During her years with University of North Carolina, she was named the Atlantic Coast Conference Player of the Year for three consecutive years and ACC Female Athlete of the Year in 19.

She played soccer for Notre Dame Catholic High School in Wichita Falls and won the 1989 girls soccer Virginia State title with Lake Braddock Secondary School in Virginia.

She took to soccer at the age of two while in Italy and was enrolled in a soccer club by the age of five when the family moved back to Wichita, Texas.

She is fourth of six children born with birth defect of a partial clubfoot.

Her father was fighter pilot with U.S Air Force and her mother was a former ballerina.

She was born Mariel Margaret Hamm-Garciaparra, on March 17, 1972, in Selma, Alabama, United States.

She is author of the national bestseller ‘Go For the Goal: A Champion’s Guide to Winning in Soccer and Life and has also written a juvenile fiction book ‘Winner Never Quits.’.

In June 2011, she was inducted into nine members Board of Directors of National Soccer Hall of Fame and in 2012 Hamm was one of the members of U.S Soccer’s newly created search committee to appoint a coach for the women’s national team.In 19, she was awarded the ‘Sportswomen of the Year’ by the Women’s Sports Foundation in the Team winners’ category andshe finished third behind Michelle Akers and Sun Wen in voting for the FIFA Female Player of the Century.

As the greatest women soccer player, she was the most marketable female athlete of her generation. Hamm is a soccer icon and the first women to be inducted into the World Football Hall of Fame.Here are some very interesting facts about the former professional women soccer player: Mariel Margaret Hamm-Garciaparra, hailed as a soccer icon, was the face of the Women's United Soccer Association (WUSA), the first professional women's soccer league in the United States.

Go for the goal by mia hamm