When Shelbourne FC team captain Pearl Slattery picked up her two teammates, Shauna Fox and Izzy Glennon, for the drive to training in North Dublin, she was downright giggly. “I have the craziest news,” she said as she drove. “But I can’t tell you, I swore I wouldn’t tell.” A second later: “We have a new player.”
Fox and Glennon started guessing Irish names. Slattery said no — try American. So they rattled off U.S. college players, and Slattery said no, think bigger. “So we start saying the most outrageous names we can think of,” Glennon says. “And Heather was one of those outrageous names.”
She was talking about Heather O’Reilly, a three-time Olympic gold medalist, World Cup champion and scorer of 47 goals for the U.S. national team. When they finally guessed correctly, Slattery giggled and confirmed — “Isn’t that mad? It’s absolutely mad. ” Once the whole car knew that O’Reilly was coming to play with Ireland’s Shelbourne FC, they were all giggly together. “We didn’t believe it at first,” says Glennon. “We told Pearl she must’ve misheard.” They were shocked, excited — and, well, confused. Why was Heather O’Reilly coming to play with them?
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O’Reilly is 37 years old. She is happily married and the mom of two small boys. She’s an assistant coach at her alma mater, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a perennial powerhouse, and she’s a pundit on various soccer broadcasts. She ran the Boston Marathon in March. She even had a stint on “American Ninja Warrior”, which is pretty emblematic of O’Reilly in general: She’s the kind of person who tends to say yes. (On the “American Ninja Warrior” broadcast, they patched in fellow U.S. legends Julie Foudy and Abby Wambach to cheer for her during her run. Afterward, when…
Source : espn
