After globetrotting with USWNT, PSG and more, Lind...

GOLDEN, Colo. -- Drive west from Denver on the Golden Freeway, beyond the billboards that dot Interstate-70 and the traffic that now engulfs the metro area, and you'll see a massive Coors brewery sprout out of the ground, serving as the unofficial welcome to this small city with western charm. Golden, Colorado, appropriately, came to fame during the United States gold rush of the late 19th century, but its name is equally fitting as the place where the unprecedented career of U.S. women's national team captain Lindsey Heaps began. Fourteen years ago, Heaps left her home in Colorado for France and became the first American woman to skip college and sign professionally out of high school. Going pro at 18 years old was an unthinkable decision at the time, in 2012, when a second U.S. professional women's soccer league had folded months earlier. It would be another five years until another American woman followed in Heaps' footsteps. On Saturday, Heaps' career and life will come full circle. She is expected to debut for Denver Summit FC, an NWSL expansion team that only played its first match in March. "It is such a weird feeling," Heaps told ESPN. "I'm waking up and getting on I-25 to go to training, which is a highway I would take all the time as a little kid to go play club soccer. It's so bizarre to me." Who could have known at the time that the 18-year-old wunderkind leaving for France would spend most of her career there, and win a World Cup and Olympics on the way to becoming the captain of the United States team? And what are the odds that Denver, a city that had not previously had a major professional women's sports team, would launch an NWSL team in time to employ Heaps during her career? Just like her decision to skip college, Heaps' return to Colorado is deeply personal. Her career arc is, without exaggeration, trailblazing. At times, those career decisions were also heart-aching for her and her parents, whose steadfast support of Heaps is intertwined with the 31-year-old midfielder's story. Now, Heaps embarks on an improbable potential bookend to a career that started with a shy young woman leaving home to forge her own path, only to come back to the future that she helped build. The decision that changed what was possible in women's soccer It is common to see teenage players competing professionally in men's soccer, but that is a newer phenomenon in women's soccer. Those opportunities existed for women to some degree in Europe before the NWSL began allowing players under 18 years old in 2021. Now, Olivia Moultrie, Jaedyn Shaw, Gisele Thompson and Claire Hutton are all USWNT regulars who began their careers as teenagers in the NWSL. Mallory Swanson and Sophia Wilson did it before them. Teenage stardom has become a realistic course even if only for the most exceptional players. In 2012, though, that pathway was unthinkable. The NWSL didn't even exist yet, and the hope of professional women's soccer seemed dead in the United States. The only proven road to World Cup glory was to play for a top college team and get noticed by the U.S. national team. That is why Heaps' origin story in the professional game is well-known lore. She signed for Paris Saint-Germain at 18 years old and turned down a scholarship to play for the University of North Carolina, the most dominant team in college sports and a factory for producing United States women's national team players. The team was coached at the time by Anson Dorrance, who coached the U.S. team that won the inaugural Women's World Cup in 1991. Heaps' heart was elsewhere -- and there was no going back. Once she turned professional, she would no longer be eligible for college athletics. "Like any parent, your kids go through these learning processes, growth processes," Mark Horan, Heaps' dad, told ESPN from the Horan family home. "It's kind of fun to watch them, because you never know how they're gonna turn out. The one thing about Lindsey that we always knew: when she was a little kid, when she had her mind set on something, she did it. It didn't matter what it was. She had this drive and passion. We always knew that part of her was really strong." Heaps had been recruited by the country's best college programs, including North Carolina and Stanford. As Heaps' mom, Linda Horan, tells the story, she would have to answer her daughter's emails just so coaches got a response, and she forced her daughter to at least go visit campuses in person. "Everything that I did was about football, and I couldn't think about much else," Heaps told ESPN. "I felt like if I was doing anything else, it was taking away from me getting better at football. That's just how my mind worked, but that's why I think the route was perfect for me. That's what I cared about. That's what I was passionate about, and I knew I could be the best at that one thing if I really just focused on that." Heaps mulled her options, and after a three-hour discussion with youth coach and family friend Erik Bushey on the bleachers after practice one night, she confirmed what seemed inevitable: she was going pro. Heaps called her dad, away for work in Kansas City like he frequently was as a vice president with the federal reserve, and she tried to call her mom to deliver the news, but Linda didn't pick up. Heaps went home and woke her sleeping mother to relay her decision. Heaps went to Paris Saint-Germain in 2012 as a teenage forward who was strong in the air and scored frequently. She returned to the United States in 2016 as a midfielder for the Portland Thorns and a USWNT hopeful chasing the Olympic dream. She was named the NWSL MVP in 2018 and helped the U.S. women's national team win the 2019 World Cup. It took almost another five years until Swanson turned professional after skipping college. Moultrie successfully fought the NWSL in court to sign with Portland as a 15-year-old in 2021, which ultimately changed the league's rules. "The one thing that I'm still really proud of, being the first, is that that is an option," Heaps said. France came calling for Heaps again in 2022, when she joined European power Olympique Lyonnais (now OL Lyonnes). She played for four years with Lyonnes, winning a UEFA Champions League title and becoming a fixture in the team's midfield. Her contract was due to expire this summer. Over the course of the past year, the wheels were in motion for a grand homecoming. A move to Denver, but not just because it's home The NWSL Board of Governors approved Denver as the league's 16th franchise in December 2024. Heaps wasn't sure if a return to the NWSL would ever be in the picture. Eight years of her professional career have been in France, and she has always spoken highly of playing in Europe and experiencing the rich soccer culture. Even after the announcement of Denver as an NWSL team, even in the anxious buildup to that moment as the ownership group led by Rob Cohen bid against two other expansion finalists in Ohio, Heaps didn't want to get too emotionally attached to the idea that playing in Colorado was a possibility. There were no guarantees that a team would even exist. Until it did. Cohen and Summit general manager Curt Johnson said from the start that they were determined to bring home top players from Colorado, a state that has produced Mallory Swanson, Sophia Wilson and Heaps, to name a few. The Denver Summit's pursuit of Heaps was transparent and aggressive. "I said I don't want to just come here because it's my home," Heaps said. "I want to make sure it's right for me, because I still have a lot of goals and dreams in my career, especially with the World Cup coming up next summer. That's never a given, and I want to be in a place where I am competing for that team." Cohen, Johnson and head coach Nick Cushing laid out the master plan. There was the roster that they wanted to build with experienced NWSL players, and the style they wanted to play to blend possession and transition. "It should impact and improve the mentality of the group when you put in a winner, the national team captain," Cushing said last week, after Heaps began training with the team. "It gives us, definitely, an edge. And we've seen that in the practices over the last three days. Tactically, it gives us so much more opportunity. "Lindsey can play deeper, she can play in the No. 10, she's really effective in the box. From speaking to her, she has a real desire to get closer to the goal, be in the box, score goals and be a high impact player for us." Then there is the training center that was just constructed and opened for the team, and the temporary stadium next door that will debut on Saturday. The crown jewel is the permanent stadium the team plans to build and expects to open in 2028. Everything on and off the field pointed toward Denver making sense to Heaps. "Once it finally became a thing I was like, what the hell, this is real. There's no way. It did start hitting me," Heaps said. Heaps said she knew early in those conversations with Denver that she wanted to go home. But this time, a wiser Heaps decided a phone call to her parents -- or waking them up to tell them at their bedside -- wouldn't suffice. This was a decision for them, too, so she surprised her parents during a routine visit around the holidays. The team captured their reaction on camera, and in January, the club announced officially Heaps would join in the summer once the European club season had ended. "Like a dream come true," Linda said of Heaps' decision. Neither Linda nor Mark wanted to pressure their daughter to come home. Like most parents, they learned through the years what not to say, whether about life decisions or soccer games. They read all the news about Denver getting an NWSL team, but they didn't get their hopes up. They didn't want to influence Heaps, but they really wanted her to come home. Those feelings can be heard in their voices, still, as Mark gets a little higher pitched in excitement and Linda reflects more deeply about the move. Their parental pride is evident throughout their home, including an "Olympic room" off the living room that is adorned with all sorts of one-of-a-kind memorabilia. There is a circular table where the family plays card games now. Decades ago, it was the kids' playroom. A Golden upbringing in soccer Perched on a hill just above Golden's main street is a peaceful neighborhood of contemporary homes, one of which is where Heaps grew up and which still belongs to her parents. Linda was Heaps' first soccer coach by necessity. Heaps was too shy to play for anyone else in her early grade school years, so Linda picked up a "Soccer for Dummies" book to better understand the game. A two-minute walk from the Horan's house is a community park where Linda coached a handful of girls, including Heaps on her first official team. Linda and her daughter would carry goals down to the park and coach mom would hand out stickers to the girls with the best attitudes. Heaps still remembers wanting more stickers. "It was very special for me to have my mom as my coach," Heaps said. "Even now, you think back to those times, and what an amazing memory and time that you get to spend with your mom. She has been there every single day of my career." Linda "pretty much facilitated Lindsey's entire life in soccer," Mark told ESPN from the family's living room that looks out to the backyard. That yard is smaller now after a back deck was added, and the property butts up against a hill (because it's Colorado, of course), but there was still enough room for Heaps and her older brother, Michael, to turn the space into their own sports stadium. Michael is an all-around elite athlete, the family said -- and mom and dad are no slouches. They are longtime runners who now participate in ultramarathons together: two 50km events last year to go with Mark's 370-mile, 10-day ultramarathon. Heaps picked up the genes and had the gumption of a true little sister: if Michael was doing something, she wanted to do it, too. That included American football, for example. Heaps threw a perfect spiral in the backyard simply by watching and listening to her dad, as Mark tells the story. Heaps has won a World Cup, an Olympic gold medal, a UEFA Champions League title, an NWSL Championship and NWSL Shield, but the trophy that got away was the NFL's old "Punt, Pass, & Kick" competition. Heaps dominated the competition locally and finished second nationally in the 2005-2006 edition, missing out by a few centimeters. She couldn't redeem herself the following year: U.S. youth national team camp conflicted with the event. All those NFL awards are still displayed in the Horans' finished basement alongside World Cup and Olympics memories. Turning down the chance of a lifetime in Lyon Soccer always came first for Heaps. A year before leaving for PSG, a family cruise was derailed by a phone call the Horans received at the airport in Spain. Tim Schulz, who ran the Colorado Rush club that Heaps played for, had an opportunity for Heaps to train with Lyon during preseason. "That kind of threw a wrench in our family trip," Linda told ESPN before Mark interjected from the other side of the large L-shaped couch in their living room: "That was not a good trip." The family spent the next two weeks discussing how to proceed with the offer. "It was a very stressful cruise," Heaps said. Her friend, Erik Bushey, offered to accompany Heaps to ease the stress on the family. After two weeks, Lyon and head coach Patrice Lair offered Heaps a contract, although as an American, she would need to turn 18 before she could play for the senior team. Heaps said she needed to go home and speak with her family, and after doing so, she turned down the offer. "When you talk about being the best in the world, you also have to be brave enough to say now's not the right time," Bushey told ESPN. "That's equally as brave as stating the goal in the first place, because now everybody would expect that a certain opportunity arises, well, you have to take it. As hard as it was to ultimately decide to go to PSG, it was equally as hard, if not more difficult, to decide not to go to Lyon." Heaps said she still believes that was the right choice at the time: "I don't think I was ready in that moment, and I wanted to be certain that this was the right thing for me." A year later and with another European title won, Lyon didn't have space on its roster for the budding American star, but its rival, Paris Saint-Germain, did. Those early days in France were tough on everyone. Linda stayed with her daughter for two weeks before she needed to return to work. She still remembers the taxi pulling away to the airport in Paris as her 18-year-old daughter, suddenly an adult in a foreign country, waved goodbye. The weeks that followed were filled with tearful video calls from Heaps, who hooked onto the public Wi-Fi at the local McDonald's to talk and see her mom's face. "There was a very scary time," Heaps said. "I actually thought I didn't really like football anymore. I think it was just the growing pains of being in a professional environment. Obviously, a lot of people know about my PSG experience and how the coaches treated me. That was part of it, but I didn't feel like I was going to training and enjoying it anymore." (Heaps has been vocal about the body-shaming she faced early in her career, particularly while at PSG.) "All I knew was enjoying football and loving every second of it. I think that was a very hard moment for me, because I just sat there, and I had spoken to a few people about it, and I was like, 'I just don't know if this is worth it anymore.' I was 18 at the time. I couldn't believe the way I was feeling, and that's a hard place to be when you are overseas away from family and friends who can be there to support you." Things changed a few months later when fellow American Tobin Heath joined PSG, giving Heaps a fellow American who turned into a mentor and friend -- "like a big sister," Linda said, adding that she wrote Heath a thank you card. Mark and Linda would travel to France as frequently as they could (more often in the early days). They were there for major club games and all of Heaps' historic moments with the U.S. national team. Seeing their daughter was much easier from 2016-2021, when she played for the Portland Thorns. Heaps had come home because she was told she had to by U.S. Soccer and former USWNT head coach Jill Ellis. That was the pathway to the 2016 Olympics and a long-term international career. Each career move she made was about making progress. A goal unchanged, realized with the USWNT and in the NWSL As all family stories go, there's minor disagreement on precise timelines of events, but the gist of it goes like this: At a young age, Heaps declared publicly that she wanted to achieve greatness in soccer. A pro player, a U.S. national team player, the best player in the world: Those were the goals. Heaps has the most vivid memory of the moment. It was one of her first road trips with her youth club, the Colorado Rush, and Schulz told the room that maybe only one player would turn professional. Heaps said she wanted to be that player. "No chance I was the best player at that time, in that room, but I knew that I could outwork everyone," she said. Heaps would practice three times per night with three different teams while Linda worked in the car, waiting for her daughter to walk up to the window and plead with her to stay a little longer. There were morning sessions, too, that earned Heaps and other gifted players credit with the local school district. Bushey would set up for training in the dark those mornings and drive a bus to get kids back to school. "She was nuts," Mark said endearingly, a description Heaps doesn't argue. She was also driven more than most elite players. "But you can be driven and not necessarily be a student," Bushey said. "You can be driven to train and work, but maybe you're not necessarily driven to learn, to develop, to be a student of your craft. And quite simply, she really didn't back down from challenges. If anything, she was motivated by them." In those early days, Heaps was a physically dominant forward thought of as, perhaps, the next Abby Wambach. But Heaps' idol is Lionel Messi, and she redefined herself around Messi's model, as a midfielder with superior technical execution and tactical acumen. Her knees have taken a beating from those years of three-a-day practices and the wear and tear of an extended professional career; she won't hide that. In Denver, though, she will immediately step into captaincy and the expectation that she will make the talented but inconsistent expansion team better. Heaps is the captain of the USWNT and objectively a lock to be at the 2027 World Cup. There are legitimate questions about how USWNT head coach Emma Hayes should best utilize Heaps given the team's abundance of midfield talent, but those are questions about starting and minutes, not the roster. Still, Heaps said she doesn't take her place on the roster for granted. Being back in Denver will keep her training and competing at a high level while putting less mileage on her body to join the USWNT for training camps. She will also be closer to her husband, Tyler, the sporting director and general manager of MLS club San Diego FC. "As time has gone on, things change in your life, your career... balance in life is not talked about enough," Heaps said. She can still remember those thoughts of quitting when she arrived in France in 2012, and how her family got her through it: "We take it so seriously because it's technically a job, but there was one day that you fell in love with this ball and this sport that you play, and you can't let that slip your mind." Life is about connections. Heaps, her parents said, has always built strong bonds wherever she has gone. She has done so with teammates young and old for club and country, crying through goodbyes as she told friends in Lyon that she was leaving. She even still gets a text from Anson Dorrance after most USWNT matches, despite Heaps never playing in Carolina blue. Bushey officiated the Heaps' wedding. Now, Heaps' parents have about a 20-minute drive to go see their daughter play most weekends. They can meet up for dinner or take a walk down to the park where Heaps first fell in love with the game. It has been a long road home for Heaps, and the start of it will never be forgotten.