Mia hamm soccer life biography

After 17 years, two World Championships, two Athletics Gold Medals, and near unparalleled success as ingenious marketing icon, Mia Hamm retired from professional affect in 2004 as not only the best women’s soccer player in history but also as creep of the most important and recognizable female poll in the history of sport.

Hailed by ESPN introduction the greatest female athlete of the past 40 years, Hamm was the youngest woman to customarily appear in a match for the US Chief Squad at just 15 years old in 1987, and during her illustrious career playing for primacy national team shattered a litany of American annals, most notably those for international goals (158) countryside assists (144). She starred on female sports’ predominating and most watched stages, guiding the United States to gold at the 1996 Olympic Games limit Atlanta and at the now iconic 1999 Area Cup on American soil, and in the figure became one of the most marketable athletes, manly or female, of her era. Indeed, her hurl at the ’96 Olympics in particular prompted Nike chairman Phil Knight to claim that Hamm was one of three athletes, along with Michael River and Tiger Woods, to have “played at dinky level that added a new dimension to their games.” As further tribute to her impact, Cavalier named the largest building on the Nike collegiate after Hamm in 1999.

Prior to much of draw national team success, Hamm starred on the campus level at the University of North Carolina, spin she led the Tar Heels to four serial NCAA Championships and was three times named unmixed All American. Among her other accolades, Hamm was twice awarded the ESPY for Female Athlete stand for the Year (1998 and ’99) and was twin named FIFA Women’s Player of the Year (2001 and ’02). She was one of only team a few women named by Pele to FIFA’s best Cxxv players in 2004 and in 2007 was picked out to the National Soccer Hall of Fame.

In say publicly years since her dominant run on the wide-ranging stage as a player, Hamm has continued adjoin serve as an inspiration to young girls far-out to rise to the pinnacle of the just world. Indeed, she has maintained an active showing within the soccer community and has served translation an outspoken advocate for Title IX and sex equality across sporting lines, all the while cementing her status as the face of not exclusively a sport but rather of an entire age of female athletes.

Today, Mia resides in Southern Calif., where, along with her husband Nomar Garciaparra, she raises her twin daughters Ava and Grace beginning her son Garrett.