Tobin Heath Elected to National Soccer Hall of Fame in First Year of Eligibility

Tobin Heath will always be considered one of the most unique and entertaining players in U.S. Women’s National Team history.  

Early in her first USWNT appearance, she had the audacity to nutmeg not one, but two Canadians consecutively among her first touches of the ball in a senior National Team uniform. 

“I think I always had a rebellious spirit,” Heath told ESPN.com in 2019. “But it wasn’t a rebellious spirit to do wrong. It was a rebellious spirit to do something different.”

She demonstrated that quality on countless occasions during her legendary career.  Her winners’ medal collection includes two Women’s World Cups, three Olympic medals (two gold and a bronze) and three NCAA Division I championships at the University of North Carolina. 

“I never played to be famous or for people to care about me,” Heath said July 10, 2025, when she announced her retirement on The RE-CAP Show podcast, which she co-hosts with her wife and longtime teammate Christen Press. “I just played because I loved it.” 

Heath also loved the ball; she is widely considered one of the most skillful and creative players in USWNT history, with those skills pouring out of her in every facet of the game — but especially her passing, dribbling and scoring. 

She became one of the USWNT’s most popular players and was voted into the National Soccer Hall of Fame on the Players’ Ballot in her first year of eligibility. Heath, 37, will be inducted on May 1, 2026, in Frisco, Texas.

Five days after announcing her retirement, Heath was listed on the eligibility list for the Player Ballot. She hadn’t played for the USWNT since recording an assist in a 6-0 victory over Korea Republic on Oct. 26, 2021, nor had she played professionally since OL Reign’s 4-1 win over Gotham FC on Aug. 14, 2022. Several knee injuries had taken their toll, and as with all players eventually, it was time to hang up the cleats. 

The Basking Ridge, N.J., native retired having earned 181 international appearances for the U.S., scoring 36 goals and 42 assists. 

“Over New Year’s, I actually came to the full acceptance that I wasn’t going to be playing, which was like a two-year, some might say three-year process of acceptance,” Heath said on the podcast.

Born in Morristown, N.J. on May 29, 1988, Heath was named Tobin by her parents, Cindy and Jeff Heath, in homage to her great-grandmother. Though her parents had athletic backgrounds, they weren’t into the sport, and unlike many USWNT players, she did not have siblings who played the game. Perhaps in a sign that great players are born, she simply took to the sport early on. 

“I was 4 years old, and I just immediately felt a click as soon as I touched the soccer ball,” she told The Athletic. “It was like destiny.”

She first played for a YWCA team. 

“Everything that I was obsessed with in football, I had to go out and seek and crave, and create my own pathways,” Heath said. “I’m lucky because Jersey is a hotbed for soccer. I was extremely fortunate where I was born, but this was just self-motivated destiny, something inside me, knowing I was supposed to play soccer.” 

By the age of 10, she was a big fan of Arsenal, which captured the 1998 Premier League title. She was so impressed with the way legendary manager Arsene Wenger had the team attack that Heath put up posters of Arsenal standouts Cesc Fabregas and Thierry Henry on her bedroom walls.  

“My loyalty to Arsenal is so strong, and it’s kind of awful,” Heath told ESPN.com in 2019. 

She watched tapes of great goals and highlights of international soccer on a VCR in her bedroom. 

“It was my football space where I got to hang out,” she said. “Lucky for me, my parents were super chill, so they let me be how I wanted to be. But I definitely celebrated football hardcore.”

As she grew into her teens, she helped the PDA Wildcats to the 2003 Girls Under-15 national championship. 

“She was quicker than everyone else,” PDA coach Tom Anderson told The Central New Jersey Home News in 2015. “She had so much fun with the ball. She was impossible to catch.”

Heath continued to star at Ridge High School, winning Newark Star-Ledger Player of the Year and All-State honors as a sophomore. She finished the season with four goals and 13 assists as Ridge (22-0) secured the New Jersey Group 3 state championship.

“She’s probably the most technically gifted player we’ve had here,” Ridge coach Todd Hebden told the newspaper. “She’s one of the few players who can run at full speed and still produce quality moves with the ball. You see fast players and you see players who are good with the ball, but rarely do you see the combination Tobin has.”

In her junior year, Heath again was selected Player of the Year by the Star-Ledger and named to the All-State team, connecting for 12 goals and eight assists. “Incredible touch and endless imagination,” the newspaper reported.

Not surprisingly, Heath had a meteoric rise playing through the U.S. Youth National Teams, including the U-16, U-17 and U-20 sides. She played in the 2006 FIFA U-20 Women’s World Cup and won a silver medal at the 2007 Pan American Games. 

She committed to attend women’s soccer power North Carolina before her junior year and decided not to play at Ridge in her senior season, concentrating instead on her Youth National Team commitments.

Heath became an important cog for the Tar Heels, playing major roles with three National Championship sides (2006, 2008, 2009).

“It was an interesting four years for Tobin,” UNC and USWNT teammate Heather O’Reilly — also a member of the NSHOF Class of 2026 — told ESPN in 2019. “To learn, ‘OK, I can be me, but I also have to be accountable to my teammates.’ ...  And if she could mesh these two worlds of being uber-competitive and uber-fit with being ridiculously comfortable with the ball, then the world was her oyster because she had it all. She had all aspects of the game.”

While she was in college, Heath made her USWNT debut in a 1-0 win over Finland in the Four Nations Tournament in China on Jan. 18, 2008. She tallied her first international goal when she came off the bench in a 4-0 victory over China at the Algarve Cup on March 5, 2008. 

By the time she was taken as the No. 1 pick by the Atlanta Beat in the 2010 Women’s Professional Soccer draft, Heath already was an Olympic champion, coming on as a substitute in three matches at the 2008 Beijing Summer Games. At 20, she was the youngest member of the team. 

After a season in Atlanta, Heath played for Sky Blue FC (now Gotham FC) for a year before venturing across the Atlantic Ocean in 2013 to play for Paris Saint-Germain for a season. She returned home to compete for the Portland Thorns (2013-20), then went back to Europe again for Manchester United (2020-21) and her beloved Arsenal (2021-22). After injuries impacted her European adventure, she came home to end her career with OL Reign in 2022.  

Not surprisingly, championships have followed wherever she has played. She won a league crown with Portland in 2017, the NWSL Shield in 2016, and the Shield with OL Reign in 2022. 

Some of her goals were legendary.

Despite playing with a broken foot, Heath struck for the winning goal on a 40th-minute free kick as the Thorns recorded a 2-0 victory over the Western New York Flash in the first National Women’s Soccer League championship game in 2013. 

Perhaps Heath’s best-known goal put an exclamation point on the U.S.’s 5-2 triumph over Japan in the 2015 Women’s World Cup Final, slotting home Morgan Brian’s right-wing feed. 

“There’s a very strong duality to my game,” Heath told Yahoo in 2019. “I’m very creative and intuitive. I like to entertain. But there is also an intense desire to win, and to be effective, and to do whatever it takes.

“There’s kind of this fun interaction that goes on within myself of expression and just this frickin’ animal.” 

This past summer, Heath served on the FIFA technical study group for the Club World Cup, alongside one of her Arsenal heroes, Wenger. 

“This tournament has blown me away,” Heath told the Associated Press. “It’s made me even more excited for the summer to come [the 2026 World Cup], and I couldn’t be more proud of this country. It shows that football is deeply embedded and deeply personal to our country. I can’t wait to see the growth.”

Heath has already played a big part in that growth during her historic Hall of Fame career.