Mollie Eriksson never thought she’d get to call herself a hometown pro.
“It has been a lifelong dream of mine to play professional sport,” Eriksson said. But she grew up playing soccer at a time when there weren’t a lot of domestic opportunities for the top players in Canada.
That changed in 2025, with the creation of the Northern Super League (NSL) – the first professional women’s league in Canada. When she heard that the NSL was launching, “it was a no-brainer to me that that was something I wanted to strive for.”
Eriksson was scouted to play goalie for the Ottawa Rapid FC, in a city where she spent many of her formative years.
Eriksson is a goalkeeper for the Ottawa Rapid FC.
While seeing this dream come to fruition, she’s been juggling another dream, too – getting her PhD.
She’s a third-year PhD student in Psychology, Neuroscience and Behaviour at McMaster, under the supervision of Louis Schmidt in the Child Emotion Lab. It’s certainly busy, but Eriksson — who played for DePaul University in Chicago as an undergrad —has balanced sport and school her whole life. Working on her dissertation while playing pro soccer isn’t all that different, she says. “Just the stakes are a little higher.”
“When you have a passion for what you’re doing, anything is achievable.”
The dark side of social anxiety
Eriksson’s research focuses on social anxiety and youth.
Historically, social anxiety was referred to as social phobia, and research was shaped by this view of it inhibiting behaviour — that anyone with social anxiety was fearful, shy, risk-averse and withdrawn from new situations or people.
But social anxiety, like most constructs, is a broad concept. “My program of research hopes to examine the whole spectrum of social anxiety, specifically in adolescence,” Eriksson said. “I have a keen interest in what my supervisor and some researchers are calling the dark side of social anxiety — so the aggressive and impulsive correlates of the disorder.”
She’s particularly interested in the development of this pathological state. A new paper by Eriksson and Schmidt, published in the Personality and Individual Differences, looked at a subset of youth individuals with social anxiety who displayed impulsivity and aggression — suggesting that “fear of rejection may sometimes be managed through externalizing responses,” the paper notes.
Their findings replicate those of research on adults, and suggest that vulnerable narcissism, also known as narcissistic personality disorder, may play a role. Eriksson said that narcissism may be one reason why some teenagers with social anxiety feel torn — they strongly want approval and recognition from others, yet at the same time feel anxious and avoid social situations.
Eriksson hopes that her research can help recognize risk factors, and what is normative versus not normative, to guide appropriate intervention.
“It’s not to intervene on things that we have no business pathologizing. Individual differences are to be expected,” she said. “But once we, as a community — perhaps as parents or friends or teachers or peers — once we start to recognize these sort of pathological, maladaptive states, like social anxiety, can we intervene earlier so that the outcomes are better.”
A dual dream
She credits Schmidt with empowering her to pursue the dual dream of research and soccer. “He was a baseball player, so I think he really understands the passion for sport and the passion for academia,” she said. “But I also think he’s created an environment within our lab that is highly supportive. So I have really, really great friends that are in my cohort who encourage me to do all the things that I want to do.”
The McMaster women’s soccer team — who Eriksson worked with as an assistant coach from 2023-2024 — also pushed her further. “I loved working with that team. They’re a group of fantastic individuals… they’ve really inspired me to continue growing my game and transition into this professional sphere.”
Last summer, she signed a contract extension with the Rapids through 2027. She’s not sure what the future will hold for her after that. “All I know is I want to keep doing what I love, and what I love is research and soccer.”
Eriksson has signed a contract extension with the Rapids through 2027.
Research and sport
In fact, Eriksson wonders if there’s a way to bridge her passion for sport and her research interests in the future. “I do think there is a lot to learn from each other.”
As an undergrad, she worked with CAMH to identify protective factors for mental health in a clinical population.
One of the things they identified, which could help protect individuals from later mental health issues or make them less severe, was feeling like you belong.
“One thing that sport has always given me is a place where I belong,” Eriksson said. “I’ve been really privileged in [that] sense.”
It also makes her a better researcher, Eriksson said.
“I think as a happy individual, I do better work. Research productivity, life productivity is in large part dictated by your mental health and your mental state.”
“I’m a better researcher cause I’m a happier individual, because I’m playing my sport. And I’m a happier individual within my sport because I have this other thing. So they kind of go hand in hand.”