The Official Site of Heather O'Reilly

Bio

Jersey Girl

New Jersey-girl Heather O’Reilly made her national team debut in 2002. At 19, she made the U.S. women’s team for the 2004 Athens Olympics after recovering from a broken fibula sustained during a match the year before. The youngest player on the roster, O’Reilly scored one of the most important goals in U.S. history in the semifinal when she took a feed from childhood idol Mia Hamm and fired a six-yard shot past German goalkeeper Silke Rottenberg in sudden-death overtime. The goal lifted the U.S. to the Olympic final, a match that would see the Golden Girls (Hamm, Julie Foudy, Brandi Chastain and Joy Fawcett) sent off in style, with gold medals around their necks.

Carolina true

After the Olympics, O’Reilly returned to college at North Carolina, where she was a teammate of WNT midfielder Lindsay Tarpley and defender Lori Chalupny. She capped off a four-year career that saw her score 59 goals with a second NCAA championship title and tournament ‘Offensive MVP’ in her senior season. She also won the NCAA Top VIII Award, given to NCAA athletes based on athletic and academic achievements, and graduated from UNC with a degree in education. In 2008, her No. 20 Tar Heel jersey was retired.

Position change

After playing her entire WNT career at forward, head coach Pia Sundhage started employing O’Reilly as an outside midfielder at the 2008 Four Nations Tournament in China. The thought was to add speed to the midfield flank and give O’Reilly more room to attack one-on-one against a back-pedaling defense. In her first match at her new position, she collected three assists, a one-game total that exceeded her assist output during any single year of her career. The effort helped earn her tournament MVP.

Later in 2008, Heather played with the WNT as they attempted to defend their gold medal at the Beijing Olympics. Heather made history when she scored in the 40th second of a must win game against New Zealand, giving her the quickest goal in an Olympic match, and more importantly helped propel the US into the quarterfinal round of the tournament. The team continued on to defeat Brazil in the finals, as Heather recorded her 100th career cap with the WNT in the gold medal clinching win.

In the inaugural season of the WPS, Heather appeared in 17 matches as co-captain of Sky Blue FC, leading the team to an unexpected playoff berth. In the championship of the 2009 Women’s Professional Soccer Playoffs against Los Angeles, Heather scored the only goal to win the championship, and was named MVP of the championship.

In 2010 Heather started all 22 games she played in for Sky Blue while playing every minute of those games. She scored one goal with a team-leading five assists and was named to the WPS All-Star Team. On the international front, Heather tallied 27 career goals at the end of 2010, and moved into the list of top-15 all-time goal scorers in U.S. history.
Today, Heather is looking forward to continuing her prolific career, and hopefully ending the 2011 season with a World Cup winners medal.

Nine lives on

O’Reilly wears the No. 9 jersey formerly worn by Mia Hamm. She throws off questions about heightened expectations due to the number, stating confidently that she is trying to write her own chapter in the U.S. soccer history book.