Mallory Pugh is going pro. And even though the news itself is perhaps not an enormous surprise, the timing caught more than a few folks off guard.
The 2016 college season would’ve been Pugh’s freshman year at UCLA. For any normal player, it would’ve been, anyway. Instead, Pugh, the No. 1 recruit in the 2016 class and the 2015-16 TopDrawerSoccer.com Girls Player of the Year, spent the first half of the college season with the full USWNT at the Olympics and the second half gearing up for - and then playing in - the U20 World Cup. Along with a few other college-bound or college-playing national teamers, Pugh deferred her year. She’d start in 2017.
Pugh returned from U20 camp with affirmations that her UCLA career would indeed resume in earnest in 2017. But with the ratification of a new CBA for the USWNT in April, plans changed. And now, four months after Pugh was seemingly locked into at least her freshman year, she’s going pro. The question now is merely where.
This decision will obviously have an immediate knock-on effect for the 2017 college season and beyond. Here are three of those likely effects and implications.
