Mia Hamm

Mia Hamm's brother played sports, inspiring her to do so as well.

She attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she helped the Tar Heels to four National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) women's championships in five years (she sat out the season of 1991 to concentrate on the 1991 FIFA Women's World Cup in China). North Carolina only lost one game in the ninety five she played on the team. She was an All-American and Atlantic Coast Conference player of the year for her last three years. She also won ACC Female Athlete of the Year in 1993 and 1994. Read Less

That same year, Nike named the largest building on their corporate campus after Hamm. Read Less

Women's Professional Soccer, a professional soccer league that launched in 2009, featured Hamm's silhouette in its logo.

Hamm was inducted into the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame Class of 2006 and the Texas Sports Hall of Fame on March 11, 2008. She is the author of Go For the Goal: A Champion's Guide to Winning in Soccer and Life. She appeared in the HBO documentary Dare to Dream: The Story of the U.S. Women's Soccer Team.

Hamm was born in Selma, Alabama. She was born with a club foot and had to wear corrective shoes as a toddler. Hamm spent her childhood on Air Force bases with her parents, Bill and Stephanie Hamm, and her five siblings. The family moved many times and resided in several places including San Antonio, Texas, and Italy. Hamm played organized sports from a very young age, and at age fifteen she joined the U.S. women's national team, becoming the youngest ever to play for them. She played for Notre Dame Catholic High School, Wichita Falls, Texas, as a freshman and a sophomore. The following year, when she was just fifteen, Hamm joined the national women’s team. Read Less