RILEY TIERNAN SETS up just inside the box on a misty Los Angeles day at the end of March. She watches as Angel City FC teammate Katie Zelem kicks the ball wide to Claire Emslie, positioned toward the far-left side of the goal. Emslie crosses the ball about 12 yards out. With three Seattle Reign defenders closing in on her, Tiernan propels her body into the air and heads the ball into the top left corner of the goal, far out of reach.
Not bad for someone who didn’t have a contract four weeks earlier.
Now, Tiernan, 23, is one of three finalists for the Rookie of the Year award, which will be announced at the NSWL Awards at 5:30 tonight on ESPN2. Seattle’s Maddie Dahlien and Gotham FC‘s Lilly Reale are also nominated. Tiernan’s path to this moment has been unconventional: Two weeks before the NWSL season began, she was still a non-roster invitee to training camp.
“She’s gone from underdog to star,” says Julie Uhrman, Angel City president and co-founder. “She wasn’t recruited. She had to fight to be seen, fight to have a place on the roster, fight to have a place in the starting 11. She’s won every single one of those fights.”
It didn’t take long for Tiernan to make an impression this season. In early May, after scoring five goals, she led all 42 rookies in goals and ranked second in the Golden Boot race. By the end of the regular season, Tiernan had started in every match for a total of 2,200 minutes, with 8 goals, 1 assist and 18 shots on target. Angel City missed the playoffs with a 7-6-13 record, but Tiernan’s breakout season was a bright spot.
“I just wanted to get a chance on the field,” Tiernan says. “I wasn’t expecting any of this to pan out the way it did.”
NEARLY EVERY DAY after school in Voorhees, New Jersey, 9-year-old Madison Tiernan joined her friends in the backyard to kick around a soccer ball. Nearly every day, 2-year-old Riley would wander over to the action.
The first few times, the older girls made sure to watch out for the toddler. Watching from afar, Tiernan’s mother, Robin, wondered if her youngest child should even be out there. “When it’s your first child, you’re worried about everything, making sure everything is OK,” Robin said. “By the time you get to your third, you realize it’s like survival of the fittest. Like, she will be fine. She will be better than fine.”
Soon, Madison and her friends were playing with the same veracity as they would during their Saturday morning club games. “Riley never skipped a beat,” says Madison, who went on to star for Rutgers after becoming the top-ranked girls soccer player in New Jersey. “She always held her own. And honestly, there’d be times where even I was afraid of her. I was like, ‘I’m going to go the other way.’ She just had that competitive edge and fierceness from such a young age. It was hard to ignore.”
If Tiernan got knocked over, she would pop right back up. “There were no tears,” Robin says. “She would just wobble over in her diaper, get right back up and not care.”
By the time Riley was 8, she’d become one of the top players in the PDA South, the player development academy in South Jersey. Madison’s little sister quickly started to earn her own recognition on the pitch. As an eighth-grader, Riley became the top-ranked girls soccer player in New Jersey for the 2021 class.
It wasn’t long before her family heard from Mike O’Neill, Madison’s coach at Rutgers. “We wanted to see if you guys wanted to come up and talk about Riley. Talk about offering her a scholarship to come play.” Riley’s father, Joe Tiernan, couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
“We know her mentality,” he remembers O’Neill saying. “We know she’s going to get the training. We know your family. We know she’s going to get all the support and be taught the proper lessons between now and the time she’s headed to school.”
Rutgers just made sense for Riley. Her sister had been a Scarlet Knight, and her brother Joey was playing lacrosse just 90 minutes south at Stockton. “I’m a Jersey girl,” Riley says. “I work hard. I’m tough. I am Jersey tough. My whole family is competitive, hardworking and tough. It’s just who I am.”
In 2021, Tiernan’s first season with Rutgers, she earned the Big Ten Freshman of the Year award and was named to the All-Freshman Team. She started every game and had a goal and an assist to help Rutgers beat Arkansas in the NCAA quarterfinals. She was named to the College Soccer Coaches National Players to Watch list and ended her career with a school record 34 assists, good for sixth in Big Ten history.
But an incident during her senior year threatened to overshadow her accolades. In a Big Ten semifinal matchup against USC, Tiernan stomped on a Trojans defender in frustration after her shot on goal from outside the box was blocked. She received a red card for violent conduct and was ejected, leaving the Scarlet Knights without their best player.
“I take full responsibility for it,” Tiernan said. “It was the end of my college career because after that, I had to sit out in the championship game that we lost. And I know that I have to prove myself after that.”
Madison, who had been hired as a Rutgers assistant coach in 2022, watched the play unfold on TV while on maternity leave. “My initial reaction as her sister was, ‘Riley are you serious?’ I was quite literally screaming at the TV. It was like phone roulette with my parents who were obviously beside themselves. After I let the moment settle and sink in, I thought, ‘There’s a reason. This is for something bigger, we just don’t know it yet.'”
With the elimination of the NWSL collegiate and expansion draft in August 2024, Tiernan knew that if she wanted to play professionally, she would need to secure a contract or compete for a roster spot during the 2025 preseason training camps. With her season over, she waited to hear from NWSL teams, including Gotham — which had drafted her sister 24th overall in 2017 when they were known as Sky Blue and with whom Riley had a successful training stint the summer before her senior year.
“I was super anxious all the time,” Tiernan says. “It was tough because it wasn’t in my control.”
For weeks, Tiernan’s phone didn’t ring. The red-card incident was still fresh, and, as Madison says, “there’s always been this underestimation of my sister. Like the, ‘Oh, it’s just the Jersey kid that went to Rutgers.’ It happens for a lot of Rutgers players. Everyone kind of takes that player for granted and overlooks them.”
With Madison’s help, Tiernan hired an agent who reached out to every team in the league. Gotham, her sister’s former team, and Angel City in Los Angeles were the only ones that offered Tiernan a trial-list invitation. It was the beginning of 2025, and Tiernan had a decision to make.
“I followed in my sister’s footsteps from the beginning. Pretty much my entire life,” Tiernan said. “I felt like this was the perfect time for me to take my own path.”
STARING OUT THE airplane window in January, Miley Cyrus’ “Party in the U.S.A.” reverberating in her headphones, Tiernan bobbed her head to the lyrics: I hopped off the plane at LAX / With a dream and my cardigan / Welcome to the land of fame excess / Am I gonna fit in?” Days later, she took the pitch in Thousand Oaks as a non-roster invitee for Angel City’s preseason training.
“I was very eager,” Tiernan says. “I had that adrenaline. Like I was here, and every day I had to show up and prove myself. I didn’t have time to waste.”
Some days, she would hear positive feedback from Angel City’s coaching staff. Other days, she wouldn’t hear anything. She started to question whether she would earn a spot on this season’s roster and whether she could’ve done things differently. In the early days of her trial period, Tiernan sat down with the coaching staff to discuss her collegiate career-ending red card.
“She had a pretty documented incident towards the end of her college career,” says Sam Laity, Angel City’s current senior assistant coach and former interim head coach. “And I think that scared people. But it didn’t scare our club because people here had a conversation with her about the incident. She took ownership of it. And that was really telling for our club.”
One day after practice, she went on Amazon to order a Bible. Tiernan, whose family didn’t attend church regularly, says she found comfort in reading scripture. “I would also pray a lot,” Tiernan says. “Way more than normal.”
She spoke with her sister nightly. Tiernan confided in Madison and leaned on her advice. “You have what it takes,” Madison would remind her.
After the first couple of weeks, Tiernan grew more confident. She started to relax, to have fun. Positive feedback from the coaches flowed.
“For Riley, on day one, she kicked the doors in,” Laity said. During film sessions, clips of Tiernan were shown more frequently as examples of what the team wanted to see on the pitch. “For the first four days of our training footage, it was all Riley,” Laity said. “And then that kept continuing.”
But the days passed without a contract offer. “I would think about all the negative what-ifs,” Tiernan says. “Like, ‘Oh, what if I don’t get a contract? Then I have to go back home. Then what do I do? Like, where do I even go from there?’
“The season was about to start, so I couldn’t go anywhere else.”
After more than a month of training, Tiernan broke down. Laying in her bed, she started crying. She became angry. “When are they going to give me an answer?” she said to herself.
The next morning, two weeks before Angel City’s home opener and just before the team boarded a bus to play in the preseason Coachella Valley Invitational, first assistant coach Eleri Earnshaw pulled Tiernan aside and told her to meet with sporting director Mark Parsons and technical director Mark Wilson. “We want to sign you,” Parsons said. Tiernan felt as if she could take her first deep breath in weeks.
“I think for Riley it was honestly better that she wasn’t given anything,” Madison says. “Now, if someone has anything to say, she can look them in the face and say, ‘I earned every inch of my contract.'”
TIERNAN’S ANGEL CITY jersey is nearly swallowed by seven Bay FC players attempting to guard her in early September in Los Angeles. Navigating the ball to her left foot, Tiernan finds an opening. At the 12th minute, her shot flies into the right side of the goal post, evading diving goalkeeper Jordan Silkowitz.
With the momentum from her kick, Tiernan pushes herself into a backward somersault. The Angel City supporter section erupts, nearly 10,000 fans chanting Tiernan’s name on Fan Appreciation Day. As Tiernan rises from the grass, she yells, “Let’s go!” before embracing her teammates.
“We had a tough moment this year when Alyssa Thompson left [for Chelsea FC], and then Riley went out against Bay and tore the left flank up,” Parsons says, “cutting inside three, four, five people and scoring an unbelievable goal.
“Who does that? Who just rolls out and starts taking on people at the age of 22? Takes a special, special technical quality, takes a special mindset. And I’ve loved seeing her bring that mentality onto the field.”
After scoring her eighth goal and setting a single-season scoring record for the club, Tiernan struggles to find the box in the following eight games despite having 10 attempts and four shots on target.
“In college, I scored some goals, especially freshman year. But I was really all about dishing it out and playing through the ball and stuff like that,” Tiernan says. “And ultimately, my goal every time I step onto the pitch is to just do whatever I can for the team. Whatever that looks like at that moment, I’m there.”
In her second-to-last home game of the season, a 2-0 loss to Portland Thorns FC, Tiernan rushes to be in the middle of every offensive play. With 15 pass attempts, Tiernan’s efforts don’t go unnoticed by her teammates and coaching staff.
“She hasn’t scored in a couple of games. I don’t care, to be honest,” Angel City coach Alexander Straus says afterward. “It’s more like she just needs to do the right thing. She needs to get into the right spaces, and that’s what we try to help her with. We need to continue to build the foundation and not get impatient. We want her to be sustainable and continue to grow.”
Minutes after the final whistle, Tiernan walks over to the Angel City supporter’s section. Two fans wave her over. They’re members of Angel City’s women-led supporter group, Mosaic 1781, and they’re holding up a gift for Tiernan.
It’s a black T-shirt, and Tiernan bursts into laughter as she shows it to the fans. Screen-printed onto the shirt is the iconic “Step Brothers” movie poster image but with Tiernan’s face photoshopped in, along with Vinny and Pauly D, characters from MTV’s “Jersey Shore.” “That’s the best thing ever,” she says with a broad smile. She’s 2,700 miles away from Vorhees, New Jersey, but she takes as much pride in her roots as she does having traveled the winding road that led her here.
Wardrobe styling by Krystal Collier; Hair and makeup styling by Sarah Dougherty; Look 1: Jacket is athlete’s own, athletic bra by Nike X Jacquemus, base layer by Jean Paul Gaultier, skirt by Chanel. Look 2: Jersey is athlete’s own, skirt is custom, earrings by Kyle Chan, Green topaz and gold ring by Astrid & Miyu, gold ring by Made by Mary, ring by Mary Brenner, socks by DSG, shoes by Flor de Maria. Look 3: Jersey by Le Pere, base layer by Jean Paul Gaultier, skirt by Louis Vuitton, socks and cleats are athlete’s own.
