How Trinity Rodman made her name her own
Trinity Rodman’s uncompromising drive officially became an obsession at a 24-Hour Fitness. She was a homeschooled high schooler at the time, a 16-year-old feeling “isolated” from peers. She’d fill spare afternoons with solo soccer training sessions at a nearby park, but still, she felt unfulfilled. “I gotta find a way to push myself,” she thought. So she turned to Mom, and began begging.
“Please, I'll do anything,” she remembers saying to her mother, Michelle. “Can I please get a 24-Hour Fitness membership?”
She knew that money had been tight for large chunks of her childhood. Her father, Dennis, had been in and out of her life, emotionally and financially. He was mostly absent as Michelle, Trinity and two siblings bounced from one Southern California apartment to the next. They rode a financial roller coaster, which once dipped to a Comfort Inn and an aging truck — and therefore didn’t always provide surplus cash for a gym membership.
But Michelle acceded. Trinity was grateful. She began walking or biking to the 24-Hour Fitness whenever she could. She found workout videos online to guide her. She “stalked” prominent athletes, poring over their social media pages, to find regimens she could replicate. She ran, and lifted, and exploded side-to-side or up-and-down.
And “that,” Rodman says, “is when it started.”
“It” was the transformation of innate hunger into all-consuming ambition. It was the reason 4-year-old Trinity would fume when her pre-K teammates weren’t trying; and the reason pre-teen Trin would cry after subpar performances. It became the tireless engine that fueled her to stardom, to the pros at 18, to a National Women’s Soccer League title and rookie of the year award at 19.
The following year, it fueled her to the U.S. women’s national team, and that’s where Rodman is now, as a potential breakthrough star at the 2023 Women’s World Cup. She scored twice in the USWNT’s send-off match. She’s a dynamic forward with a vibrant personality. And she is more, far more, than the daughter of a Basketball Hall of Famer — despite what tiresome tabloid headlines might have you believe.
She is thankful, of course, for her athletic genes, and actually, she revealed last month, “I watched my dad play a lot more than people really know.” She was born in 2002, two years after Dennis’ final NBA game; but she’d pull up clips, and study his anticipation, his activity, his positioning. “Obviously, my dad was pretty good at rebounding,” she said, before bursting into laughter at the understatement. She’d mine the 1990s footage for tidbits she could add to her soccer repertoire, and she found plenty.
She calls it “hunting” — “hunting in front of goal, hunting when you lose the ball.”
And opponents notice. “Trinity Rodman is probably one of the hardest-working forwards I've ever seen live,” San Diego Wave head coach Casey Stoney raved after Rodman, who plays for the Washington Spirit, broke open a May 6 match between the two teams. “Obviously she's got pace, she's got ability to run with the ball,” Stoney continued. “But she tracks back. That woman works hard.”
Crediting her father, though, is complicated. Neither Trinity nor her brother, DJ, has a relationship with their dad anymore. Dennis didn’t call Trinity to congratulate her on making the World Cup roster. He didn’t contribute much to her adolescent or adult development.
As she rose through soccer’s ranks, meanwhile, many outsiders assumed that Trinity had been boosted by privilege, but those around her have since explained that the assumptions evade truth.
She is, rather, largely a self-made star shaped by a singular influence: her “role model,” her “support system,” her “favorite superhero,” her “best friend,” “my rock” — her mom.
'I feel like I'm a spitting image of her'
For a brief period in the early-mid 2000s, toddler Trinity’s life seemed idyllic. The kids lived with Michelle and Dennis in Newport Beach, California, and had everything they needed — except calm. Dennis partied, outrageously and relentlessly. Michelle filed for divorce in 2004. And thus began the roller coaster.
The kids went with Michelle, who largely raised them as a single parent. Dennis faded in and out of their picture. And so did his child support payments.
Michelle had some money saved, but not enough to consistently fund their new family of four — including her daughter from a previous marriage, Teyana Lima. So they struggled at times. They jumped from home to home, including the Comfort Inn, “because we’d get evicted,” Michelle told The Spokesman Review. They needed help to afford the four-figure annual fees that would allow Trinity to play for an elite club team, the SoCal Blues. They needed help finding stability.
But Michelle, with assistance from Lima — who is 13 years older than Trinity — made do. And she “embedded in my brain that, at the end of the day, family's always gonna be there,” Trinity recently said.
Michelle also taught lessons in humility, in diligence and loyalty. When asked what she inherited from Mom, Trinity recently said: “Everything.” She laughed, but she wasn’t joking. “I feel like I'm a spitting image of her,” Trinity said.
Michelle is the person she vents to. Michelle is the person she celebrates with. Michelle was the one who bear-hugged her when the Spirit drafted her No. 2 overall before she’d ever played a college soccer game.
Dennis, meanwhile, was and is still her dad. But they’d go long stretches without speaking. And so, when Trinity heard his voice out of nowhere at a 2021 NWSL playoff game, she was “shocked, overwhelmed, happy, sad, everything.”
They hugged afterward. But Trinity felt compelled to clarify in an Instagram post: “My dad doesn’t play a big role in my life at all and most people don’t know that, we don’t see eye to eye on many things. I go months if not years without his presence or communication. Being in spotlights has been hard for us, him and me. We don’t have the best relationship, but at the end of the day he’s human I’m human… he’s my dad, and I’m his little girl that will never change. I will improve and look forward everyday as I hope he does.”
They then went months without seeing each other.
Two years later, they have once again gone months without communicating, and Trinity says she’s “gotten closure with it all.”
“I know he's proud of me. I truly do,” she said at the USWNT’s pre-World Cup media day, with dozens of reporters surrounding her. “He has his own things to deal with, but at the end of the day, he's communicated to me that he knew I was gonna be here. And that's all I need.”
Trinity paves her own path
Even while Dennis was absent, though, even when their father-daughter relationship was rocky or mum, they always shared one thing that trailed Trinity through childhood, to the present day.
“My last name has always been a factor,” she says. “Especially before I kind of made my own way.”
It followed her from a local Boys & Girls Club to the SoCal Blues. It followed her to youth national teams and prestigious tournaments, many of which she won. She became something of a local legend on the Southern California soccer scene, leading the Blues to state, regional and national titles. But still, person after person would ask about her father, and media outlets would mention his name before hers.
The questions multiplied when Rodman entered the NWSL Draft, after one COVID-annulled fall season at Washington State. Interview requests flooded in, and her fame — inextricably linked to both her name and her on-field exploits — grew. It grew as she excelled for the Spirit as a rookie. It grew when she signed the richest contract in NWSL history. It grew when she debuted for the USWNT in January 2022.
And along the way, in soccer circles anyway, the name crystallized as her own.
She’d said on draft night: “I’m excited to be known as Trinity Rodman and not just Dennis Rodman’s daughter. I’m excited to pave my own path,” and that’s precisely what she’s done. Cameras flock to her; fans clamor for her; but it’s largely because she’s ascending onto her own global stage. Even around her home in Virginia, not far from where the Spirit train, passersby now recognize her more than ever.
“Not, like, a lot,” she clarifies. “But it does happen sometimes.”
And she doesn’t mind. When she was young, she saw what true celebrity looked like. “We'd have dinner, and … you couldn't even finish a conversation,” she says.
She was talking, of course, about her first brush with fame, childhood meals with Dad interrupted by anybody and everybody who’d recognize him, but I wanted to double check: That doesn’t happen now, to her, does it?
“Not yet,” I added.
She smiled, and confirmed: “Not yet.”
Trinity arrives in New Zealand poised to make an impact
Perhaps conditioned by her relationship with fame, when Rodman enters new environments, she takes time to suss them out.
When she arrived in Washington D.C., she and Spirit teammates now say, she was shy and nervous, almost borderline mute. “I literally would not talk to anybody,” Rodman says. She’d observe, and stay in her rookie lane, and conceal the outgoing personality that people close to her have come to know and love.
She remembers “feeling everything out before I brought the Crazy Trin out.”
But then by Year 2 and especially Year 3, comfort and confidence sprouted, and “Crazy Trin” appeared. It manifests in pre-practice jokes or goal celebrations, at sushi restaurants or on TikTok. “She's a very bubbly and fun person to be around,” says Spirit defender Sam Staab. “She makes training fun, she makes this team fun.”
But she still needs comfort, familiarity, bonds. With the national team, in Year 2, she’s still “working on” all that. “I still am very shy [in the USWNT environment],” she says. “You'd be surprised.”
She also seemed worried, in a sense, about all the World Cup-related hoopla, the packed itineraries and exploding attention. The past few weeks, ever since a roster call from USWNT head coach Vlatko Andonovski made her shake, have felt like an “out-of-body experience.” She knows that grand moments await her in New Zealand, but beyond their sheer size, “I mean, I have no idea what to expect,” she says.
So she consulted veterans, especially Megan Rapinoe. “Trin, I think she was a little nervous that, because it feels so crazy right now, that when we get to the World Cup it's gonna be worse,” Rapinoe recalled in late-June. Rapinoe tried to assuage that concern: “No, home is worse. … Once we get into the bubble, that can be calmer.”
They have now stepped into the bubble Down Under. Rodman said she planned to bring coloring books and "Fortnite," distractions that would allow her to relax and escape all the noise — which, she knows, can be difficult.
She also noted, though, that the past two decades have given her plenty of practice.
And she said that Rapinoe, a seasoned blocker of noise, had given her resonant advice.
“You're here for a reason,” the 38-year-old veteran told Rodman. “Do you."
