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scored more than 95 career goals and earned recognition as the two-time Region Player of the Year and threetime all-state selection. McMahan will graduate with 20 letters to her resume hailing from six different varsity sports.

Aside from soccer, McMahan has competed in track, cross country, basketball, football, and flag football during her four years at McIntosh County Academy.

And she wasn’t just showing up for practice. McMahan has won region championships in the 800-meter, 1600m, and 3200m runs in track, she’s a two-time region champion and fourtime state qualifier in cross country. She’s a two-year starter on the basketball team, she is a two-time all-area selection in flag football, and she’s the first female in school history to score for the MCA football team — finishing her career with 25 points.

Yet, if McMahan had her way early, we might have never seen the multi-sport star shine. She never envisioned herself in sports before her parents signed her up for soccer.

“I didn’t want to play it, but they put me in it,” McMahan says. “I hated it at first.”

A soccer ball to the face certainly didn’t make the first experience any more enjoyable.

FA stray soccer ball unceremoniously welcomed a 7-year-old Madi McMahan to her first athletic endeavor.

“I got hit in the face my very first game, and I didn’t like that,” the McIntosh County Academy senior says with a smile.

A decade later, McMahan is set to play college soccer at Brenau University after completing one of the most decorated athletic careers in MCA history.

Still, McMahan stuck it out. She even began running with her father Jamey, a longtime jogger himself. Soon, soccer wasn’t so bad anymore.

“I didn’t like it at all, then I guess I kind of got good at it, so I started liking it a lot better,” McMahan said.

First impressions are important — but they are not everything.

However, McMahan hasn’t confined her talents to the pitch, where she’s

But that was it. When she was young, McMahan expressed she never wanted to play sports. She could make an exception for soccer; she was showing a real knack for the game, but how often could that be the case?

Then her friends talked her into joining the basketball team in sixth grade.

“I didn’t like basketball either,” McMahan says. “I stopped playing my seventh-grade year then I started playing again my eighth-grade year.”

McMahan is the poster child for the rich rewards of simply trying something new.

Once she reached high school at McIntosh County Academy, McMahan added track to her repertoire. It was as a junior that she added her fifth, and most daring sport yet when she earned a spot on the school’s varsity football team.

“We came over (to the practice field) one day, I think we were on break for some reason, and I was just kicking a little bit,” McMahan recounts the story.

McIntosh County Academy athletic director, and head football coach, Bradley Warren caught a glimpse of some of the kicks and offered McMahan an opportunity to try out for the team.

“During the season she was coming down to kick and get her work in, whatever was asked or whatever she wanted to do on her own, and then she’d go run cross country right after that,” Warren says.

“I’m like, ‘I’m not going to not give this to her if she earns it,’ and then all of a sudden, she’s out-kicking a couple of guys that were trying out for it and they just sort of wilted away. She’d earned the job.”

It was while McMahan was kicking for the varsity football team when the Georgia High School Association officially sanctioned flag football as a championship sport in the fall of 2021, providing her clearance to add a sixth sport to her ledger.

McMahan was the running back of the flag football team her junior year before taking over as the team’s quarterback this past season.

“It was like going from kicker, where you just go out on the field every once in a while, to being on the field all the time,” she says.

There was a two-week stretch last year where McMahan was a member of four active sports — football, flag football, basketball, and cross country. There’s school too, of course. Not that it bothers McMahan, whose GPA sits well north of 4.0.

If McMahan has a secret to her success in any and every dominion she’s stepped into, she’s not sharing it.

“I don’t know,” McMahan says wrly. “It’s fun. I just got something to do year round. I’m always busy.”

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