VANCOUVER – It seems all Sydney Leroux wanted from her estranged father was his citizenship.

It allowed Leroux, born and raised in Surrey, to move to America as a teenager to pursue a place on her soccer team of choice: the United States national team. Leroux no longer speaks to her dad, former professional baseball player Ray Chadwick, who met Sandi Leroux while playing for the Vancouver Canadians in 1989 but left to play winter ball before Sydney was born the following May. Sandi Leroux raised her daughter as a single parent.

By all written accounts, Sydney was a handful, as several billet families in Seattle and Arizona discovered.

She’ll probably be a handful this evening when she plays for Team USA in Vancouver against Nigeria in a first-round World Cup game that has much more riding on it than most people envisioned, which is not a good thing for the Americans.

While Leroux has nothing to say about her dad — “I don’t talk to him,” she told The Los Angeles Times about Chadwick, who ironically settled in Canada and is now the baseball coach at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops — she has good things to say about her birth country.

“I love Vancouver more than any city in the world,” Leroux, 25, said after practising Monday evening at BC Place. “My mom still lives here, my family still lives here, so this city is very dear to my heart.

“The amount of people who have come up to me while walking the streets of Vancouver ... even Canadian fans are being like: ‘Congratulations, we’re proud of you. We’re coming to the game, we’re rooting for you guys.’ It’s been really cool. I really don’t have anything bad to say.”

That was not the case two years ago when Leroux and Team USA played Canada in Toronto in a “friendly” that followed their epic semifinal at the London Olympics. Leroux was booed relentlessly. When she scored in the 3-0 U.S. victory, she raised her finger to her lips to shush the hostile crowd and proudly displayed the American logo on her jersey.

After the game, she made an incendiary comment on Twitter: “When you chant racial slurs, taunt me and talk about my family, don’t be mad when I shush you and show pride in what I represent. #america.” The next day, she clarified that no one in Toronto said anything racist to her.

These are her first games in Canada since then.

“I think, to be honest, a lot of that is in the past,” Leroux, 25, said Monday. “It’s old news now. I think people are a lot more understanding. It’s been really cool. Our games have been almost like we’ve been home. The past two games (in Winnipeg) it’s like we’ve been playing in a U.S. city. It’s probably going to be similar tomorrow.

“I love being back in the city. The (Team USA) girls are like: ‘Oh, this is one of the most beautiful cities I’ve been to.’ I’m like: ‘Yeah, well, I was born here.’”

Yes, but she left, which is the point. Some Canadians will never forgive her for that.

It was one thing for Calgary’s Owen Hargreaves to forsake the Canadian national team for mighty England in men’s soccer, but something entirely different for Leroux to choose the U.S. over competitive Canada in the women’s game. Leroux is a difference-maker. She has scored 35 goals in 73 appearances for the U.S. and is still getting better.

She could have been the next Christine Sinclair — and may already be better than Canada’s top player — but instead looks like the next Abby Wambach, the iconic American forward who came off the bench while Leroux started up front for last week’s 3-1 win against Australia and 0-0 draw with Sweden.

“I’m doing anything I possibly can to help my team do well, regardless of whether I’m on the bench and I’m cheering or I’m on the field trying to play hard and score goals,” Leroux said.

There is so much noise surrounding this U.S. team, her return to Canada hardly registers.

A storm continues to gather over domestic abuse allegations against American goalkeeper Hope Solo and U.S. Soccer’s alleged investigation of them. Wambach is still complaining about artificial turf, which she plays on willingly for her professional club team, and absurdly claimed on the weekend that it is responsible for Team USA’s offensive problems. The Americans, favourites for this World Cup after failing to win any of the last three, may still need a result against Nigeria to advance beyond the group stage.

“This team is under the microscope 24/7,” U.S. coach Jill Ellis said. “They’ve been like that for years and years and years. I think it just comes with the territory in terms of the attention this team garners. It’s (about) not allowing any distractions to come into it.”

imacintyre@vancouversun.com