#defector

Heath and Press are part of a cohort of former USWNT players who have chosen to stay in the public eye by becoming members of the media. By my count, seven players from the 2019 World Cup–winning squad regularly host a podcast, and several others own or frequently participate in other media ventures. Heath and Press are aware of the crowded space they're in; Heath's comment that NWSL Championship weekend was actually just "retired athlete podcast weekend" got a laugh from the crowd.

For many of these players, the transition from national team star to media personality was a smooth one. They were professionals at a time when the USWNT was the dominant force in international soccer, and when the team was stocked with big personalities. The USWNT's on-field success, and the stature of national heroism that came with it, made many of these players icons within the sport. They were becoming celebrities and objects of fascination at the same time they were stacking trophies. And they learned to leverage that attention to win equal pay, that politically charged issue that came to define their generation.

Heath and Press were never much for the spotlight during their playing days, however, and for good reason. Their relationship was a source of speculation among soccer fans for more than a decade, and it wasn't until 2024 that they revealed that they have been in a romantic relationship since around 2016. Press said in 2024 she and Heath kept the relationship from going public for so long because they felt like they "had something to protect."

Things are different now, though. Press and Heath are married, and they talk into microphones for a living. This puts them in a new place, one where the attention and parasociality they sought to avoid while playing are key ingredients for success, and where they are still trying to make their mark in a sport that continues to grow in unexpected directions.

One thing is for certain: Press and Heath have dedicated fans. Before and after the live taping, I approached some of them at the venue and asked why they listen to the podcast. A pair who called Press and Heath's generation of players "heroes" said The RE—CAP Show stands out from other player-hosted media because of the host's relationship, which they admire. Folks told me they like the podcast's authenticity, inclusive values, and dedication to talking about issues that matter. A group of middle-aged educators told me they appreciate hearing from women who have fought, at a much more prominent level, against the same kind of systemic sexism they've faced in their own careers. Those women also told me they learn about soccer from Heath's enthusiastic expertise; one said she should become a coach. Another fan, who I ran into on the way from the live show to the Fan Fest, really enjoyed watching both players on the pitch because of their respective styles of play, which makes it all the more special to see their partnership now. That same fan told me he feels especially connected to Press because she's Black, like he is.

"There's kind of something there for everyone, from the soccer geek to, you know, the kid that is just looking on the internet for some safe space," Heath said when I told her about the many reasons folks love the show. "I just feel really proud of the many, many places that we touch in this ecosystem, and that we try to build around, that honestly didn't exist when we were young athletes."

It's not unusual for female athletes to sell themselves as a product. Their typically low salaries often don't provide financial stability, and developing approachable, personal-feeling relationships with fans helps to attract sponsorship money. Parasocial relationships between fans and female athletes are common, and there are few, if any, current or former American women's soccer players who boast fandoms more eager than those of Heath and Press. Their ship name, "Preath," was assigned by fans before they were even an item, and for years they had to navigate their lives and relationship while under the watchful eyes of fans who dissected their every move.

As podcasters, Press and Heath seem much more willing to embrace their fans than they were as players. In a candid episode of the podcast released in June 2025, they talked about how unpleasant it was to have their relationship speculated about so intensely during their playing days. "We didn't even know what we were going to be, and yet everything was being labeled as something, or even you were being labeled as something. It's like our identities, our sexuality, who we were attracted to, was all being scrutinized and like, almost celebrated before we had even a chance to understand," Heath said. "And I just think it was a gross feeling and I hated it."

At the live taping, there was no evidence of tension between Heath and Press and their fans. Press talked about her final season as a professional, and how special she felt when she would go to games and see "a sea of 23s"—her kit number—in the stands.

I asked Press why she and Heath are so much more open about their personal lives than they used to be. "I think early in ventures, like early in your career, early in a business, it is important to sort of protect the sanctity of what you're trying to build," she said. Now that they've built up a solid community, they feel more comfortable being open.

It also helps that they own the podcast and its production company, RE–INC. "We have full control in terms of what's shared, and it allows for us to have really organic, authentic conversation in front of the camera, knowing that we have the safety of our own company behind us," Press said.

Press told me that owning the company, which offers paid yearly and monthly memberships to fans, allows her and Heath to approach their relationships with the public in a new way. "I think as an athlete, there's this natural barrier: It's player, fan," she said. "But with our company, it's community members, and we all take turns leading and we really feel strongly about co-creating, and so I think there's a little bit of a dance."

"What I think I've found is that it's actually really natural, deciding what to share and what to keep," Press said. "Just sort of listen to your instincts, listen to your heart, being authentic, and not trying to create this perfectly packaged brand is quite easy, because it just means I'm me."

This, Press says, has held true throughout her time as a public figure. "At any point in my journey, it might be different information that I'm sharing or not, but it always is what felt true to me," she said. "And I think that's why there's been so much grace and kindness in its reception."

Part of Press being herself is allowing Heath to take on the more boisterous parts of hosting a podcast. After a moment of grounding at the live show—Press and Heath are in some respects caricatures of hippie Angelenos—Press ceded the floor entirely to Heath, who proceeded to monologue for more than six minutes. It would be reasonable to believe that no retired athlete should ever talk for more than six minutes uninterrupted, but Heath is a true showman, and she flitted easily between cheeky jokes and incisive commentary. She brings as much flair to the podcast as she did to the field.

Later, I asked Heath if she sees herself as an entertainer. "On the pitch, obviously, it was a really natural way for me to express myself in so many different ways: creatively, emotionally, stylistically, kind of mentally as well," she said. "But now there are these new avenues, and obviously—it being our company—our show gives me a lot of liberty and freedom to create what I want." Still, she said that her on-stage exuberance isn't her "normal self," and she relishes pushing herself to feel uncomfortable.

In addition to being open about their romantic partnership, Press and Heath have enthusiastically updated their listeners about their new dog, Bob. When they adopted her in the summer, they partnered with PETA to promote pet adoption over shopping. And now, there's an ongoing segment on the podcast sponsored by Ally called "Banking With Bob," in which the pair discuss how they go about handling some aspect of their finances. The segment was even adapted for the live show, with Press enthusiastically announcing, "It's 'Banking With Bob' now!" Those personal lives that Heath and Press worked so hard to keep separate from their playing careers are now woven together with their business.

Heath and Press are hopeful that their podcast can help create a media environment that is a little more connected to the realities of women's soccer. Heath said that when she was a player, she felt that women's soccer media was "kind of disconnected from what we were actually doing." She attributes this in part to the fact that most people covering the sport were coming from men's sports, "so they didn't have any idea into our culture, our lives. It's a very narrow lens that they were covering us from." She said this kind of media feels very outdated to her, and she hopes that through the show, "how we just do life feels less separate from the football."

That effort involves the pair's willingness to talk candidly about the business of soccer. In one episode, Press opened up about a 2018 saga that saw her player rights sent to the NWSL's Houston Dash against her will, and ended with her signing with a club in Sweden. In a September episode about the NWSL's salary cap, spurred by panicked discourse around Alyssa Thompson's move to Chelsea, Heath said she knew that a new coach in the league was making three times as much as the league's highest-paid player. The power dynamic created by that kind of discrepancy, she said, is one of "the problems that the NWSL is so scared about in the first place," ostensibly alluding to the NWSL's history of abusive coaches.

The episode about the NWSL salary cap has only gotten more relevant since its release. The league is currently experiencing a full-blown crisis over the free agency of Washington Spirit superstar Trinity Rodman, who has the enough ability and starpower to be the face of the league for years to come. The trouble is that, due to the NWSL's salary cap, Rodman can earn much more playing in Europe, where teams are less encumbered by artificial financial constraints. In early December, the Spirit attempted to sign Rodman to a four-year deal worth more than $1 million annually, but their offer was rejected by the NWSL, inviting a grievance from the NWSL Players' Association. The league has since attempted to solve this issue by instituting an arcane High Impact Player rule, which allows teams to go over the salary cap when signing a star player who meets certain arbitrary criteria. The NWSLPA is against this plan, preferring instead for the league to just raise the salary cap, and has implied that it may take legal action against the league.

Labor battles in sports often suffer from the fact that reporters can only react to information strategically leaked by obviously interested parties. This puts people like Press and Heath in a unique position, in that they are media members who come to the job with built-in insider knowledge. As a player, if Heath had wanted to weaken the league's position in a labor battle by pointing out that a new coach was making three times as much as the highest paid player, she would have had to stick her neck out by saying so in an interview or leaking the information to a reporter. As a podcaster, she can just say it.

When I talked to Press and Heath, less than a week after the NWSLPA filed its grievance against the NWSL, Heath expressed her frustration with the situation. "In the CBA, there's nothing about the Players' Association that's keeping the NWSL from increasing the salary cap. If [NWSL commissioner] Jessica [Berman] went to [NWSLPA executive director] Meghann [Burke] today and said, 'Let's increase the salary cap to $5 million,' the CBA would be changed to $5 million." Her position is nuanced. She's not entirely against the existence of a cap, but believes that it has to "reflect the growth that's happening all around women's sports, and the future growth that's about to happen, too."

My interviews with Press and Heath took place before news of the High Impact Player rule came out, but on the September episode about the NWSL salary cap, Heath spoke passionately against any 'Designated Player'–like rule. "If you create a system where one player or two players is deserving of some ridiculous amount of money and the rest of the team is basically paid what the NWSL is currently paying the rest of their players, this creates a massive chasm between the worth of players, and I don't believe that belongs in team sports," she said. "I believe that every single player should have the same right to go out and fight for their value and their worth."

Heath told me that the low salary cap "shows that there's some clubs and owners that are real serious about this business that would love to see that be a bigger number, and there's others that aren't." Another project she's a part of, World Sevens Football, has offered an indirect challenge to those behind NWSL's low cap. This year, the group has held two seven-a-side tournaments for select professional clubs in their offseason, and the total prize pool is a whopping $5 million, substantially more than each NWSL team's annual salary cap. When the San Diego Wave won the second edition of the competition on December 7, the club's players took home a total of $1 million—almost a third of the Wave's annual salary cap in the NWSL. On a recent episode, Heath said, "The GM of San Diego Wave told me that half of the players doubled their income in three days." If a three-day competition can deliver its athletes a sizable payment, why can't the NWSL?

"I think the fact that we're even in this Trinity Rodman discussion and we've seen some of our top superstars go over to Europe is a shame, because I like being on our front foot," Heath said. "And it seems like we're constantly, as a league, on our back foot."

I asked Press how she decides when to use her insider knowledge to push the public conversation in one direction or the other. Basically, she trusts her gut. "I think with the right intention, I don't feel too bound in what I speak about," she answered. But she does think her retirement will impact her podcasting going forward. "I think as a current player, I'm just really careful about some of the things that I comment on. I generally didn't talk too much about, you know, teams' performances in the NWSL or like inner happenings on my team," she said. "Once I'm a former player, I won't have that same access, so I just try to be respectful to some of the access that I got because I was a former player, and respect some of the boundaries that are there."

Then again, it's not clear how long the pair's insider understanding will even remain immediately applicable. Their careers unfolded in an environment that is starkly different from the one in which today's players find themselves. Press and Heath were in their prime at a time when an American player's career revolved almost entirely around the national team—up until 2021, U.S. Soccer was paying the salaries of USWNT players who played in the NWSL—but now the club game is taking on more importance. And, thanks to the enormous amount of extracurricular work their cohort did as players to push the soccer world forward for women, workplace standards are significantly higher.

At the live show, Press and Heath talked about this dynamic with two of their guests, Megan Rapinoe and Sue Bird (you may have heard of them). "It's really becoming clear we never got anything nice when we played," Rapinoe half-joked. That's the curse of the breaking body—the time needed to improve standards, and enjoy them, is a lot longer than the lifespan of an elite athlete's career.

Heath told me she's glad current players have better working conditions. "I think the greatest gift that we hopefully gave to this next generation is the ability to just play, and I don't think that that should come lightly," she said. "...I think they're gonna pave their own way and I want to be able to support and guide and mentor and encourage as much as possible, so that they can go way beyond where we've ever been."

You can sometimes detect an edge in how the USWNTers of the previous generation—who fought for and won pay equity while in many cases being outspoken on various social justice issues—talk about today's crop of stars. During the live show, Press expressed her ambivalence about the current generation's public complacency. "I played soccer during the right time for me because I wanted to do that work. That is why I played. But it's a gift to not have to do that work. And so it's like, we fought so that this generation could just ball out, right?" she said. "And we get to see that, and we're like, 'Wait, aren't you going to fight for more? Like, carry the torch!'"

Rapinoe identified a "more conservative" shift among the personal brands of current American stars. She gave a word of wisdom to the next generation: "Somebody's profiting off you, so you may as well be a part of it."

Press and Heath don't want to become curmudgeons, like so many former athletes who end up on TV complaining that the stars of today don't know how good they have it. They see the differences between themselves and today's players as an opportunity to remind those players how much there is still to be gained. "We'll still have the most probably unique perspectives on this planet until, you know, another generation comes around and wins two World Cups and fights for some kind of massive thing outside the sport," Heath told me. "There's such a unique perspective that our generation of players has that almost is like a mandate to continue forward and pushing."

The women's soccer community has historically been "sacred and protected," as Press told me, referring to the sport's proud cultural identification with the LGBTQ+ community that makes up so much of its fanbase. But as leagues like the NWSL court more eyeballs and more money, there emerges a temptation to pander to a broader, more conservative audience. Through RE, Press and Heath are navigating how to grow the sport without sacrificing its values. "It's an important question to ask," Press told me. "How do you maintain the safety of your community as you scale it?"

"We have the opportunity right now because we're kind of still at that basement level of building and we get to be intentional about our decisions," Heath said. "And I think that intentionality is really important because we've seen where women's sports thrive is when it's authentic to the culture and the audience that it's representing. And when it doesn't thrive, it's trying to fit into the traditional sports landscape."

"Women, queer folks … people that have been othered by sports, that haven't felt necessarily quote-unquote sporty: They haven't related to the media that's been put out about what an athlete is or what a fan looks like," Heath said.

Heath and Press's careers were defined by their fight for equal pay against U.S. Soccer, and it's just as likely that Rodman and her comrades' legacies will be defined by coming labor and political battles. The league is growing—Arthur Blank just coughed up a reported $165 million for an expansion team in Atlanta—and as more money flows into the sport, the more ground there is for labor and owners to fight over. That the stakes of that fight keep getting higher is a privilege for today's players.