7 Fun Facts About Sophia Smith, USWNT's Breakout World Cup Star

Although she was first called up to the senior team in 2017 (at just 16 years old!), Smith didn't make her official USWNT debut until November 2020 during a game against the Netherlands. At that point, she became the first player born in the 2000s to earn her cap (meaning, appear in her first game with the national team) for the USWNT. Smith scored her first goal for the team during a Sept. 21, 2021, match against Paraguay in Cincinnati.

Smith played two seasons of soccer at Stanford University, helping to advance the team to the 2019 NCAA Championship, which they won. However, she chose to forgo the later part of her college soccer career, instead becoming the top pick in the 2020 National Women's Soccer League College Draft. She's played for Portland Thorns FC since then.

This may be the year Smith makes her World Cup debut, but 2022 was also a pretty great year for her. It was so good, in fact, that she was named the 2022 BioSteel US Soccer Female Player of the Year for her achievements. In 2022, she also led the entire USWNT in scoring (with 11 goals), was part of the NWSL Championship-winning team, and was voted the Championship Game MVP and the NWSL MVP, making her the youngest league MVP to date. In April 2022, she also scored a hat trick against Uzbekistan, becoming the fifth-youngest to score a hat trick in USWNT history, according to US Soccer.

Smith and fellow USWNT member Naomi Girma have been friends since childhood and also attended Stanford together, where they were part of the soccer team that won a national championship in 2019. Last year, their friend and former Stanford teammate Katie Meyer died by suicide, and Smith and Girma are committed to championing mental health in her memory.

After scoring her second goal in the USWNT's 2023 World Cup match against Vietnam, Smith celebrated with a "zipping the lips" gesture, a tribute to Meyer's celebratory gesture in 2019. The duo are hoping to honor their late friend by bringing awareness to mental health.

"I think we see this as an opportunity to shed light on a lot of things that are important to us, and I think that's been something that's at the core of this team for so long," Girma told The Philadelphia Inquirer. "And for us to come in now and carry on that legacy is something that's really important to us."

Smith has two older sisters, Gabrielle and Savannah, and grew up in Windsor, CO, outside Fort Collins. (She's shared Savannah's clothing designs on Instagram, like this sweatshirt!) She comes from more of a basketball family than a soccer one: her father, Kenny, and Savannah both played college basketball, and she herself played basketball along with soccer in high school.

Smith met her boyfriend, Michael Wilson, when they were both student athletes at Stanford, according to People, and they've been together ever since, even going long distance after Smith left Stanford to start her pro soccer career. After an injury in 2020, Wilson recovered and became the third-round draft pick for the Arizona Cardinals in 2023.

In the USWNT's opening match against Vietnam, Smith scored two of the team's three goals. The team soon tweeted that she became "the second-youngest player in #USWNT history to score multiple goals in a World Cup game and the youngest since Cat Whitehill in 2003."

That said, Smith's success didn't come as a surprise to her teammates. In a video posted by the National Women's Soccer League, several other USWNT players predicted she'd be the one to notch the first goal for the team at the World Cup.