We Are Rare

allie_long_: I’ve been waiting to post this since Oct 29, 2016. HAPPY BIRTHDAY, I love ya lots. 👯🎉🎈 @alexmorgan13 oh and @sonny_dayes in the back lookin fresh.

The United States women’s soccer team pressed its fight for equal pay not in one dramatic moment at the negotiating table, but in a thousand small ones away from it. In text messages and phone calls, in hotel rooms and on bus rides, and at home in far-flung cities, the players fine-tuned their needs and their arguments and their solidarity.

Sometimes the suggestions arrived in an overnight email from forward Alex Morgan in France, or a late-night one from midfielder Megan Rapinoe on the West Coast. They sent out anonymous surveys to their teammates, to better gauge what people prioritized but might not want to say aloud, and weighed in on legal language and PowerPoint slides in a cache of shared Google Docs.

As the talks intensified in recent weeks, players like Becky Sauerbrunn and Meghan Klingenberg conferred with teammates like Kelley O’Hara and Christen Press to propose changes as small as a single word in page after page of proposed contract language. Then they would rehearse what they would say at each negotiating session, and even decide who would say it.

Unlike most of her fellow stars on the team, you won’t see much of her away from the field. She doesn’t do bikini shoots. She’s isn’t on magazine covers. The USWNT’s reigning Player of the Year has a habit of ignoring interview requests, actually.

“I’m not opposed to it,” she said in an interview with Yahoo Sports that she was somehow talked into doing. “I think I’m more traditional in how I do media. I want my brand to be about football. I’m a footballer through and through. It’s all I’ve ever wanted to be.”

She lives on Tobin Time, moving at her own speed. She isn’t sure what Tobin Time is when she’s asked about it – it’s a term used by some of those around her.

“It sounds like something fun is going to happen,” Heath said before she bursts out laughing. But she sort of gets it. “I definitely don’t abide by most rules.” More laughter. “I don’t ever know the schedule. I guess I do live on my own planet sometimes.”