Soccer
Favorite athlete: Trinity Rodman
Favorite team: Collegiate: University of Nebraska Women’s Soccer / Pro: San Diego Wave FC
Favorite memory competing in sports: In my PDA season, I scored a goal to tie the game against Slammers FC in an ECNL Showcase. This is my favorite memory because many of the college coaches I began to talk to after that referenced that game as when they began to follow me as a recruit.
Most embarrassing/funniest thing that has happened while competing in sports: Shooting a three-point shot in basketball that went over the backboard by a good two feet.
Music on my playlist: For our pre-game day playlist, my favorites are the Rihanna hits and some of the Pitch Perfect songs.
Future plans: Play Division 1 soccer at the University of Nebraska, on a professional team if possible, and then my career plan is something in sports medicine/exercise science or law.
Words to live by: “Everything happens for a reason.”
One goal before turning 30: To travel to Iceland.
One thing people don’t know about me: I can quote every episode of The Office.
By Andrew Robinson
It was a phone call no athlete wants to receive.
When the phone call ended, Mia Cairone retreated to her bedroom and shut the door behind her.
Just days ahead of her senior soccer season at Council Rock North, Cairone had received unexpected and devastating news. She understandably needed some time to process it. Her future of playing Division I soccer at Penn State, which had all but set in stone for the previous year, was now gone as fallout from an NCAA lawsuit led to the program pulling her expected spot on the roster.
While dealing with an unprecedented adverse situation, Cairone has started her senior season in fine form, and her response to the challenge has led the senior to a new home at the next level.
Cairone didn’t linger in the negative, instead choosing to be open, up front and aggressive in getting back on her feet which led to her committing to Nebraska less than a month later.
“The day it happened, it was right after a high school practice when I got the call. I was in the room with my parents, and when we hung up the phone, I just went upstairs and had an hour to myself,” Cairone said. “My parents came up and asked if there was anything they could do. I said, ‘You can bring my laptop,’ because I had to start emailing coaches and find a new home.
“I had to go to high school practice the next day and pretend like everything was going great, which it wasn’t. The scariest thing about reaching back out to coaches is that you’re just waiting.”
Once she’d pulled herself together after the phone call from Penn State’s coaches breaking the news, Cairone got to work. She started pulling together any film she could find from the last three years at CR North or her PDA club team, began emailing college coaches she knew from her first go-round with recruiting, then took a bold and brave step.
On August 22, a day before the PIAA season began, Cairone posted to her X account that as a result of the roster restrictions that came in the wake of the NCAA lawsuit, she would no longer be attending Penn State and would be making every effort to find a place at another high level program. By opening up and owning an unfortunate situation, one that was not exclusive to just her, Cairone gave herself a chance to get the new opportunity she was looking for.
“I know the power of Twitter, and if you post something with the right tags, you can get something seen by a huge audience,” Cairone said. “It wasn’t about outing Penn State, it was about letting coaches know I was available again, and I needed people to know what was going on. This is a really unfair situation, but if other people are struggling with this, at least you know you’re not the only one.”
College women’s soccer isn’t the only sport that has been affected by the NCAA’s new regulation, and players across the board in the Class of 2025 are dealing with a new, unexpected hurdle. Cairone’s objective was to find herself a new home at the next level but as she weighed making the news public, she considered the others who might be struggling with it as well.
“I wanted to show that there’s hope,” Cairone said. “The fact that it was an awful situation, it was not fun - I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, but the fact is you deserve a second shot that is as valid as your first one
“Going public was a big thing and knowing you will find another home, coaches will be open to you. It’s stressful but you will get through it.”
Soccer from the start
Cairone, the youngest of three sisters, grew up in an athletic household, so sports have been part of her daily routine her whole life. Mia’s dad Steve, a Hatboro-Horsham alum, played college soccer at Lycoming while her mom Kari played basketball at Lafayette and now coaches with the Upper Makefield Heat Hoops organization.
Her older sisters were athletes at North as well, Ella playing basketball and Anna a soccer and basketball player who is now playing her senior soccer season at Swarthmore College. Mia was on a two-sport path as well, but the time came where she had to make a choice about her athletic future.
“When I switched clubs and went to PDA, that’s when I knew I had to make a decision if I was going to take the spot on that team or keep playing basketball, so I had to think about what I saw myself doing in the future, what do I love to do and all that,” Cairone said. “I picked soccer because I felt like I had more of a future in that sport.”
While she hasn’t played basketball in a few years, Cairone does still miss it. Had she kept playing, she undoubtedly would have played for her mom’s Heat Hoops team as well and been teammates with quite a few girls that have been opponents on the soccer field the past few years.
“I was really good at defense, getting steals and all that, but the worst part of my game was definitely shooting,” Cairone said. “I could not shoot, so I’d get a steal then pass off to somebody I knew could shoot, that was kind of my way of playing basketball.”
It did not take long for Cairone to make an impact at CR North as a freshman on the varsity soccer team. If there is a blueprint for what a soccer center forward should be, Cairone would certainly check most, if not all, those boxes.
Not only is she a clinical finisher - Cairone netted her 50th career goal for CR North in the first weekend of the current season - her blend of size, strength and speed is very difficult to defend. North coach Gavin Flannigan knew quickly that Cairone had the makeup of a game-changing player.
“The right word is efficiency, I’ve not seen too many players who are as calm and composed when the moment’s at its highest and the crowd’s at its loudest,” Flannigan said. “When the excitement is there, she seems to find a way to be calm and efficient in those areas. She’s just very, very good at it.”
Cairone credited the team’s veterans during her freshman year for showing her the way. One of those seniors was Taylor Brennan, now a junior playing at Michigan, who took the freshman in as an understudy.
“Freshman year of high school is when I started to realize I did have potential in this sport because I was surrounded by those players who were a lot older, and their strengths helped me find my strengths,” Cairone said. “Taylor Brennan, playing with her helped me see that I could keep up with those older players and be inspired by them to find skills in myself that I didn’t know I had.”
Cairone’s play at CR North continued to elevate. As a junior, she was selected to the PA Soccer Coaches Association all-state team and a United Soccer Coaches All-Region selection while also earning First Team All-SOL Liberty honors.
“She had confidence as a freshman, but she was still a young player. What’s been exciting is to see her grow from a maturity standpoint and take that confidence across the rest of the team,” Flannigan said. “She’s grown as a leader through her play on the field. She came in with a good senior group, and it’s been interesting seeing the way she’s taken on more of that mantle.”
Flannigan explained that Cairone’s demeanor on the field is an extremely focused one, and it’s the view most people have of her. Away from games, there is a more relaxed side to the senior that her teammates get to see, but once the whistle sounds, all attention is between the lines.
“I would honestly say mental strength is where I’ve grown most, which is something nobody sees but me, and that’s why I think it’s such a big area of growth,” Cairone said. “Even back when I was playing basketball, I would get fazed easily, I’d get taken out of a game if someone said something mean to me on the court, and now, I’ve learned how to keep my head above it all and not let it affect the game I was playing.”
She was playing at a high level on the prestigious ECNL club circuit, but representing CR North was just as important. The Indians have a 10-deep group of seniors this year, several of them four-year contributors on varsity, playing with plenty of shared motivation.
“Our team at North feels like home to me, part of that is you see these girls in school every, day, and we spend a lot of time together,” Cairone said. “With club soccer, we train together and we play together, but we don’t spend that same amount of time together, and that’s what makes high school really special. It makes you want to work harder for your team and it becomes a community, you’re all there having fun playing your sport.”
NCAA changes college sports landscape
In May 2024, the NCAA came to terms on a historic settlement worth 2.8 billion dollars with former college athletes who had filed an antitrust lawsuit against college sports’ governing body. The former athletes, in the wake of NIL legislation in 2021 that allowed current college athletes to monetize their abilities, alleged they had not been given the same opportunities during their college careers.
With the NCAA as a whole, Power Five and Group of Five schools, FCS schools and non-football Division I schools combining to front the bill, it led to serious financial hits. As a solution, the NCAA removed the cap on guaranteed scholarships across all sports with the exchange coming as new limitations on roster sizes.
For example, Division I football teams were allotted 85 scholarships but up to 120 spots on a roster under the regulations ending in the 2023-24 athletic year. The new regulations would cut the maximum roster size to 100 but allow a program to theoretically offer players on the roster a scholarship, although that is not required and would be up to each individual university to determine its overall budget.
On the soccer side, men’s and women’s programs were cut to a maximum roster of 28 players, with many programs having somewhere between 30-35. With the proliferation of the transfer portal and athletes gaining extra eligibility, the Class of 2025 was thrust into the middle of a race of attrition as programs began the first stage of cutting down numbers to prepare for that offseason movement. It’s likely more cuts to players currently on rosters will follow at the conclusion of the season, so there wasn’t a lot of time for recruits to reconsider their options.
Recruiting – the second time around
Within a few hours of going public, Cairone became one of the early faces of the NCAA roster restriction casualties as her post started to get shared. Other soccer players from around the country started to follow suit with similar social media posts, creating a sense of solidarity that she wasn’t in it alone.
It also caught the attention of college coaches. Programs from across the nation reached out, the number getting close to two dozen within just a couple of days. That led to a bit of a whirlwind past few weeks with Cairone balancing the start of her high school season, the beginning of the school year and trying to narrow down what new programs seemed like the best fit and then setting up visits with them.
“I had to say, ‘What do I want now?’ I thought about what league did I want to play in, what kind of coaching staff am I looking for, what location do I want to go, it was all about casting a wide net,” Cairone said. “
She ultimately made three visits, staying close by to see Penn, heading south to the University of Miami and, of course, west to Nebraska. While signing day for college soccer isn’t until February, Cairone didn’t have a ton of time to make a decision on a new home.
At the same time, she wasn’t going to rush into it either. In a way, she saw this second trip through the recruiting process as a second chance and a way to utilize some lessons she’d learned a year earlier.
“I made a lot of mistakes the first time,” Cairone said. “I only visited Penn State, and I committed on the spot. I learned pretty quickly you shouldn’t just commit on the spot without talking about things like finances or getting a feel for what you’re going to experience at the school, I think it was more important to visit multiple schools and then decide.”
Nebraska, which joined the Big Ten in 2011, was the conference’s regular season champion in 2023. Coach John Walker, who started the program in 1994 and is still at the helm of the Cornhuskers, invites a high-tempo, attack-oriented style that greatly appealed to Cairone.
She and her parents made a visit to Lincoln in September and Cairone was sold, announcing her re-commitment on Sept. 15. One strong factor really helped sway her decision.
“The coaching staff. I love the coaching staff, the players, the team culture, they know what they’re doing,” Cairone said. “Their environment, I knew that’s where I wanted to play. Their style is quick, they’re pressing everywhere, that’s what I wanted to be a part of.”
Finishing strong
By the time CR North took the field on Aug 23 to open its season against West Chester Henderson, all of Cairone’s teammates knew her situation. She scored the game-winning goal in overtime, a classic Cairone goal that saw the senior receive the ball while shielding a defender, making a quick turn and applying a burst of speed to slip another back before calmly slotting it past the keeper.
It was the perfect way to let it all out and a sign to the new coaches tuning in that she wasn’t letting her circumstances off the field affect her efforts on it. If all that wasn’t enough, Cairone tore a hamstring six months ago and had get over the physical and mental hurdles that came with that recovery.
“It was definitely a factor of revenge, I would say, I wanted to show what they were missing if that was going to be my situation,” Cairone said. “Also, I needed film to send to coaches and that definitely helped.”
Cairone had a feeling the news from Penn State might be coming and had given Flannigan some advance notice. When it did happen, the CR North coach told his senior standout to take whatever time and do whatever she needed, even if it meant stepping away from the team for a period of time.
Flannigan added he wouldn’t have blamed Cairone if she’d taken the entire season off but instead has simply marveled at how she’s handled the entire situation. Cairone hasn’t missed a game and minimal practice time while running point and handling the bulk of her re-recruitment by herself while still continuing to deliver on the field.
It was the senior who advised the coach that Nebraska’s staff would be reaching out, something he hasn’t often seen from players in a more normal recruiting process.
“It’s her mentality, right, she had an inkling something was going to happen, she came to me and said it’s not going to work out at Penn State, and when I told her to take a moment, she didn’t even flinch at that,” Flannigan said. “She went to practice, and by the next day, she’d moved on to the next step and what she could do to get to the place she wanted to be at.
“It’s rare in a youth athlete or even kids in general these days, but she was so quick to refocus and just be that mature about it.”
CR North, now 9-3 on the season as of Sept. 23, enters the second half of SOL Patriot play a game back of division leading Neshaminy. Last year, the Indians came two wins short of the state playoffs, a part of the season Cairone and her classmates haven’t yet experienced.
Whatever may come in the second half of the season and beyond, given what she’s already experienced, Cairone feels ready for it.
“I definitely learned a lot about myself, I think resilience-wise, I did not expect to bounce back that quick,” Cairone said. “It was something I actively thought I needed to do, ‘I need to bounce back or I’m not going to have a college going into senior year and signing day coming up soon.’ I wanted to get back on this and get it done quickly.”
