How did Freese do it? By scraping his way through the college and professional ranks and continuing to improve, channeling the same energy he had as a young boy leaping onto his bed. “I just continue to remind myself,” Freese told NBC News, “I’m always a student of the game.”
Being a student happens to run in the family. Matt’s paternal grandparents, Ernst and Elisabeth Freese, were German scientists who immigrated to the U.S. after World War II and ended up working for the National Institutes of Health. Ernst was a renowned molecular biologist who studied DNA mutations, the link between chemicals and cancer, and the root of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases.
“He discovered how gene mutations work,” said Katherine Freese, who is their daughter and Matt’s aunt. “Which is like the foundation of evolution, for God’s sake.”
Katherine became a scientist, too. She is an astrophysicist who teaches at the University of Texas and is a leading expert in dark matter. She’s working to answer weighty questions such as: How did the early universe begin? And what is the universe made of?
Then there’s Dr. Andy Freese, Matt’s dad. He was a neurosurgeon who attended Harvard as an undergrad and for medical school and later earned a Ph.D. in neurobiology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was recognized as a pioneer in the field of gene therapy before he died in 2021 at 61 of kidney failure.
The extended family includes more academics, all of whom have their own impressive lists of degrees and accomplishments. “It’s kind of the family business,” Katherine said.
Imagine the reaction, then, when Matt, a sparkling high school student, said he wanted to be a professional soccer player. Andy was unfamiliar with the sports world and worried that his son would get swallowed up in it. “It was a little bit foreign to him,” Matt said.
Others in the family had a similar reaction: “I remember my uncle saying, ‘Poor Matt is going to end up sitting on the bench his whole life.’ My biologist uncle,” Katherine said. “‘Oh no, it’ll never work!’”
In the end, Matt and his father reached a compromise. Matt went to Harvard to study economics and play on the soccer team. He stayed for two seasons before he signed with Major League Soccer’s Philadelphia Union in 2018. A few years later, the pandemic hit and Harvard started offering online classes, which allowed Matt to finish his degree in 2022. But Andy didn’t get the chance to see him graduate.
“He obviously came around,” Katherine said. “Matt was better than anybody understood.”
Matt also put his studies to good use. In college, he wrote “a very long research project” about penalty kicks. As he rose through the soccer ranks, his strength as a goalie, it turned out, was his mind — how he approached the position in an almost scientific way.
“I think people typically, incorrectly, think that it’s a position where you’re a shot-stopper,” Freese said. “What you’re trying to do is prevent goals. Whether that’s through proactive, good positioning, good communication, understanding of the game, reading of a play.”
Goalies are constantly surveying the field, diagnosing where the threat might come from, positioning themselves to protect against it. “A lot of goalkeeping,” Freese said, “is maximizing the surface area of the goal that you can cover at any given point.”
It helps that Freese has a mind, inherited from his father, that can solve problems. “It’s a logical and analytical mind,” said Katherine, the dark matter expert. “It’s a way of looking at the world. Putting pieces together, seeing things that other people don’t see.”
What exactly does she mean by that? “In math and physics, you have to be creative. There’s equations, but you can’t just blindly turn to equations. You have to decide: What problem are you going to solve? You have to be creative and think: What if we put A and B together? What happens? You’re putting pieces together in a way people didn’t see before. We have that skill. We can see things.”
Throughout a soccer game, for all the goalie’s involvement, Matt believes, the position is judged by a handful of plays “where you make a name for yourself,” he said. “You’ll typically get two to three per game, maximum. And so you need to be fully focused and present and 100% explosive during those moments.”
To prepare for those moments, Freese has a routine. He of course watches a lot of video, studying his opponents’ tendencies. But he also limits his cellphone use, avoids social media and stays “off of technology as much as I can.” He eats a simple diet: chicken and vegetables, plus carbs during the season. He also meditates and prioritizes seeing sunlight in the morning, he said, “to get in tune with my natural biology as much as possible.”
His natural biology is unlike that of other goalies, too. Matt’s maternal grandfather was Jack Geary, who was an Air Force pilot and professional football player, according to the family. Matt wears the jersey No. 49 for his MLS team, New York City FC, in Geary’s honor. “I was also born with very natural athleticism,” Freese said. “I’m very thankful for that. But you have to let that come out. And to let that come out, you’ve got to be in a flow, and you’ve got to be fluid and just able to make the save.”