Portland Thorns Ellie Carpenter’s rise from teen whizz to Matildas gun
She’s gone from an excited kid competing at her first Olympic Games to a mainstay of the Matilda’s football side. So how is sporting nomad Ellie Carpenter doing staying in one place for the first time in years?
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Four years ago she was the baby of the Australian Olympic team.
Four years on she is working on being one of its stars.
Former Westfield Sports High student Ellie Carpenter is dumbfounded how quickly time has flown since the Rio Olympics and how much she has grown as a player.
“It is crazy to think it’s been four years already,” said Carpenter, who made her Matildas debut when just 15 and was the youngest ever footballer to represent Australia at an Olympic Games when just 16 and still at school.
“It would be amazing to compete in a second Olympics,” said Carpenter of the very real prospect of playing in Tokyo at the reschedule Games next year.
“I have grown so much on and off the field and I think I could give so much more.
“I was so young, didn’t have a lot of experience and I have big tournament experience now.
“It would be very different.”
Now an in-demand football nomad, the Cowra-born Carpenter usually spends much of the year after her duties in the W-League in America with her top flight US national women’s soccer league side, the Portland Thorns.
But due to the outbreak of Covid 19, Carpenter, who has played with the Wanderers, Canberra United and Melbourne City in the Australian league and boasts more than 30 international caps, has found herself in limbo and is waiting out the pandemic at her mothers home at Wamberal on the Central Coast.
“I’ve had two seasons in Portland now and it has taken my game to the next level,” said Carpenter who turned 20 on Tuesday, the same day she had expected to be playing a game for Portland before “the world turned upside down”.
“Now I’m just waiting to see what happens, for this travel band to be lifted and to see what is happening with the competition. It’s just a waiting game. Nothing is really happening right now,” she said.
Carpenter said the enforced isolation due to the pandemic has seen her stay in one place longer than she has for years.
“Normally I never spend any time at home, maybe just a week here and there“ she said. “It’s nice to kind of just relax the body a little bit but at the same time keep things ticking along.”
Carpenter is making the most of the opportunity, cleaning out her old bedroom for the first time in years while staying in shape with fitness programs she does in her mother’s backyard or at a local park.
It has also given her the chance to rest up after a hectic international schedule over the past 12 months which included numerous games for the Matilda as they worked on qualifying for the rescheduled Tokyo Olympics, an Asian Cup and also the World Cup in France last year.
“I don’t know when it will happen but I can’t wait to be playing again,” Carpenter said.