JERSEY CITY, N.J. – If Tobin Heath remains a magnificent enigma in her 10th year on the United States women’s national team, that’s less by design than indifference.

Unlike most of her fellow stars on the team, you won’t see much of her away from the field. She doesn’t do bikini shoots. She’s isn’t on magazine covers. The USWNT’s reigning Player of the Year has a habit of ignoring interview requests, actually.

It isn’t some studied mysteriousness or aloofness. She would just rather play soccer and play it beautifully.

“I’m not opposed to it,” she said in an interview with Yahoo Sports that she was somehow talked into doing. “I think I’m more traditional in how I do media. I want my brand to be about football. I’m a footballer through and through. It’s all I’ve ever wanted to be.”

And it’s what she became. So now it’s all she wants to be doing – aside from surfing and skateboarding and purposeful homelessness and not wearing socks, that is. But we’ll get to all that.

“I grew up loving Brazilian soccer,” Heath said. “What made me think soccer was cool was these guys making soccer look like fun and easy, and they would just destroy people. It was an art. I loved that. And that’s the way I learned the game and mimicked a style. It’s just so beautiful.”

Even longtime U.S. women’s national team fans still don’t entirely know what to make of the 28-year-old Heath. She was always a towering talent, her surpassing and unprecedented skill evident from the day she made her senior national team debut as a 19-year-old in January 2008. But it took much of the following nine years and 131 national team appearances for her to finally shed the prospect tag and become a fully-fledged national team star – on the field, at least.

Until then, Heath was mostly known for her juggling skills.

And her love for the nutmeg.

And her penchant for scoring outrageous goals, on the rare occasion when she did get a goal.

And for pulling mind-bending tricks like this.





For all this, she was beloved, even though all that ball magic wasn’t always put to good use on the field, where Heath remained maddeningly inconsistent. She was unique, though. And an untold number of young players modeled their games on her.

“I looked up to Tobin a lot, just because of the way she plays,” national team prodigy Mallory Pugh said. “Nobody plays like Tobin. It’s just … Tobin.”

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Most of Heath’s fans don’t even know half the fascinating things about her. So let’s get you brushed up on all of the surprising things you probably didn’t know about Tobes, or Toby, or Harry – as she and Allie Long call one another

Heath is an avid surfer, in spite of being a proud native of decidedly non-surfer New Jersey. “The ocean is so powerful and so healing at the same time,” Heath said. “It’s kind of like a sanctuary. And the culture of the people in surfing, I love that. It’s such a community. It’s just got this, like, chill way about it. When you’re in the water, it’s very inclusive.”

She skateboards to practice every day with her National Women’s Soccer League team, the Portland Thorns.

She was effectively homeless after her graduation from the University of North Carolina in 2009 until just before the 2015 Women’s World Cup, when she finally bought a place in Portland. For those six years – save for a spell spent playing with Paris Saint-Germain in France – Heath couch-surfed between friends and family all over the country when she wasn’t with the national team or her clubs. She still doesn’t spend much time at home, since all of her family lives along the Eastern Seaboard.

“It’s a glorified storage facility,” Heath said. “Because of our schedule, we’re always all over the place.”

“It’s kind of the way I feel more comfortable,” Heath explained. “Because since I started with the youth national teams back when I was 13 or something, that’s just how it’s been. It’s been life on the road. So now I feel the most comfortable when I’m always having somewhere to go.”

She is deeply spiritual, although she’s rarely public about it. Every now and again, she’ll allude to it on Instagram.





She lives on Tobin Time, moving at her own speed. She isn’t sure what Tobin Time is when she’s asked about it – it’s a term used by some of those around her.

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