My teammates and I are best known for our penalty kick victory against China to win the 1999 Women's World Cup. But a lot of people don't realize that when we were first playing soccer on the Women's National Team, the Women's World Cup didn't exist. In fact, Women's Soccer wasn't even in the Olympics.
I remember the day I met Cammi Granato, a former star on the U.S. women's hockey team. We were at a Women's Sports Foundation dinner in 1996, and she came over to introduce herself. She had watched the U.S. women's soccer team win gold at the Atlanta Olympics and was hopeful the U.S. women's hockey team could do the same.
The Women's World Cup gives FIFA a chance, once every four years, to showcase the growth of women's soccer. It gives FIFA a highly visible opportunity to encourage countries around the globe to also support their women's programs. It gives FIFA the forum to show countries the potential of women's soccer if only you support it.
I think we have to keep putting women's sports in the limelight. I thought the Women's World Cup did a wonderful job of showing the quality of women's soccer. But we also need coverage and marketing and press and getting these female athletes to become household names.
The best goal I have scored for the national team would be during the 2002 World Cup against Portugal. It was my first World Cup and my first goal in the World Cup. It was like a dream, and that's why it was so memorable.
The women's national team is a very successful team, and that success has given us a platform to speak on gender equity issues. Millions of young women play soccer in this country, and it's empowering for them to see that our contribution to the game is valued.
I think that women are often lumped into categories - single gals, or soccer moms, or career women, or women of a certain age. For some reason our society wants women to wear labels, and not only on their clothes.
When the U.S. team went on its historic run to the World Cup quarter-finals in 2002, I was thirteen years old. Each game in that run - the astonishing victory against Portugal, the resilient win over Mexico, even the gutsy but unlucky effort against the Germans - propelled me to push my other athletic interests aside and focus only on soccer.
Women's soccer is not heavily publicized, so when you have an opportunity to be in a big magazine that publicity can be good. It definitely helpes as far as awareness about women's soccer.
Hockey is no longer a big four. It's football, basketball, baseball and soccer. Now, I'm not talking MLS. I'm talking COPA, World Cup, men's, women's, MLS, youth... and there's a lot of reasons for it.
The growth of women's soccer and women's sports all around the world has been slow.
For me soccer provides so many emotions, a different feeling every day. I've had the good fortune to take part in major competitions like the Olympics, and winning the World Cup was also unforgettable. We lost in the Olympics and won in the World Cup, and I'll never forget either feeling.
It wasn't until 1999 when my idols Mia Hamm and Kristine Lilly took home the women's World Cup trophy at the Rose Bowl in front of 40 million TV viewers that I remember thinking how rare it was to see women play sports on TV.
The thing I want to see before I die is women achieving full equality in the world. I'm very passionate about injustice against women and there's too much of it in the world. In so many parts of the world, women are not regarded as worthy or equal to men. In parts of the world, women are bought and sold.
What's surprising to me now is that now that I'm talking to a lot of women about this, so many women are doing this. Straight women, lesbian women, bisexual women, poor women, White women, immigrant women. This does not affect one group.
I'm enormously proud that I can do a deal with the National Women's Soccer League to showcase the power and passion of women athletes as positive role models, not only for my daughter but also for my son.
Women's tennis has been around for a very long time - we're talking about the 1800s. But women's soccer hasn't had such a long history, so now they're right at the beginning of really trying to make things equal. We need to continue not only to advocate for women but to have men advocating for women.