— Her nickname began as an Instant Messenger username, an easy mashup of her initials and her favorite pastime: “Soccer HAO.” A coach eventually took to just calling her “Hey-O!” and it stuck. He dropped soccer. HAO never did.

Few American soccer stars have been more accomplished, more tenacious and more beloved than Heather Ann O’Reilly. It’s a rare trifecta in the elite echelons of sport, where kindness and competitiveness are often viewed as mutually exclusive. She’s fierce and ferocious on the field, with an “angry chicken” face, in the words of Anson Dorrance, her college coach. Off the field, she’s accessible and affable with others, yet also austere and pensive when alone with her thoughts. Every aspect of her psyche exists in a genuine state. There’s no phoniness. All of HAO is all real, all the time.

O’Reilly will end her storied professional playing career this month. Her final regular season match is next Saturday against Sky Blue FC, her first pro team in 2009, the same year she won her first pro league championship. Her current club, the North Carolina Courage, held a send-off celebration for her last month. She obliged by wowing the Cary, NC, crowd with a goal and assist, seemingly for old time’s sake.

But Heather O’Reilly isn’t one to just fade into the sunset. Circumstances have since thrust her into the Courage’s starting lineup, ensuring that she’ll finish her career at WakeMed Soccer Park, the same place she won both of her college national championships, and even before that the same place she tallied her first goal and assist for the U.S. national team this month 17 years ago, as a 17-year-old high schooler.

There’s another special soccer pitch in O’Reilly’s life. The renovated UNC Soccer and Lacrosse Stadium sits on the same spot as Fetzer Field, the WPA-era facility where Dorrance forged his legend as coach of the Tar Heels women’s soccer team, on a field that now bears his name. O’Reilly played for UNC from 2003 to 2006, and she recently became Dorrance’s volunteer assistant coach. The Tar Heels have just beaten rivals NC State when I catch up with her.

The old Carolina blue track that once encircled Fetzer is where her husband Dave proposed to her in 2010, a group effort that included ‘Heather, will you marry me?’ beaming from stadium’s electronic scoreboard. As we sit fieldside on a balmy September evening, the university’s bell tower chiming in the distance every quarter-hour, the setting revives O’Reilly’s favorite Fetzer memories. “Kind of at this time of night, when I was in school. I lived in Carmichael dorm [adjacent to the stadium], so I remember the nights where it’s quiet and nobody’s around and my teammates or friends are out here with a ball, and you have a bit of spiritual experience out on the field.”

It’s a rare moment of repose for O’Reilly, whose gregariousness is outmatched only by her intensity. Ask her about the games she most remembers while playing in Chapel Hill and you’ll first get a list of the wins that got away: an NCAA tournament loss to Santa Clara in 2004; a loss to Duke next year; and being ousted in the 2005 NCAA quarterfinals by Florida State when O’Reilly, then a junior, was the only player who didn’t convert her kick from the spot during the decisive shootout.

“A real winner like Heather O’Reilly isn’t going to remember her wins,” says Charlie Naimo, who coached O’Reilly when she was a teen in the New Jersey youth academy system and later in the W-League. “She’s only going to remember the handful of times in her life that it didn’t go her way and think about all the ways she could have fixed it.”

O’Reilly isn’t set on what career path she wants to follow after her playing days are done. She’s delved into broadcasting, including studio work for FOX at last summer’s Women’s World Cup in France. But that might require moving LA or New York City, which she isn’t yet sold on. She enjoys living in Chapel Hill. She turns 35 next January and realizes the time is drawing nigh if she wants to have children.

She also clearly has the coaching bug, having already earned her USSF C coaching license with plans to travel to England this November to pursue her UEFA B license. I tell O’Reilly that a person close to her remarked that coaching would be a “waste of her potential,” not because she couldn’t succeed but rather because her talents would be better suited for more lofty efforts. “The mystique of being who you are wears off quick when you have to give a halftime talk,” they said.

“Really?!,” O’Reilly retorts, flashing her competitive face. “I think it’s the best profession out there. Is coaching the U.S. national team not one of the greatest jobs in the world, or coaching Carolina?” Or, she later adds, an American manager in the Women’s Super League?

“Are those your aspirations?” I ask.

“Maybe,” she fires back. “I don’t set low bars.”

‘You gotta see this kid play’

Almost every story about the first time seeing a young Heather O’Reilly play soccer begins with someone telling someone, “You gotta see this kid play.” With a fast and furious style, O’Reilly was a lighting bolt, a force of nature. “‘Who is this kid?!’,” Naimo remembers exclaiming. “Fast, with a workrate off the chart. She looked like a senior as a freshman.”

Naimo told Mike O’Neill, the director of the local New Jersey PDA, “You gotta see this kid play.” O’Neill, now the head women’s coach at Rutgers, later coached O'Reilly as a youth.

“She loved taking players on, just a mentality to go after people, and during that time there just weren’t enough players who had that mentality,” O’Neill says. “Obviously, from the time Heather started to the end of her career, the game changed. There were more players who had that mentality of taking players on, but I think Heather was one of the first who did that with a fury.”

After seeing O’Reilly play as an East Brunswick High School underclassman, Tar Heels assistant coach Chris Ducar told Dorrance, “You gotta see this kid play … She’s fast as hell, and she competes like there’s no tomorrow.”

The youngest of four children, O’Reilly grew up in a humble Irish-Catholic family that also set high expectations. If one of the O’Reilly kids got an A-minus or B-plus on a test, mom and dad would ask, “What happened?” She admired her three athletic older brothers—today they’re a doctor, an architect, and a rocket scientist—and took pride in impressing them. When O’Reilly was a youngster, the family was gathered around the fireplace one winter’s day when someone suddenly asked, “Where’s Heather?”, only to find her in the driveway shooting basketball in the snow. She wanted to win at everything, even the Presidential Challenge fitness screenings when she was in elementary school. Nearly three decades later, she still recounts which skills she had to improve to best her classmates. “I remember I was so certain I wanted to get the award. I was crushing all the tests, but there was a sit-and-reach flexibility test that I struggled with because I wasn’t super flexible. So I remember laying a piece of tape down in my room that marked where I had to reach. Every night before I went to bed, I did a little bit of stretching and then scored the highest mark in the sit-and-reach.”

O’Reilly has often cited the 1999 Women’s World Cup as her soccer epiphany. The 14-year-old O’Reilly and her “rugrat” friends—”we were boy crazy and soccer crazy”—made the pilgrimage to Giants Stadium for the United States’ opening match against Denmark. “I remember driving there, I remember the parking lot, I remember blasting music with my friends, I remember going in during warm-ups. I remember seeing Mia Hamm down on the pitch. I remember the goal she scored. I remember trying to get her attention. It was just a really, really impactful game. I sat in the stands, and I had tears in my eyes, and I was overwhelmed with inspiration and thought, ‘I want to do that.’”

But if the ‘99 World Cup was O’Reilly’s inspiration, her father Andrew was her motivation. On the one hand, he tried to shield her from external pressures.

“I was trying to get her to play on my W-League team over the summer going into ninth grade,” Namio remembers. “I met her father Andy in a local diner, and I say, ‘Mr. O’Reilly, I really believe that your daughter is next level, and I really believe she’ll make the full national team before she graduates high school.’ His response to me was, ‘Let’s just see if she can handle high school soccer.’ I just laughed in his face, but it was so refreshing.”

But back home, Andy grasped his daughter’s prodigious talent and was there to blunt her self-doubts. When she accompanied her brother Kevin to his soccer tryouts, Andy, who ran track competitively at Villanova, encouraged the six-year-old Heather to play with the nine-year-old boys. As she advanced up the academy ranks, a day came when she was gripped with a fear that she didn’t belong.

“I was very nervous because I didn’t really know any of the other players,” O’Reilly says. “I remember hiding out in the bathroom and not wanting to go onto the field because I was shy. That was the one time that I could say my dad basically forced me out there. I said, ‘Dad, I want to go home,’ and I was crying. He literally shoved me out in the field and said, ‘Just go out there and say hi to those girls, and you’ll be fine.’

“I wonder if I would have had the same opportunities if my dad had listened to me and drove me home that day.”

‘The Replacement’

O’Reilly was making her way through the high school and club soccer ranks, scoring gobs of goals and winning trophies along the way, when her big break occurred in 2001 while playing an ODP regional tournament at age 16. She had herself a day, scoring two goals plus an assist to lead her team to a comeback 3-2 victory.

“We were all celebrating like it was the World Cup final, and there weren’t many fans there, except at the moment of our match [USWNT head coach] April Heinrichs was walking through the facility,” O’Reilly recalls. “Evidently she stopped and watched our game because she heard all these cheers. She literally saw me play the best game of my young life, and from that moment I was on her radar.”

When a knee injury kept Mia Hamm out of the Algarve Cup in March 2002, Heinrichs gave O’Reilly a call. Save for Tiffany Roberts, O’Reilly became the youngest player since Hamm to make her senior national team debut. “My friends had a field day with that,” O’Reilly says. “That Keanu Reeves movie “The Replacements” had just come out, so they were calling me ‘The Replacement.’”

In her mind’s eye, O’Reilly can still see the changing table with the U.S. kits laid out when she arrived for her first national team camp. O’Reilly was handed the #9 … Mia Hamm’s #9.

“I knew it was clearly temporary,” O’Reilly says, “so at the next camp Mia was at after she was healthy, I kind of sheepishly said to her, ‘Thanks for letting me wear your number.’ I vividly remember her saying, ‘It’s not my number; it’s the team’s number.’”

The Mia comparisons came thick and fast, most of them because O’Reilly, like Hamm, played striker and broke in with the national team at an early age. Hamm was 30, and the search for her second coming had begun. After O’Reilly scored her first national team goal in October 2002, the New York Times ran an article with the headline “Is Heather O’Reilly the Next Mia Hamm?”

“I was embracing it, but also trying to be a bit measured about it and be my own person,” O’Reilly admits. “With what Mia was able to accomplish, even though there’ve been spectacular players since her, she’s probably still the best ever. So that’s definitely a lot of pressure for a young person.”

After O’Reilly and the U.S. U-19 team won the 2002 World Championship, she appeared on track for a roster spot at the 2003 World Cup. Those dreams were dashed on June 14, 2003. As O’Reilly was scoring a goal just two minutes into a friendly against Ireland, the opposing goalkeeper crashed into her, breaking her fibula. First, O’Reilly called O’Neill on the way to the hospital, telling him that she wouldn’t be able to make the red-eye to New Jersey to play for her club team in the state final the next day, as she had planned. She asked him to let the team know she was sorry.

O’Reilly then tried to defy expectations and fully rehab for the World Cup in September. But a few weeks after the initial injury, doctors discovered significant ligament damage in addition to the fracture, requiring surgery and finally scuttling her World Cup hopes.

She arrived for her freshman year at UNC that fall as “a basket case,” Dorrance remembers. “My first couple of meetings with her were very tearful. She wondered if she was ever going to be the player that she was.”

O’Reilly admits she’s not someone who copes well with injuries.

“I thought I was such a disappointment, because I was the number one recruit and everyone had these big expectations for me, and I could barely run and was still limping,” O’Reilly says. “I was stressed because I was nervous that I would never be the same player again, and nervous that I would lose my speed. I was like, this is a classic story of this teenage kid who peaks too soon and never actually makes it. I was scared of that narrative.”

As O’Reilly’s minutes gradually increased through her freshman season, so did her production. The Tar Heels went undefeated and won the College Cup in Cary. But O’Reilly held higher aspirations. Although she appeared bound for the 2003 World Cup before her leg injury, the 2004 Olympics carried a smaller roster and O’Reilly had been away from the senior team for months. Heinrichs suggested O’Reilly return to the U-19 team, something O’Reilly rejected. “I knew the system was an out-of-sight, out-of-mind thing, and I knew that if I’d agreed to play in the youth World Cup, even if I played well, I would be out of consideration for the Olympics.”

“Heather called me up, all tearful about April trying to send her back to the U-19s,” Dorrance says. “So I told her, ‘Look, April’s a reasonable person. Just go in there and tell her you want to help the Olympic team get ready for the Olympics. You don’t want to go back to the 19s. You want to work hard in practice and you want this environment for your own development.”

O’Reilly trained with the national team all summer in California. “It was going to be tight, and I was going to have to knock some people out of their spot. I needed to be full guns blazing to have an opportunity … It was a challenging residency. People were scraping and crawling.”

On the eve of the final roster selection, a scrimmage was played between the regular senior players and the reservists. O’Reilly scored two goals, and she phoned Dorrance afterwards. “Anson, I think I’m going to make the Olympic team.”

O’Reilly made the cut. Her elation was tempered by the fact that several friends did not, including Leslie Osbourne and Lori Chalupny. “One of those devastated people was an idol of mine, Shannon MacMillan, who I was competing for a similar position as her,” O’Reilly recalls. “For me to sort of knock her out of her spot and her job was a big jump for me, as a young player. It was hard to see her devastated. She was upset, so for years I never heard from her or saw her. Now we see each other at events all the time, but she never played for the national team again. That was it. That was interesting for a young person to experience.”

After not seeing the field much during the early stages in Athens, O’Reilly was thrust into the limelight late in the semifinal match against Germany. After planting a loose ball off the post early in extra time, she took a pass from Hamm herself in the 99th minute and netted the ultimate game-winner. O’Reilly and the U.S. later won Olympic gold. O’Reilly’s star was born. Hamm would retire about three months later. The torch was seemingly passed.

Pushed to the edge

“I hate losing,” O’Reilly declares “I’m kind of a freak when it comes to competitiveness. It’s like a fine line of sanity for elite athletes to always be on the cusp of drive and competitiveness and motivation.”

There’s still a faint hint of regret when O’Reilly discusses her move to outside midfield in 2008. She’d always been a center forward, but Abby Wambach had become America’s new champion goalscorer. When Pia Sundhage became U.S. head coach, she was clear with O’Reilly about two things: she valued O’Reilly’s ability, and she saw O’Reilly’s place on the pitch as an edge player. O’Reilly wanted to play, so she acquiesced. Her eyes were opened to Sundhage’s perspective at the 2008 Four Nations Cup in China. The U.S. won the tournament, with O’Reilly earning three assists and winning MVP.

“I remember being super bummed out before I received the award,” O’Reilly confesses. “I was like ‘I went through this whole tournament and didn’t score, didn’t even get any shooting opportunities,’ because I was now basically hugging the sideline as they instructed. Then all of a sudden, I win player of the tournament. I was like, ‘Whoa, I didn’t see that coming.’ That was a change of mindset in how I perceive success, because before then it was score goals, score goals, score goals.”

With quicksilver speed, a rocket right boot, and unparalleled tenacity, O’Reilly’s place in the U.S. lineup was secured. She won more Olympic gold in 2008 and 2012, although a World Cup win would have to wait until 2015. She had 231 caps when she stepped away from the U.S. team, currently the eighth most all-time. She ranks eleventh in USWNT history in goals and sixth in assists. She still holds the national team record for most consecutive games played with 74, a streak that spanned from August 12, 2007 to Jan. 21, 2011.

The stories of O’Reilly’s moxie are legion. Her high school team once lost a state championship final in which O’Reilly scored four goals, but all she could talk about was missing her PK in the game-deciding shootout. For all her accolades with club and country, she still cites the 2006 College Cup finals win over Notre Dame as the happiest she’s ever been on a soccer field, and not just because she left UNC with national title. Notre Dame sophomore Kerri Hanks won the M.A.C. Hermann Trophy, becoming the first underclassman to do so. The trophy ceremony was held in Cary on the eve of title match, and O’Reilly was among the three finalists present and the only senior.

“That was kind of a personal vendetta,” O’Reilly explains, 13 years removed. “For some reason, that year they chose player of the year the weekend of the College Cup, which I don’t understand. But anyways, she won and scored a bunch of goals that season. It wasn’t that surprising, but it was still kind of irritating. To win that game was extra special. I scored a great goal and went out a senior at Carolina as a champion.”

Two weeks later, O’Reilly won the Honda Sports Award as the nation’s top collegiate female soccer player.

O’Reilly’s outwardly oozes confidence, but those close to her see another driving force, a more vulnerable underpinning for her rabid determination.

“I don’t think she is [inherently confident],” Naimo contends “I think she’s confident in the effort she’s going to put in. I don’t think she’s ever confident she’s going to live up to her standard, or sometimes the outcome. No matter how much she prepares, I always believe what drives her is the fear of failing.”

“Sometimes there’s that fear of failure that drives her,” O’Neill affirms. “She’s never been associated when anything that’s not been successful. So there’s this pride in her name that drives her to be one of the best. Failure is not an option. It motivates her. We’ve had unbelievable conversations about that over the years.”

O’Reilly won the 2005 W-League title playing for Naimo’s New Jersey Wildcats. Three years later, when Naimo was general manager of the Los Angeles Sol in WPS, O’Reilly scored the game-winning goal for Sky Blue to beat the Sol in the league championship. After winning an NWSL championship with FC Kansas City in 2015, she missed the NWSL playoffs and retired from the U.S. team in 2016. Yet, she sojourned to England to play 18 months for Arsenal, eschewing the opportunity to join the newly formed Courage in 2017 after her dad urged her to go overseas, much like Andy pushed her to play with those kids she didn’t know years ago in New Jersey. When she finally came to the Courage last year, she won another NWSL title and scored the goal to beat Lyon in the Women’s ICC.

“The reason she always ends up being successful at everything she does is because it’s never good enough for her,” Naimo adds “She’ll never meet her goal.

“Because she never believes she’s great, she’s always going to be.”

Perhaps the desire to dodge failure prompted O’Reilly to retire from international play in 2016, soon after not making a fourth straight Olympic roster. Maybe she wanted to go out on her own terms, remembering the example of Shannon MacMillian 12 years earlier. Perhaps it’s part of the reason she’s leaving pro soccer this year, despite now starting for the first-place NWSL team. She wasn’t in the Courage lineup most of the season, and she admits this is the first year she can sense she’s lost a bit of explosiveness, a bit of her “fast twitch.” “Things that I used to be able to do, especially in the attacking third or beating people on the dribble, maybe I can’t do anymore.”

“My definition of going out on top goes beyond wins,” O’Reilly asserts. “To go out with integrity, a love for the game, the respect of your teammates and peers, all that stuff goes into going out on top. I don’t want to go out on top and nobody say ‘Thank you,’ because that doesn’t seem like a nice way to go out.”

Naimo had his own nickname for O’Reilly: Pre, after the late runner Steve Prefontaine. “He held himself to a higher standard than winning. That’s kind of how Heather was all the time. Every time she went out, she was going to make the game like some kind of art. It was going to be her challenge to be better than a win. There is really no one else like that.”

She’s leaving pro football, but she’ll always be footballer. She’ll get back to playing Noon Ball, the thrice-weekly small scrimmages Dorrance started years ago for UNC coaches and other chosen few. “I’m a lifer, in terms of pickup games and charity matches. I’m sure I’m going to show back up at the Courage training sessions. Paul [Riley] will probably be yelling at me for messing something up in the passing patterns or something like that.”

The life of O’Reilly

About a half-hour into our chat, O’Reilly spies Angela Hucles, her former U.S. national teammate from the 2004 and 2008 Olympics, approaching us with her TV announcing partner, who were on the call for the UNC-NC State broadcast. “They allow Cavaliers out here?!” O’Reilly playfully barks at the former UVA standout, echoing throughout the now-empty stadium.

It’s the third time we’ve paused the interview for players, well-wishers, patients from a local children’s hospital, and others asking for photos and autographs. They’re not the ones interrupting me. I’m the one interloping on the life of O’Reilly. I remember something Dorrance told me about O’Reilly’s approach to life in the social media age: “She cares about the fact that you like her, not that she has 40,000 likes. She cares about the people around her.”

O’Reilly and Hucles reminiscence for nearly 15 minutes, when someone suggests they take a snapshot. As they’re about to pose, O’Reilly takes a beat, looks back in my direction 20 yards away, and shouts, “I can’t believe someone said that about coaching!” HAO’s dander is still up.

There are a couple of theories for Heather O’Reilly’s enduring popularity and mystique. One, to which she happens to subscribe, is that she’s a last tie that binds the history of American women’s soccer. She’s the last member of the 2004 U.S. Olympic team still playing pro ball. Her career spans the eras of Mia, Abby, and Alex.

“Now I play with Sam Mewis and Lynn Williams,” O’Reilly says. “They look at me and say, ‘I cannot believe you played with Mia Hamm.’ I’m like, ‘I know,’ because I’m their peer now. I’m older than them, but they’re my teammates and my peers. They can’t wrap their heads around how long I’ve been at this.”

While accurate, that appraisal defines O’Reilly’s legacy in terms of agency and nostalgia. The other answer traces back to her worry after she broke her leg in 2003, maybe even back to shooting baskets in the snow and those grade school physical tests: that she’d end up another falling star, another poster child for what could have been. O’Reilly burst onto the soccer scene as the princess apparent. She persevered and endured. Her star never waned, from her Olympic goal in Athens, to her Olympic assist to Alex Morgan at Old Trafford, to the championships she’s still winning. She didn’t become Mia Hamm. “What she became was an extraordinary Heather O’Reilly,” Dorrance says.

“No one on the modern-day national team can be mentioned in the same breath as Heather, with respect to what she brought holistically to the game,” Naimo declares. “Who really cares about the team more than themselves? There aren’t many.”

“Our game is a better game because Heather O’Reilly played it,” O’Neill says.

HAO’s thoughts on how she’d like to be remembered as a player are, to borrow the modern vernacular, a humble brag. You’d expect nothing less.

“If I won a lot of stuff, was a good person, and brought people joy, I think that’s a win.”