For any athlete growing up, the Olympics is the one thing you watch with your family, and it's the one thing you dream about. Seeing your country's flag go up as you get a gold medal is the best thing you can achieve.

As professional soccer players, we take our bodies to the extreme. We're the people at the gym that look like we're breaking the machines. Pushing our bodies to the limits is what makes us so strong and capable and Olympians. It's not an easy thing to consistently do over and over again to your body.

When I was really young, the women's national team wasn't on a grand media stage, so my role models were male basketball and male American football players.

The growth of women's soccer and women's sports all around the world has been slow.

I'm a person who believes that if a team that's producing a champion and producing contenders in that same division, then the coaches should be proud of that and pat themselves on the back because they're really creating a dynasty, so that's the way I take it.

After I went through two years of not winning an event, what kept me going was winning one more major. Once I won that last U.S. Open, I spent the next six months trying to figure out what was next. Slowly my passion for the sport just vanished. I had nothing left to prove.

A takeover or a player doing something wrong can take the focus away from what the most important thing is, which is to play football.

They read their sports pages, know their statistics and either root like hell or boo our butts off. I love it. Give me vocal fans, pro or con, over the tourist types who show up in Houston or Montreal and just sit there.