Field goals to goalie goals: How football shaped Taylor Moreno’s sports journey

It started with a question.

Every Sunday, Taylor Moreno could find her dad, Mike, on the couch of their Huntington, N.Y., home watching the Jets, Giants or flipping between the two. Mike grew up in Queens, close to the Jets’ old stomping ground of Shea Stadium, where he treasured catching games of Joe Namath and the New York Sack Exchange — the nickname of the dominant Jets defensive line of the 1980s. Mike rarely ever missed a Sunday kickoff, either in person or digitally.

When Taylor was around five years old, Mike said, she questioned what he was watching. He said the game.

“Can I watch it with you?”

Like it can be, football quickly became an unnamed tradition for the two. Taylor grew into as big a Jets fan as her father, cheering on Darrelle Revis’ coverage on Sundays and perfecting her spiral and running routes in her backyard in her Chad Pennington jersey. It was the quarterback — involved in nearly every play — that intrigued her most. It was a quarterback — a difference-maker — she wanted to be.

But Taylor, a bit of a freak athlete who ended up playing five sports in high school, knew the odds of ever actually being under center weren’t in her favor. So, growing up, she pivoted.

For the first half of a fifth-grade PAL lacrosse game, Taylor volunteered to get in net. None of her teammates particularly wanted to play goalie, so the team often took turns rotating players in and out of cage. But Taylor didn’t think she’d mind taking hits, so in this game, one of the fastest kids on the team was pulled from the midfield (she’d return to the field for the second half). It was Taylor’s turn to try and block some shots, so she put in her mouthguard and put on the chest protector, gloves and helmet to warm up.

Almost immediately, Taylor thought: “Wow, this is sick.”

“I feel like this will probably be the closest I ever get to playing football, just being in all this equipment,” she said.

In her new armor, Taylor felt fearless, never really frightened by the five ounces of vulcanized rubber being pelted her way. And then there was the whole quarterback similarity she drew to it: “I fell in love with how it felt to kind of always, almost always, be involved in the game. I think that’s probably one of the real main reasons why I stuck with it and ran with it.”

She also excelled at it. Taylor committed to play at North Carolina, emerging as a 2021 Tewaaraton Award finalist and IWLCA Goalkeeper of the Year. She led her team to the 2022 national championship, helping clinch the title with 11 saves in a 12-11 thriller against Boston College. Taylor graduated as Carolina’s career leader in saves, goalie minutes played, goalie wins, goalie starts and goalie appearances. She was then a two-time Athletes Unlimited champion in 2022 and 2023 and won the first-ever World Lacrosse Women’s Box Championship gold medal with the U.S. team in 2024. She joined the WLL in its inaugural 2025 Championship Series, where she scored the league’s first-ever goalie goal with the California Palms in the Sixes-style tournament.

At UNC, Taylor dabbled with the idea of being a dual-sport athlete in lacrosse and soccer. She played both competitively growing up, alongside basketball and a year of high school track. She even participated in a flag football league when she was young.

And while the quarterback dream never came true, the football dream did. Yes, Taylor once competitively played football football.

While throwing the pigskin around with some middle school classmates at recess one day, the middle school football coach approached Taylor: He was in need of a quarterback. Taylor raced home that day, delighted, and told Mike and her mom, Theresa, about it. But her parents vetoed the idea, citing potential harm and injuries for a star athlete who had a legitimate future in other sports.

“If I could go back, I think maybe my decision would’ve been different,” Mike said.

Good thing it wasn’t Taylor’s only chance to put on football pads. Because when a second chance arose, Mike didn’t have to think twice.

For her junior season, Taylor made another transition from midfield to goalie, but this time in soccer for her high school team. New to the net, she struggled with the accuracy and power of her goal kick, so she asked her sixth-grade science teacher, Mr. Suarez — who coached the boys soccer team — to help her.

For a week straight during the summer going into her junior year of high school, Taylor arrived at the field early before the boys’ soccer summer camp started and worked with Mr. Suarez on her kicks. By the fall season, her kicks were controlled and could travel well downfield; she even notched an assist off a goal kick and scored a game-winning goal from far. It got the attention of the football coach, ​​Steven Muller, who was looking for a kicker for the following season. Again, Taylor was asked if she wanted to play football. They’d figure out her place on the field, her schedule alongside soccer, all of it.

Again, Taylor thought to herself, “This is so sick.”

“I obviously hopped on board … because all I ever wanted to do when I was younger was play football,” she said.

Taylor trained to learn how to properly kick a football. The summer going into her senior year in 2015, she joined the football team for training twice a day. The following week, she joined the women’s soccer team for summer training, again twice a day. Her schedule that fall was convenient, though chaotic: soccer practice from 3 to 5 p.m. and football practice from 5 to 7.

Once Taylor proved to the coaches she could consistently hit PATs (point after touchdown), she was put in games. She only kicked PATs in order to protect herself for soccer and remembers nailing kicks at the high schools of future Carolina teammate Jamie Ortega (Centereach) and fellow WLL player and now-girlfriend Ally Kennedy (North Babylon).

One of the coolest parts, she remembers, was the normalcy of it all. Her male teammates were all “awesome,” “super protective” and “super accepting,” Taylor said. Once she started drilling balls through the uprights at summer camp, any doubts from her teammates fled the field.

“The memories of just, like, people being so shocked, yet not shocked at the same time that like I was kicking for the football team, I think that was probably the coolest thing,” Taylor said. “Yes, it was out of the ordinary, but also, the way people kind of looked at it and people who knew me very well were not shocked whatsoever.”

Especially Mike.

“She kind of lived out a little bit of her dream,” he said.