Scarves Up! Sounders’ Paul Rothrock
Scarves Up! Sounders’ Paul Rothrock
After a standout Sounders performance, Seattle Sounders’ Paul Rothrock points to joy, not pressure, as the key to his game. Once doubted early in his career, he now plays at the center of the region’s World Cup moment. It’s a story of resilience shaped by family, mindset, and community.
Sounders’ Paul Rothrock reflects on joy, family and what drives his success
By Ellen Hiatt
Joy is the name of the game for Sounders’ Paul Rothrock.
Before he reached the stairs of his Portage Bay houseboat, Paul Rothrock was on the phone with his sister. He had just scored in the Seattle Sounders FC vs Colorado Rapids game. Coming home, he hijacked the sound system and was blasting Donna Summer’s upbeat, disco version of MacArthur Park.
Rothrock listened to the song earlier, as well, when he entered Lumen Field — the Sounders won 2-0. The first was a goal that shouldn’t have happened. The ball skidded toward the sidelines with Paul in pursuit. He sprinted past, kept it in play with deft footwork, crashed into the boards, and spun back to deliver a perfect cross to Alex Rusnák.
“Rusnák with the finish,” the announcers shouted. It’s all Rothrock, though! When you talk about not giving up a lost cause… It’s a wonderful bit of skill… It’s all about the delivery! It’s all about the work ethic of Rothrock. He made that goal. Yes! Rusnák scored it. But this is all about sheer endeavor and desire!”
The article continues below.
He followed that by “sending a screamer” past the keeper to double Seattle’s lead.
“ROTHROCK!!!” The announcers full-throated gushed. “He has the confidence and the ability to take it!”
Paul will be the first to tell you, though, that confidence is fickle. Some players pump themselves up pre-game by getting mad. Their anger fuels their performance. That never worked for Paul. The best motivator for Paul, when he finds it, is joy.
He saw that in ice skater Alysa Liu, as well, when she played Summer’s song to her gold medal performance.
“I was pretty inspired with just her attitude going into the Olympics and I was trying to play on that a little bit today,” he said in a post-game interview.
“I was just going in free and going in for the joy of it, and making connections with the guys and not thinking about objectives and results… I think it paid off tonight.”
The kid from Seattle who’s made it big in his hometown wasn’t always happy playing soccer. Now, as the region prepares for the FIFA World Cup, he finds himself at the center of it. Early in his career, Paul was drafted by Toronto and benched for most of his time there. Head coach Bob Bradley told Paul he didn’t have what it took to be in Major League Soccer.
At the time, Paul was feeling pretty low. One of his four sisters told him he didn’t seem happy. Maybe he should quit.
Paul grew up with an underdog mentality driving a desire to prove his worth. The call to happiness collided with his coach’s blunt assessment. He would later say Bradley’s words were “the best thing he could say to me, because he was right at the time.” Paul stayed in soccer. He came back home to his family and signed with Tacoma Defiance, the Sounders’ second team.
“Maybe our happiness is within our control,” Claire said. “I want to achieve my dreams and I want to seek joy while I’m doing it,” she imagined him thinking.
Claire was talking from her home in New York, where she moved as a college student when Paul and his twin sister, Mia, were entering Kindergarten. With two sisters Rosie and Annie in between Mia and Claire, Paul grew up in a household with four young bosses, Claire said. Anytime they’re together, it’s like the first four minutes of Home Alone — all day! Their entrepreneur father and charity-founder mother always provided unconditional love, she said, and unconditional support.
“I do feel like Paul has been inspiring to all of us in our little family in the way of bringing hope, joy and resilience, and actively searching for that. He is wide open in a way that is refreshing. We are all optimists but Paul is much more…” She paused, searching for the right word. “…Yeah. Pure is maybe the best word.” Rosie, she added, shares that quality.
Claire credits his fiancée, Lucy Levine, with seamlessly joining the family and “embracing our nuttiness. Lucy is grounding, smart, interesting.” Before they dated, she didn’t watch soccer, or follow any sports, Paul said. They first met at Bumbershoot, and make the quintessential Seattle couple, living on a houseboat, hiking together in Index, and Lake Serene. He spent his youth hiking with friends in Gold Bar and Mount Pilchuck, training for soccer in Shoreline and playing for Seattle United against teams like Everett’s Washington Rush.
“If I’m rich in anything it’s community,” Paul said. “And I feel really lucky that I’m getting to play in the place where I’m so rich in that, and supported in that.” – Paul Rothrock
He shared that the passing of his grandfather, a “gravitational force” for his family, broke a connective tissue that brought them together. His games have, in a way, recreated that space. Relatives from Spokane to the West Coast come together to watch him play for a club that he says is also “familial.”
When he’s not in training or at a game, Paul is likely in a local park, or swimming in Puget Sound with Lucy. Paul loves Seattle parks and once said if he wasn’t a soccer player maybe he’d be a park designer. He can tell you all about the Olmsted designed parks, and the gift they are to the region.
Paul is under no illusion that soccer is the all important goal of his life. He doesn’t expect to stay in soccer as a coach or manager when he hangs up his cleats.
“It doesn’t feel like soccer is his whole personality,” shared Claire. “He’s into politics. Reading. Music. There are so many things that I could see him doing.”
Whatever path he chooses, there’s little doubt it will feed the joy that radiates from Paul’s broad, toothy smile he flashes when he’s running down the soccer field.
Their mother had a phrase Claire shared: “Misery is optional.”
“If it doesn’t bring you joy, get out,” Claire said. “Misery is optional. We don’t expect you to stay in something that is making you unhappy.” Claire is a television writer, and thinks that despite the cross-country distance and age gap between them, she and Paul are close. They share a common challenge for artists, athletes and entrepreneurs in navigating uncertainty, timing and luck while putting in the hard work.
“It’s the unknown factor in having a life in the arts or a life in sports. There’s talent and performance, but also a certain amount of luck that we’ve been chasing. We talk about it a lot. There’s the sort of practice and drive and the passion and there’s a hunger for it to work out. The dream is so tangible and elusive at the same time.”
Paul called Claire the night he blasted Donna Summer at his Portage Bay home. “He was saying he just loved the rehearsal, the practice, the work. ‘And now I just want to go and have fun’.”
Like Liu on the Olympic ice rink, Paul backs his performance with the work ethic that has sports announcers declare: “They have Messi! We have Rothrock!” when the Sounders defeated Lionel Messi’s Inter Miami 3–0 at Lumen Field in the Leagues Cup Final.
That game day energy is coming to the whole region for the FIFA World Cup games, playing out in Seattle and Vancouver, British Columbia. Paul loves the energy, and gets the shivers, he says, when he enters Lumen field. “It’s really special.”
Sports, he said, can be “super trivial and playful,” but they also provide a civic glue, community building, joyful role. Seattle Sounders FC does that for Seattle, and for his own family.
The game bridges divides in a time when the gap feels wider every day. When the world descends on Seattle for the World Cup, the spotlight will be bright and the stakes high. But if players bring the same freedom that sent Donna Summer’s music across Portage Bay, the moment will feel less like pressure and more like Paul Rothrock at his best — pure, unadulterated joy that binds a community together.
