On the field, Dorrance notes, she is less Californian, more Brazilian: “She loves making players fall over. She’d rather nutmeg a player than go around her. She relishes the art of the dribble.”
In her first cap for the United States National Team, in her first touches on the ball, she nutmegged not one Canadian defender, but two. In a send-off game against Mexico back in May, Heath’s dribbling art was on full display. Mexican commentators shouted, “Oiii, Ole” as she pulled off this elastico before sending the ball towards Abby Wambach for the finish.
“To be great, you have to absolutely love it. And that’s Tobin,” says Dorrance. “She could not get enough.”
Her freshman year at UNC in 2006, the dorm Tobin lived in had a soccer field right outside.
“We’d always end up out there at some point. Whatever hour it was. At one or two in the morning, we’d go turn on the lights and play,” says Tobin. “That was the story of our class, my group of friends – we always wanted to play, anytime, anywhere. That was our culture.”
Fetzer Field – UNC’s game field – always said “CLOSED” but they snuck out there anyway, playing pickup under the track lights just as Mia Hamm had when she was there, nearly twenty years earlier. They played in the dorm hallways (“Even people who didn’t play soccer wanted to play—it was so fun.”); they played in the parking garage, using trash cans as goals; they even snuck out onto the game field at midnight several hours after winning the national championship. “Even though we’d just won this great thing, even though our season had ended in the best possible way, we still didn’t want it to be over,” says Heath.
Her swag and personality has made Tobin a fan favorite
While most Tar Heels move off campus after their freshman year, Heath convinced her friends to live in the dorms through junior year. “I loved community living. I think it’s because any time of the night, I could be up and I’d hear a guitar, and I could just go there, and walk into a room and have a conversation with someone I didn’t know. Everyone lives with their doors open. I really enjoyed that.”
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