National Soccer Hall of Fame member Abby Wambach shot to the top early in her career and stayed there, cementing her status as a soccer legend with an abundance of awards and championship titles. She is a two-time Olympic gold medalist, FIFA World Cup Champion, and six-time winner of the U.S. Soccer Athlete of the Year award. As a forward, she currently stands as the highest all-time goal scorer for the national team and is second in international goals for both female and male soccer players.
Mary Abigail Wambach was born in 1980 in Rochester, New York, the youngest of seven siblings, making her a natural team player. She developed an interest in sports at an early age and started playing soccer at four years old, often playing with the boys’ teams. She attended the University of Florida on a full athletic scholarship, where she was named All-Southeastern Conference in all four seasons and was the conference Player of the Year twice.
Wambach joined the U.S. Women’s National Team (USWNT) in 2001 and teamed up with Mia Hamm the following year on the Washington Freedom, where they scored a combined 66 points in 2003 and won the WUSA title. She experienced an incredibly successful 2004, scoring 31 goals in the final 30 matches of the year. In the following years she continued to rack up points, and in 2013 she broke Hamm’s all-time record for international career goals during her performance against South Korea, where she also became the USA’s all-time leader in multiple-goal games. She retired in 2015 at the top of her game after the USWNT defeated Japan in the World Cup.
Wambach is an activist for equality and inclusion and has done philanthropic work for several organizations, including the Epilepsy Foundation and the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. She has been an ambassador for Athlete Ally, a nonprofit organization that focuses on ending homophobia and transphobia in sports, and has participated in Mia Hamm's annual Celebrity Soccer Challenge, which raises money for Children's Hospital Los Angeles and the Mia Hamm Foundation.
Wambach has authored two best-sellers, her memoir “Forward” and “Wolfpack: How to Come Together, Unleash Our Power, and Change the Game.” She is the host of “Abby’s Places” on ESPN+ and co-hosts the podcast “We Can Do Hard Things” with her wife Glennon Doyle.