Carolina Ascent FC player with big dreams just made her pro debut. She’s only 14
Listen to Stella Spitzer recount her morning, and you wouldn’t think much of it.
She wakes up around 7 a.m. Eats breakfast. Takes her 5-month-old toy poodle, Milo, for a walk. Then, around 9, she gets a ride from her apartment in Uptown Charlotte to Memorial Stadium, where she and the rest of her professional soccer Carolina Ascent FC teammates get treatment and start training at 10 a.m.
She then practices for a few hours, and then around noon, she waits for her dad to pick her up and take her home so she can do schoolwork until dinner. And then—
Wait, why does she need a ride from her Dad?
And ... schoolwork? What?
That’s when you’re reminded:
She’s 14 years old.
Spitzer is a forward for Carolina Ascent FC, the women’s pro soccer team in Charlotte that’s in the final stretch of its inaugural season. She’s among the youngest players on a team’s roster in the league, and earlier this month, she became the all-time youngest player to play in a USL Super League regular-season match after entering in the 95th minute against Brooklyn FC.
She’s a pioneer in this way. A history maker.
At 14.
“It was just really exciting,” Spitzer said in a Charlotte Observer interview. “I think we had a good crowd. They were really energetic the whole game. And my teammates, they were all really supportive and happy for me at the end.”
Were you nervous?
“A little bit of nerves,” Spitzer said with a smile, showing off her pink braces. “But I knew I was prepared and that I just had to go in there and do my thing.”
Part of the reason Spitzer didn’t have a ton of nerves playing against some players who were twice as old as her — in the top pro women’s division in all of USL — is simply that she’s done this before. She’s been playing above her years all her life.
Spitzer started playing soccer when she was 3 years old, she said, in a rec league in Columbus, Ohio, not far from her hometown of Lewis Center. She started playing club ball by 7 and moved to Dallas by 10 to play for a larger club called Solar. Born in 2010, she played with players born in 2007 and 2009 regularly. She also played with boys born in 2010.
“That’s how I learned how to hold off players and not outrun them but outsmart them,” she said about her experiences playing against older players. “So it was familiar before. But I think playing with women just took it to a new level.”
She spent a few years playing with Solar before moving on to Sioux Falls City FC in the Women’s Premier Soccer League, a semi-pro league in South Dakota. Spitzer had a bunch of other accolades to her name by then, too. That included invitations to the U.S. U14 Identification Camp and the U.S. U-14 Young National Team training camp — as well as being named to the 2024 Olympic Development Program National Team.
She was then signed by Carolina Ascent FC in June prior to the club’s inaugural season beginning in August. Then came her Oct. 19 debut. And then came a random practice on Thursday where the forward wearing No. 70 — a tenfold upgrade from Spitzer’s favorite No. 7 — turned her defender and screamed a low ball through two defenders and a goalkeeper and into the left-side net.
“The potential is there, the ingredients, the appetite, mindset, competitiveness is all there,” Ascent head coach Philip Poole said. Poole, prior to this job, has been a coach in the Carolinas the last 25 years. He’s trained some of Charlotte’s most promising talents — some of whom he brought on to Carolina Ascent, like Cannon Clough — and has also seen what the rest of the country has to offer as an assistant on the U.S. Women’s National Team.
“I’ve been fortunate enough to have a look behind the curtain in the upper levels of world football, and how I’ve coached high-potential young players,” he said. “And that’s where I can confidently say that Stella’s in that mold of super-high potential players, if you can guide her correctly.”
Spitzer not alone as academy player on Carolina Ascent
Spitzer being so young might feel like an anomaly. But the reality is that she’s part of a youth movement that’s ablaze across the entire USL Super League.
When she arrived in Charlotte, Spitzer signed a USL Academy Contract. That sort of contract allows USL clubs to sign, train and compete in matches with professional senior teams without affecting their players’ eligibility to play college soccer. In other words, Spitzer doesn’t get paid — and, according to the league’s website, there are over 75 players just like her who are signed to USL Academy contracts. They train with teams in the mornings and then take classes online afterward; they are on the fast track to playing soccer for the rest of their lives.
On Carolina Ascent FC alone, there are six players who haven’t yet graduated high school. In addition to Spitzer there is Riley Pickels (16 years old), Isabella Franco (16), B Hylton (17), Jaida McGrew (17) and Molly Vapensky (17).
That means Spitzer isn’t alone when she brings her laptops and notebooks on road trips. She’s not alone in considering her teammates as mentors. She’s not alone in having to sacrifice a lot of her youth to pursue her pro sports dream.
That goes for her family, too. Her mom, Alison, is a schoolteacher in Ohio, and her father, Joel, runs a law firm remotely in Charlotte while also getting Spitzer to and from her soccer responsibilities.
She’s not alone in getting asked the same question, as mid-aughts tunes blast in the locker room: Do you know this song?
To which replies with a laugh:
“Nope.”
She’s living her dream at 14
Spitzer’s favorite TV show on Netflix right now is Outer Banks. Her favorite men’s soccer player is Lamine Yamal, the 17-year-old who plays for Barcelona who is on his way to being a generational winger. Her favorite women’s soccer player is Tobin Heath, a now-retired U.S. Women’s National Team star. (She was a Tar Heel, too.)
Spitzer said she doesn’t yet know if she’ll go to college or go pro after her high school days. She has four years to weigh those options, after all. She did say that her final goal is to play overseas and then star on the United States Women’s National Team — something her independent trainer and former USMNT star Eddie Johnson has called an inevitability if she continues to progress.
But for now, on this Thursday, she’s also somehow a freshman in high school. She’s also somehow a kid smiling after practice through pink braces with her father en route to pick her up — ready for her friend from out of town to arrive so they can go trick or treating for Halloween.
“We don’t really know what we’re being yet,” Spitzer said, when asked about her Halloween costume. She then went on a tangent as 14-year-olds do. “When I was little, I was a bumble bee almost every year. We might be pirates this year.”
She added: “We’ve been soccer players, of course.”
Yes, Charlotte knows.
Everyone else might one day know, too.
This story was originally published November 1, 2024 at 5:15 AM.
