Unlimited Potential: Wambach a Champion for Lacrosse, Women's Sports

Abby Wambach’s prowess on the soccer pitch was on full display during her 14 years with the U.S. Women’s National Team. She scored 184 goals, including a game-tying header off a Megan Rapinoe pass in 2011 that’s considered one of the greatest goals in World Cup history — right up there with Brandi Chastain’s penalty kick winner in 1999 and the iconic celebration that followed.

The U.S. didn’t win the World Cup that year. But Wambach, a two-time Olympic gold medalist, ended her international career as a World Cup champion in 2015.

Since then, she has become a champion for another sport: lacrosse.

Wambach is a part of the advisory board for Athletes Unlimited, which operates the longest-running professional league for women’s lacrosse as well as for volleyball, softball and basketball. Her nephew, Brady Wambach, just completed his first season as a faceoff specialist for North Carolina and was one of 42 players named to the 2025 U.S. Men's U20 Training Team.

Aunt Abby’s love of lacrosse is rooted in family.

“From a very young age, my brothers played lacrosse in the backyard,” Wambach said. “Soon after I left high school, women’s lacrosse just started booming and exploding in popularity.”

Wambach had chosen to specialize in soccer, attending Florida in 1998 and earning her first national team cap in September 2001. She’s watched the rise of women’s lacrosse closely.

“I have a massive amount of respect for lacrosse players because those balls are hard,” Wambach said. “I know men’s lacrosse is a little bit more physical than women's lacrosse, but women's lacrosse is still very physical and tactical. You can watch the athleticism and movements of all the attackers. It’s a fun sport to watch.”

So, who is Wambach watching? Let’s just say she shares something in common with Boston College and current U.S. Women's National Team coach Acacia Walker-Weinstein’s school-aged daughter, Wesley, and thousands of other people worldwide — perhaps (probably) including you.

“Charlotte North — she’s special,” Wambach said. “I see the way she scores and her movements. They’re unreal. Her trick shots? I’ve gone down YouTube rabbit holes for them. She’s incredible.”

Speaking of trick shots, Kylie Ohlmiller also got a shoutout from Wambach. So did a few other greats.

“Jen Adams, Kenzie Kent, Izzy Scane, Taylor Cummings,” Wambach rattles off, just to name a few.

North, Cummings, Ohlmiller and Kent (as an alternate) were all part of the 2022 U.S. team that won the World Lacrosse Women’s World Championship in Towson, Md., becoming the first team to take gold in the event on home soil.

The previous year, Wambach spoke with candidates for the final roster, partly because of another tie she has to the game. Dan Levy, the husband of North Carolina and former national team coach Jenny Levy, was her agent and remains a friend.

But she wasn’t just doing him a favor.

“Jenny Levy has just been such a champion,” Wambach said. “I value human beings staying in one industry for a long time. She became the coach at UNC [nearly] right after graduating from college and has been there ever since. That [exemplifies] the kind of character and integrity that she shows up with.”

When she showed up at USA Lacrosse headquarters, Wambach felt she was among many of her own.

“If you play for your country, no matter what sport you play for, there's this embedded respect,” Wambach said. “When I walked in the door, I felt like, ‘Oh, these are my people.’”

There are national teams for many sports, including hockey, baseball and basketball. So, the fact that Wambach, who didn’t play a sport embedded in U.S. TV viewing culture growing up, was speaking to lacrosse players also made her feel at home.

“There’s a special kind of person who chooses to play the sport that isn't necessarily the most popular in the world or the country that you live in,” Wambach said. “Us lacrosse and soccer players probably played multiple sports growing up and were good at multiple sports. We specifically chose these sports, and that feels very special to me. It showed me they want to be a part of building something beautiful and have this belief system that goes far deeper than [themselves].”

The continued belief in the sport’s potential helped spur lacrosse’s inclusion in the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. There was a steady drumbeat of questions and commentary in 2021 about whether the Olympics were still relevant or important — perhaps in part due to the controversy surrounding the pandemic-delayed games being held with COVID-19 rates still surging.

There’s been less of that during the 2024 Games. But do they still matter? For Wambach, the answer is yes. The Olympics mattered for women’s soccer, and she believes they’ll matter for men’s and women’s lacrosse in four years. 

The 1999 Women’s World Cup team is often credited for inspiring a generation. It did. But the 1996 Olympic team, which struck gold in front of a home crowd in Atlanta, is the Rapinoe to the 99ers’ Wambach. It gets the historic assist.

“Our country is going to show up for Olympic events. They just will,” Wambach said. “One of the reasons you see so much success in women's soccer right now is because when those chances came, we took them and brought home the gold. That created this groundswell of popularity that crosses over into pop culture — that crosses over into people who might not necessarily be sports fans and don't care about the statistics, but who are like, ‘I want to be a part of this team because I feel good when I'm here.’ For many people, there's a sense of unity, teamwork and equality, which are the true value systems on which our country was built.”

If lacrosse also strikes gold in LA?

“Standing on the top podium for the women's lacrosse team and the men's lacrosse team would be, I think, the most profound thing that happens,” Wambach said. “I will be very excited to see that happen. Hopefully, my nephew is on top of that podium with his own gold medal draped around his neck.”

International events like the World Cup, World Championship and Olympics occur every four years. However, wins in these events don’t always translate into immediate success at the professional level, where annual seasons provide opportunities for more athletes and exposure.

Both lacrosse and soccer have had growing pains in this regard. For instance, buoyed by hope following the success of the 1999 Women’s World Cup team, the Women’s United Soccer Association launched in 2001. Many of the 99ers, like Mia Hamm and Julie Foudy, played. But the league only lasted one season.

Lacrosse-wise, Major League Lacrosse folded into the Premier Lacrosse League. The United Women’s Lacrosse League played three seasons from 2016-18, while the Women’s Professional Lacrosse League lasted two years (2018-19).

But the National Women’s Soccer League is in its 12th season. The PLL model has proved promising, with its higher player salaries and a tour-based schedule. And Athletes Unlimited is in its fourth year of sponsoring women’s lacrosse.

For Wambach, the reasons current soccer and lacrosse leagues are seeing successes where others didn’t isn’t rocket science.

“A lot of that came down to money,” Wambach said. “It was [also] about branding — getting our little niche league into the world of pop culture.”

In a way, pop culture came for the NSWL. Wambach says the league was becoming stable and getting by. Then, a group led by Oscar-winning actress Natalie Portman, venture capitalists Kara Nortman and Alexis Ohanian and entrepreneur Julie Uhrman teamed up to join forces to invest in and found the expansion franchise Angel City FC in July 2020.

The list of other owners read like the closing credits to a Hollywood movie and a list of all-time greatest athletes ever rolled into one: Serena Williams, Uzo Abuda, Jennifer Garner, Eva Longoria, Foudy, Hamm, Wambach, Joy Faucett … the list goes on. Perhaps appropriately, Walt Disney CEO Bob Iger and his wife, Willow Bay, became controlling owners of the club — now valued at $250 million, making it the world’s most valuable women’s sports franchise — in July.

What’s followed sounds like a fairytale but is the product of generations of hard work and advocacy.  

“It ignited this new way to women's professional sports ownership, and you're seeing so much more investment across all women's sports boards,” Wambach said. “It's like every person who missed out on the tech bubble and the bitcoin bubble, every big investor, every office in the world, is trying to become a part of the women's professional sports ownership groups.”

Wambach and Deloitte point to the allure of a high ROI of a growing sector. The 2024 Nielsen Sports Report cited a 17-percent increase in NSWL interest, an 89-percent increase in ratings for the women’s NCAA basketball championship game between South Carolina and Iowa and a 511-percent surge in WNBA draft ratings.

Is lacrosse mentioned in the report? No, but Wambach believes that it can be, especially with the Olympics on the horizon and the support of the Athletes Unlimited umbrella, which announced it would sponsor lacrosse during the same year that she backed Angel City FC.

“I hope it becomes the most popular league in the world,” Wambach said, laughing — but only a little.

Like Walker-Weinstein says, “Dream big,” right?

“I hope that it becomes a sustainable league that the best players want to play in and continue to return because they are making enough money, have good healthcare, are planning their retirements, people love and appreciate them and they are sharing in profit from TV rights deals,” Wambach said. “I think the sky is the limit for Athletes Unlimited.”