Molly McCage: Championing Strength, Style, and Space for Women in Sports
From a young age, fashion was about more than just clothing for Molly McCage—it was a creative playground.
She planned not just one, but three different Halloween costumes each year, eager to embrace every dress-up opportunity.
Growing up in a household full of athletes, McCage discovered another outlet for self-expression in sports. She dabbled in cheerleading, basketball, and track before ultimately committing to volleyball—the sport that would define her professional career. Yet, even as volleyball took center stage, her love for fashion never faded.
Blending athleticism and fashion wasn’t always easy, especially as a young girl who shot up eight inches in one year before reaching her full height of 6-foot-3. Highwaters quickly became an unavoidable stylistic element of every outfit.
But inseam limitations weren’t the only hurdle for an athlete with a love of fashion. McCage believes society still struggles with the idea that strength and femininity can coexist.
“Why one without the other?” McCage asks. “It’s funny. Being a girly girl does not negate how strong and impressive and powerful you are on the court. If anything, if you’re allowed to express that part of yourself as well, I think both are heightened.”
Now, with seven years of professional volleyball experience under her belt, McCage is embracing her enthusiasm for fashion more than ever. She’s built a niche community on social media, where her thousands of followers across Instagram and TikTok can tune in for game-day fit checks, sustainable fashion discussions, and dynamic offensive highlights, as well as dominant defensive clips of her on-court endeavors.
Her goal? To showcase the multifaceted nature of women in sports and inspire others to embrace their unique passions without compromise.
Although McCage developed an impressive professional resume, learning to take control of her own personal journey and volleyball career took time as she navigated the added challenges of societal stereotypes faced by women athletes.
Following a prolific collegiate career at Texas, McCage’s professional journey landed her in Germany, where she played for Allianz MTV Stuttgart and VC Wiesbaden, earning back-to-back Best Blocker titles. Despite her success, she felt the pressure to chart her post-retirement path.
“I just felt like I hit a wall,” McCage recalled. “I felt like a cog in the machine, like, ‘What are my goals here?’… The ever-looming, ‘What are you going to transition to? What’s your career afterward?’”
In 2020, at just 25 years old, McCage decided to retire.
But that choice didn’t keep her off the court for long. In 2021, McCage was presented with a new on-court career opportunity, this time, on U.S. soil. McCage signed on for the inaugural season of Athletes Unlimited Pro Volleyball, starting a new chapter that sparked growth on and off the court, and helped her reshape her relationship with the game.
“Women are athletes well beyond 25. If anything, they’re better athletes after 25,” McCage said. “I want to make sure that women understand that being a woman athlete is not like, ‘Alright, you have kids and you’re done.’ …We need to push this boundary of, you’re not done when you’ve finished college. If anything, you’re just getting started.”
As one of the first athletes to sign on with AU, McCage helped form the league’s first Player Executive Committee (PEC). Although unsure of herself in the leadership role, she quickly learned to value her own voice and embraced the chance to advocate for every athlete in the unprecedented league.
“We were doing these PEC meetings, and I really was intimidated,” she said. “(AU CEO and co-founder) Jon [Patricof] called me after one of the meetings, and he was like, ‘Hey, there’s a reason you’re on these calls. We need your opinion. We need your voice.’ And from then on, I just yapped away. I’d never had somebody be like, ‘No, we actually value your opinion, and we almost need it for this sport to grow.’”
Since then, McCage has used her voice to uplift her fellow athletes as the longest-serving member of the PEC and has worked to spark positive change—not only as it applies to the game she loves but also in the fashion world.
McCage’s AU Athlete Cause is 1% For the Planet, an international organization that challenges its members to take responsibility for their environmental impact by committing at least one percent of their annual revenue to environmental causes.
“As much as I love being part of the fashion world, we do need to call out fast fashion in every aspect,” McCage said. “Just understanding we are living in a consumerist society, like overconsumption is literally everywhere. And I think we need to, one, call it out, and two, just be aware of the fact that this planet is precious, and being a good global citizen is just a priority of mine.”
The global initiative pushes businesses and individuals to actively invest in the planet’s future rather than simply profit from its resources and challenges some of the wasteful practices that are common in the fashion industry.
McCage advocates for buying second-hand clothing and supporting small businesses.
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Overconsumption isn’t the only fashion-related issue she aims to tackle. McCage recognizes a blind spot when it comes to tall-girl clothing options and uses her platform to share her best brand recommendations and inspire confidence in those who have been taught to be ashamed of their height.
“I have thankfully been in communities my entire life that being tall is celebrated,” McCage said. “But it really does come with comments every single day, judgments, you can’t find clothes, you’re always sticking out. It can seriously and truly impact your mental health, and so that fashion piece is super important to me. Empowering tall women to find clothes that make them feel awesome…you are beautiful because you are tall.”
Through her online presence, McCage strives to create an uplifting community that empowers women to embrace both their strength and femininity, proving that power and grace are not opposing forces but essential elements of self-expression.
“Women carry those parallels, all of the time,” McCage said. “I love taking up space and being big and aggressive on the court. But on the flip side of that, I also love being super feminine. I love that fashion community as well… It’s just a blend of two beautiful worlds to me.”
Siera Jones is the digital media reporter at Athletes Unlimited. You can follow her on Instagram and X @sieraajones.
