“I’ve never really explained why the team means so much to me,” U.S. midfielder Sam Mewis said, but the interviewer was affable and the setting right.
The 28-year-old star had just been named to the women’s Olympic soccer roster, a first in her career. But while “there’s a lot of patriotism involved” in representing your country, Mewis confided, her pride largely comes from elsewhere.
“I feel like what the U.S. women’s national team stands for and what it represents is everything that we fight for all the time,” she said. “It’s all these women that have come before us.