More than just a pretty face: Heather Mitts is often called "the Anna Kournikova of soccer," but that tag neglects her considerable on-field skills - Biography

Soccer Digest, August-Sept, 2003 by Rick Woelfel

GLIDING ACROSS THE TURF AT Villanova Stadium in her bright red Philadelphia Charge uniform, Heather Mitts is in her element. For three seasons, she has been a fixture in the back for the Charge, reading the ever-changing patterns of a soccer game the way a grandmaster reads a chessboard. At times she seems to sense openings almost before they materialize, taking advantage of them to play a short ball to the midfield, to serve a long ball out of the back, or--on not infrequent occasions--to jump into the attack.

"The quicker you can read the play, the more effective you become," says Charge coach Mark Krikorian. "That's an area in which Heather has always been pretty good. Her level of technical understanding and her technique continues to improve."

But there is more to Mitts' on-field persona than her technical skill and athleticism. Even in the midst of a tight match, there is the hint of a smile on her face that reflects the sheer joy she feels at being on the field. "There's not a day where I'm sick of playing soccer," she says. "I love it."

Mitts was introduced to soccer as a six-year-old, but her passion for the sport didn't truly blossom until a few years later. Growing up in Cincinnati, she was energetic and athletic, excelling in a variety of sports, everything from softball to horseback riding (one notable exception was volleyball, for which Mitts admits she had little enthusiasm). "I think my parents tried to push me into every sport possible, so that I would use some of that energy instead of causing havoc at home," she says with a chuckle.

Both of her parents had athletic backgrounds; her father played basketball at the University of Kentucky and tried to steer her in that direction, while her mother, a fine tennis player, encouraged her daughter to concentrate on that sport.

As a preteen, Mitts' best sport was tennis. She competed regularly in junior tournaments throughout Ohio and was good enough to play in national events. But somewhere along the way the game stopped being fun. At 13, Mitts gave up competitive tennis. "It was too much for me at that age," she says.

Soccer was different. As a freshman, Mitts made the St. Ursula Academy varsity, one of the strongest prep programs in Ohio. By the end of the season, she was starting. The next year she was playing on a state championship team. By then she had stopped playing other sports in order to focus exclusively on soccer--and she was having fun doing it. "I chose soccer because I was lucky and I never grew sick of it," says Mitts. "I was very lucky, because my parents didn't know a whole lot about soccer. They never pushed me to be better than I was, they just wanted me to have fun and I think that's why I've enjoyed it as much as I have."

Mitts finished her high school career as a two-time All-State selection and moved on to the University of Florida, where she developed a reputation for durability, establishing school records for starts, games played, and minutes played. With Mitts in the lineup, the Gators won four SEC titles and captured the national championship in 1998, her junior season, by defeating then 14-time champion North Carolina, which was riding a 70-game unbeaten streak at the rime. Mitts herself earned first-team All-American honors from the NSCAA as a senior.

After college, Mitts saw the game from a different perspective. Like most elite players, Mitts played all over the field in her youth soccer days. In high school, she was primarily a center midfielder before shifting to the outside when she came to Florida. By her junior year she was playing outside back on the left side--despite being naturally right-footed--before moving to the right as a senior. When she finished college, Mitts was a defender with a midfielder's creative instincts. "It helped me understand, from a defender's point of view, what was going through the minds of the forwards during their attacking runs," she says. "Being able to play on both sides of the field--and play with both feet--helped me to improve."

By the time Mitts played her last college match, in fall 1999, the Women's World Cup had brought women's soccer an unprecedented level of popularity and exposure.

Throughout her senior season, Mitts heard whispers about the launch of a top-grade women's professional league, but all she could do was cross her fingers and hope.

While she was finishing her coursework at Florida (she earned a degree in advertising in December 2000), the WUSA was taking its first tentative steps from concept to reality.

In May 2000, the league announced the allocation of 20 founding players (essentially the 1999 U.S. Women's World Cup Team), who were divided among the eight franchise cities. Although Mitts had earned her first cap with the Women's national team in a February 1999 match against Finland and had spent time with the U.S. U-21 team, she was not part of the World Cup roster. Her destiny was determined at a league combine.

Mitts wasn't exactly a nobody when she arrived at the combine, but she had to convince an audience of coaches and league executives that she was good enough to compete over the long haul against the best players in the world. The talent level at that combine surprised Mitts. "For the most part, you know who the good players are in college," she says. "But there were players there who had graduated years before or players you'd never heard of that had played at smaller programs."