“Life with Sophia Bush feels like coming home,” Ashlyn Harris said, a line she returned to repeatedly while talking about the work of rebuilding her life after elite sport.
Harris is here to promote Gamechangers: The Ashlyn Harris Story, which premieres June 8 on The Roku Channel, and the film frames that return-to-self as the product of choices that began years earlier. The two-time World Cup champion retired from soccer in 2022 and told viewers she has been doing a lot of healing since then — a process she links directly to the stability she now describes with Bush.
The simplest numbers underline the change Harris described: she began playing soccer at age 5, chased the sport through adulthood, retired in 2022, filed for divorce from Ali Krieger in September 2023 after nearly four years of marriage, and then started dating Bush in October 2023. She and Krieger share two children, Sloane and Ocean, and those family ties are threaded through both the documentary and Harris’s reflections on identity after competition.
“We filter too much success when it comes to sports and athletes,” Harris said during the conversation. “We always show the highlight reels.” She leaned into that point: chasing elite achievement demanded sacrifices. “Chasing greatness was awesome, but it cost me a lot,” she said, and then a line that struck the room — “I know I hurt her in that process.”
That admission is the friction at the center of Harris’s story. She insists she is thriving now — “I’m the happiest I’ve ever been,” she said — and that she has reached a steadier sense of self: “I love myself. I just always want to be authentic.” But Harris did not frame the present as a simple exit from pain. The divorce and its aftermath, she said, were hard decisions that caused real hurt to her former partner, a fact she acknowledges plainly rather than smoothing over.
The documentary revisits the trade-offs she made long before the headlines: Harris told the filmmakers she did not go to birthday parties while pursuing soccer greatness, a small detail that the film uses to show how singular the athletic focus was from childhood. Those early choices — starting at age 5 and accelerating into a professional life — set up both the triumphs and the gaps she is now trying to fill.
Harris credits the work after retirement, and the relationship that followed, with giving her a sense of home she had lacked while in the constant orbit of training and travel. She described her current life as an accumulation of the healing steps she has taken since 2022, and she framed her relationship with Bush as part of that recovery rather than its whole. “Life with Sophia Bush feels like coming home” is how she put it; “home” here means stability, an ability to parent, and a renewed commitment to authenticity.
What happens next is immediate and public: Gamechangers lands on The Roku Channel on June 8, offering viewers the fuller arc Harris sketched in brief — the childhood trades, the locker-room rewards, the personal costs and the work of repair. If the movie’s aim is to show how an elite athlete can remake herself after the final whistle, Harris’s answer to what changed is concrete: she stepped away from the game, did the healing work she says was necessary, and allowed a new relationship to be part of that life. The premiere will be the first wide window for the public to see exactly how she connects those pieces — and whether the claim that she’s finally home will hold up on screen.
