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Princeton University Athletics
Porter '16 Making Headlines
June 15, 2017 | Men's Soccer
On June 13 he was named one of the World's Top 20 Most Tech-Savvy Athletes by SportTechie. SportsTechie considered athletes' diversified interests and investments along with forward-thinkers and those who drove conversations around different niches within technology, including wearables, digital media, esports, emerging innovation and virtual reality, among others. Porter is on that list - along with LeBron James, Derek Jeter, Serena Williams and Cristiano Ronaldo.
Steve Brisendine wrote a feature story for MLSsoccer.com on Porter, and his dual role in Major League Soccer, as both player for Sports Kansas City and as a software engineer for MLS Digital. Here's a portion of that article from June 8:
KANSAS CITY, Kan. – Cameron Porter turned pro in his chosen field even before leaving Princeton. Some time after that, he started getting paid for playing soccer, too.
Sporting Kansas City's young forward majored in computer science at the Ivy League school and launched his first startup as a junior – and it's still thriving, though he has stepped away from day-to-day operations. Now, Porter wears two hats with MLS – as a player and also working as a software engineer on the development side for MLS Digital.
Porter loves doing double duty, though.
"Doing software engineering on the side makes me enjoy playing soccer even more," the third-year pro says. "No matter whether it's a crappy hot day, or anything – because you really appreciate just what an amazing job it is, to be able to play every day."
If it weren't for soccer, though, Porter – who was drafted by the Montreal Impact in the third round of the 2015 MLS SuperDraft and came to Sporting last July in a trade for Amadou Dia – might have taken a different academic route entirely.
"I went into college, thought I'd be an [economics] major," he says. "The computer science class at Princeton was notoriously hard, and a few of the guys on the soccer team were like, 'You know what? Let's see if we can do this.'
"And so we took the class, loved it. Took another one, we still loved it and we ended up taking even more computer science classes than any of our majors. One thing led to another and we were computer science majors, me and three friends of mine from the team."
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