PORTLAND, Ore. – “I’m just over it.”
Tobin Heath is still over a month away from having to answer the inevitable: what it’s like to be back; how she survived being out; does she really feel healthy, now; how much she missed the field.
They’re good questions. But they’re good questions with obvious answers, ones that won’t change over the next month of rehab sessions, fitness building and, eventually, getting back to playing soccer. It’s only March, and Heath has just returned from Los Angeles, where she spent the first stage of her rehab. She’s relaxed, sitting in the bowels of Providence Park, taking in the organization’s media day with her teammates and coaches. The first time people outside the organization notice she’s back with Thorns FC, however, she knows she’ll have to talk.
“There’s nothing to say,” she says. “It was what it was. I can’t do anything about it.”
What “it” was
,
was January ankle surgery, a procedure U.S. Soccer described on Jan. 4 as “minor.” On the heels of an NWSL season lost to a back injury, though, the surgery played into a growing perception, if not an outright fear. When would fans see Tobin Heath back on the field?
“I knew I was going to have to get surgery,” she says, trying to distinguish the more recent, planned absence from the problems that curtailed her 2017. “It was one of those maintenance things, so I could have a long career.”
She’s already had a long career. Only 29, Heath is already in her ninth year of professional soccer, and she has over 10 years of games at the international level. Add in time preparing for those minutes, and maintenance becomes a greater concern.
“If I think of it now, I don’t want to do it (have surgery),” she says. “If I think about the career I want to have, and how I want to play here, I had to do it in terms of timing. It was the only timing that worked.”
The timing would have been innocuous if it hadn’t been for the 12 preceding months. After all, Heath wasn’t the only prominent U.S. international that did some January clean up. Becky Sauerbrunn’s stress reaction in her left foot undermined her winter, while Samantha Mewis took care of an emerging knee problem. Neither issue was serious. Both had to be addressed.
For Heath, though, 2017 provides a different context. As training for that NWSL season ramped up, a back injury surfaced. In the wake of the USWNT's March She Believes Cup, the problems seemed passive - one of many, minor knocks internationals carried out of the tournament. But Heath’s problem lingered. Then, at some point, it changed, and then it worsened. Come season’s end, the team’s 2016 standout had only logged 245 minutes.
Among those minutes were starts in the team’s two playoff games, wins that brought Thorns FC their second NWSL Championship. It was the third major NWSL honor of Heath’s career, too. Her first came with her scoring the game-winning goal in the 2013 NWSL Championship and the second was part of an NWSL Best XI campaign that saw her help the team earn the 2016 NWSL Shield.
“Obviously, people are going to ask about [the injuries],” Heath concedes. She understands, even if it’s a point of discontent. “Any time I’m off the field, it’s tough, because I can’t do what I love to do. It’s obviously extremely frustrating for someone that loves the game the way I do, and loves this club.”
That club part is often overlooked, particularly for players whose broader, international identities cast them in red, white and blue. Both Lindsey Horan and Emily Sonnett have alluded to the role the Thorns environment played in helping them through their problems. On a more mundane level, life around the team is the pulse of players’ existence from March to October. Heath’s injury took her to Southern California, away from that environment, depriving her of the most consistent part of her soccer world.
“It’s one thing not being able to play for the national team,” she explains. “That hurts, because I’m used to doing that. But not being able to play for this club is hard, because I enjoy this place so much. When I came back to Portland, just walking down to the stadium for the first time, I was like, aw, it feels so good.”
“When you take away the soccer part of it, though, it’s almost like I lose my connection to this place a little bit. That was hard. But just being able to contribute to whatever way I could last year, and to see the team still do so well, that was a really proud moment for me, because it wasn’t an easy season.”
They’re circumstances that force Heath to find the positives. If you’re a professional athlete, there’s almost nothing else you can do. You could succumb to circumstance and feel sorry for yourself, but that won’t allow you to be a professional athlete much longer. Instead, just as you would do against a stout opponent or a difficult tactic, you have to engage the problem.
“It strengthens you as a person, too, you know?” Heath asks, finding her space of comfort in talking about her 2017 ordeal. “People always talk about it as the nice thing to say, but it’s so true. You’ve got to dig, at some point. Everybody’s going to see you at your best, in terms of when you’re out there, you get to do what you love. But when you have to dig as a person? It’s incredible. That’s where the gold lies. The digging.”
“You always have to flip it around in a different way,” she says, about the time off. “I constantly have to renew my mind in that way, because not doing what you love to do can be extremely painful.”
Painful, but in a weird way, rejuvenating. The benefit to spending so much time away from the field gave the chance to reset everything else: your mind; the rest of your body; your perspective on the game. No athlete would willingly make that tradeoff, but when forced into that new situation, the new perspective proves helpful.
“The way that I think about it is that, I’m keeping miles off,” Heath says, fully digging into her dark cloud’s lining. “It’s not like last year didn’t matter, but I got to keep all that (playing time) in me.”
“Now I’m just so motivated to play,” she says, not fully knowing it would be another five weeks before she saw the field. Once she did, though, playing 30 minutes in the Thorns’ 1-1, April 20 draw to the Washington Spirit, she faced her first round of questions.
“For me, personally, it was great to get back out on the pitch and get that over with,” she would say, the first part of her answer deflecting the obligatory ‘how did it feel’ question toward talk of her team. “Obviously, the result, we would have wanted it to be better,” she said, before shifting and appeasing the crowd.
“I don’t really want to talk about it,” she admits, knowing that she has to. “I feel like I’m just so over it, and I want to just focus on what’s ahead.” That’s this weekend’s game, the last 20 games of this season, and, next summer, a World Cup.
Right now, though, Tobin Heath has to put something else in the rearview.
