“Collective Action Works”: Tori Huster on Union Power, DC SCORES, and Why the Future Is Bright for the Next Generation

Poet-Athlete Award winner Tori Huster continues making history. 

When the former professional soccer player hung up her cleats in December 2023, she’d secured her icon status in the sport as the most tenured player in Washington Spirit history. 

But Huster’s seismic impact on soccer is as much about her accomplishments off the field as those on it. She currently serves as the deputy executive director of the National Women’s Soccer League Players Association (NWSLPA), the official union representing all players in the NWSL. As president of the NWSLPA between 2020 and 2024, she led negotiations to secure two groundbreaking collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) that changed the face of the American sports industry. 

In May, youth development nonprofit DC SCORES will present the 2025 Poet-Athlete Award to Huster at Our Words Our City, DC SCORES’ premier poetry showcase. The award is presented annually to an individual who embodies the ethos of DC SCORES poet-athletes through their commitment to their physical and emotional wellbeing and by using their voice to speak up for their communities. 

Huster will receive the award for her community work for DC SCORES’ award-winning afterschool soccer, poetry, and service-learning program as well as her continued leadership on workers’ rights with the NWSLPA.

“[DC SCORES] has an immense impact,” says Huster. “Thinking that I had a positive impact in the community to receive this award, it’s just extremely humbling.”

“We Have to Advocate for Change”

Huster grew up in Cincinnati and began playing soccer after her dad noticed she “loved kicking things.”

She discovered a passion for the sport and won a string of accolades as a high school athlete. After a four-year college career with the Florida State University, Huster was drafted by the Washington Spirit during the 2013 NWSL Supplemental Draft. She spent her career at the club, amassing more than 13,000 minutes. 

Huster believes the security to put down roots with the team obligated her to become a NWSLPA representative when the union formed in 2017. “I got to stay in one place the whole time and I think that came with the responsibility to make the club better, make the market more attractive,” she says.

The NWSLPA was formed at a time when players in the league faced significant challenges. Many were leaving for higher-paying jobs that could support them full-time, while those who stayed spoke out about inadequate medical care. Then, in 2021, several players went public about the abuse and sexual misconduct they experienced from coaches and senior figures in the NWSL. 

“It was just really hard to exist as a women’s professional soccer player in the U.S.,” says Huster of those first few years. “We came to the understanding that the league is not going to do this for us, we have to advocate for change.”

Demanding Player Rights

For a union that is less than a decade old, the NWSLPA has made remarkable strides. 

When Huster was elected president in January 2020, one of her first acts was to lead negotiations establishing health and safety protocols around the COVID-19 pandemic. The NWSL became the first professional sports league in the country to return to play. 

That same year, the union notified the league of its intent to negotiate its first CBA. 

“I feel like I have a quasi-law degree because of all the lawyers I’ve been around!” says Huster about being at the bargaining table. “It was really incredible, being able to negotiate and advocate for the change that needed to happen.”

The first CBA was ratified in 2022 and secured significant minimum wage increases, free agency rights (the first in U.S. professional women’s soccer history), and health and safety protections including mental health leave, pregnancy and parental leave, and the right to a second opinion in the case of injury. 

The 2022 CBA was “a foundational moment,” says Huster, and opened up avenues for players to share what they needed as workers in the league. While every player’s experience may be different, she says, “we get to a point where we understand what the next step is.”

The next step, it turned out, was to return to the negotiating table. 

In July 2024, the NWSLPA announced it had secured a second CBA, one that was unprecedented in the domestic sports industry. It guaranteed contracts, extended free agency to all players, and made the NWSL the first league in the country to abolish the draft. 

“Together, we secured freedoms that empower the players to have autonomy over their careers and, in doing so, reshaped American sports,” Huster told the AFL-CIO after the CBA was announced.

The NWSLPA is now focused on enforcing the terms of the new CBA, while looking to secure better salaries, facilities, and benefits for players that keep up with the league’s projected growth. “Collective action really works,” says Huster. “We’ve proved that when people come together and demand change, they can truly make a difference.”

“We’re soccer players, but we’re workers,” says Huster of the ethos that drives the NWSLPA’s work. “That is our identity as a labour union.”

Poet-Athlete Power

Embracing and asserting their rights as workers has enabled NWSLPA members to build community, demand equity, and build toward better conditions for future generations of players.

That’s perhaps why the DC SCORES “poet-athlete” moniker resonates so strongly with Huster; it’s another expansive identity built around collective power. “It’s a reminder that I am more than any one thing,” she says.

Huster experienced the impact of DC SCORES firsthand as a player on the Spirit. She cheered on poet-athletes during tournaments, packed boxes of equipment to send to their homes during online pandemic programming, and greeted them from the pitch when they attended Spirit games in Audi Field’s DC SCORES Young Supporters section. 

She also attended Our Words Our City, where DC SCORES youth perform their original poetry alongside some of the top spoken word artists in the DMV and where Huster will receive her award in May.  

“It wasn’t until I attended Our Words Our City that I was really enlightened to the impact that DC SCORES is having in D.C.,” she says. “[Kids] are performing poetry that is deep and meaningful. It elicits such a deep sense that this next generation is going to be okay.”

When she steps onto the Our Words Our City stage to collect her Poet-Athlete Award in May, she hopes that the more than 3,500 young people served by DC SCORES will hear her story and realize the collective power that they have to create change together.

Huster says community empowerment begins with a team. “We’re the team behind the team,” she says of the NWSLPA. “We’re the team that the players are always a part of.”

Readers can buy tickets to Our Words Our City on May 20 at dcscores.org/our-words-our-city-event-info.