerta said. “There’s just not. The Reign are so lucky that Jess decided to spend her whole NWSL career here.”
