Hope Solo, the goalkeeper of 102 shutouts who came back at 43 on her own terms

Hope Solo

Photo: Erik Drost / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	July 30, 1981 Richland
Occupation	Footballer
Individual awards	Olympic gold medal, women's football · FIFA Women's World Cup champion · FIFA Women's World Cup Golden Glove · FIFA Women's World Cup Bronze Ball · FIFA Women's World Cup All-Star Team · U.S. Soccer Female Athlete of the Year · WPS Goalkeeper of the Year · IFFHS World's Best Woman Goalkeeper · FIFA FIFPro World XI · CONCACAF Women's Championship Golden Glove · NWSL Shield · National Soccer Hall of Fame

For nine years, the goalkeeper who holds the international shutout record in the women’s game did not play a competitive match of any kind. Hope Solo had not retired. She had been removed, by a federation that suspended her, tore up her contract and moved on, while the teammates she had protected for sixteen years went on to win another World Cup without her. When she finally came back, it was not through U.S. Soccer, a club or a farewell game. It was through a seven-a-side tournament in North Carolina, with a team she had assembled herself and named after herself.

That return says a great deal about how Solo has always operated. She was the best player in her position for a decade and one of the least manageable people the American game has produced, and she never accepted that the second fact should cancel the first. Her career is a list of records and a list of ruptures, and the two lists were written at the same time. Most accounts of her pick one and footnote the other. Hers is the story of someone who kept both, and who is still arguing about which one should define her.

What follows is that argument in full: the childhood that shaped her distrust of institutions, the saves that made her untouchable for a while, the words that made her expendable, and the slow, public repair of the last few years.

A childhood built around an absent father

Hope Amelia Solo grew up in Richland, in the dry south-east of Washington state, where she was born on July 30, 1981. Her mother, Judy Lynn Shaw, raised her after her parents divorced when she was six. Her father, Jeffrey Solo, was an Italian-American Vietnam veteran who drifted in and out of her life, and he was the one who first put a ball at her feet. When she was seven, he collected her and her brother Marcus for what was supposed to be a trip to a baseball game in Yakima and instead drove more than three hours west to Seattle. The children spent several days in a hotel believing they were on holiday, until police found them at a downtown bank and arrested their father on suspicion of kidnapping.

The episode could have ended the relationship. It did not. Years later, as a student in Seattle, Solo found her father again, by then living rough in the city, and rebuilt a bond with him that lasted until his death from a heart attack in June 2007, months before the tournament that would define her public image. She has described him as a major influence on her life, and much of her later suspicion of authority reads more clearly against that background: a girl who learned early that the official version of events and the private one rarely match.

The forward who became a goalkeeper

The detail that surprises people most is that Solo was not a goalkeeper as a teenager. At Richland High School she played up front and scored 109 goals, leading the team to three consecutive league titles between 1996 and 1998 and to the state championship in her senior year. She was twice named a Parade All-American and played her club football with the Three Rivers Soccer Club in the Tri-Cities. The reflexes and the physical confidence were already there. The position came later.

It came at the University of Washington, where she enrolled in 1999 to study speech communications and where head coach Lesle Gallimore and goalkeeper coach Amy Griffin, herself a former national team player, moved her permanently into goal. The switch worked almost immediately. Solo was a four-time All-Pac-10 selection, an NSCAA All-American three times, and in her sophomore year she became the first goalkeeper, and the first player from Washington, to be named Pac-10 Player of the Year. She left the Huskies as the program’s all-time leader in shutouts, saves and goals-against average, and as a senior she was the only goalkeeper nominated for the Hermann Trophy, college soccer’s highest individual award.

Sweden, Lyon and the leagues that kept folding

Her professional career began in a market that kept collapsing under her. The Philadelphia Charge chose her in the first round of the 2003 WUSA draft, fourth overall, and she spent most of that first season on the bench before starting the last three games, in which she recorded her first professional shutout against the Atlanta Beat and also shut out the eventual champions, the Washington Freedom of Mia Hamm and Abby Wambach. Days before the 2003 World Cup, the WUSA folded.

Solo went to Europe. In February 2004 she joined Kopparbergs/Göteborg FC in Sweden’s top division, playing twice a week for ten months and making nineteen appearances. In 2005 she moved to Olympique Lyonnais in France for seven more. Those years abroad were not glamorous, but they gave her the volume of matches that American women’s football could not.

When professional football returned to the United States, she returned with it. Allocated to Saint Louis Athletica for the first season of Women’s Professional Soccer in 2009, she helped drag a team that started without a win to second place, kept eight clean sheets and was named WPS Goalkeeper of the Year. That same year she became the first goalkeeper to be named U.S. Soccer Female Athlete of the Year. When Athletica folded in 2010 she moved to the Atlanta Beat, led the league in saves, and was fined and suspended for a game after questioning the integrity of officials on Twitter. In 2011 she signed for magicJack, and by early 2012 that league had gone too.

The Seattle Sounders Women, in the second-tier W-League, gave her a home in 2012 alongside Alex Morgan, Megan Rapinoe and Sydney Leroux, and sold out nine of ten home games. From 2013 she was the goalkeeper of Seattle Reign FC in the new National Women’s Soccer League, recovering from wrist surgery in her first season and then helping the Reign to a sixteen-match unbeaten run and the NWSL Shield in 2014, a trophy the club won again in 2015. She was named to the league’s Second XI in 2014 and was a finalist for Goalkeeper of the Year.

The semifinal she watched from the bench

Solo made her senior debut for the United States in April 2000, in an 8–0 win over Iceland, and went to the 2004 Olympics in Athens as an alternate behind Briana Scurry. By 2005 she was the first choice. At the 2007 World Cup in China she conceded only two goals in four games, with consecutive clean sheets against Sweden, Nigeria and England. Then, before the semifinal against Brazil, head coach Greg Ryan dropped her for the 36-year-old Scurry, who had a strong record against the Brazilians but had not played a full match in three months. The United States lost 4–0.

Solo’s response after the game became the most quoted thing she ever said. “It was the wrong decision, and I think anybody that knows anything about the game knows that,” she told reporters. “There’s no doubt in my mind I would have made those saves.” She added that it was no longer 2004 and that a team could not live on big names. Many heard it as an attack on Scurry. Solo issued an apology the next day, but the damage inside the squad was done. The team, led by captain Kristine Lilly, decided she would not travel to the third-place match, and she was left off the pitch for the post-tournament tour against Mexico. Ryan’s contract was not renewed that December.

The benching has been read two ways ever since. In one version, Solo broke the unwritten rule of a dominant, tight-knit team. In the other, a coach made an indefensible call and the only person punished was the player who said so aloud. Solo has always insisted on the second version, and her 2012 memoir, Solo: A Memoir of Hope, written with the columnist Ann Killion, laid out her account of Ryan in detail. What is not in dispute is that the episode set the terms of her relationship with the team for the rest of her career: indispensable on the pitch, isolated off it.

Two gold medals and two Golden Gloves

Her answer was to become impossible to leave out. Under new coach Pia Sundhage, Solo started at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, where Scurry did not make the squad, and the United States beat Brazil 1–0 in extra time to win gold. Four years later in London she played every minute of the tournament, recorded three clean sheets and made a late save from Mana Iwabuchi in the final against Japan to protect a 2–1 win and a second gold medal. Before those Games she had received a public warning from the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency after a test detected canrenone; the agency accepted that it came from a prescribed premenstrual medication and she was cleared to play.

Between the two Olympics came the 2011 World Cup in Germany, and with it the save that many American fans still remember first. Against Brazil in the quarterfinal, after Abby Wambach’s header in the last seconds of extra time forced penalties, Solo stopped Brazil’s third kick and sent the United States through. She reached 100 caps in the semifinal win over France, lost the final to Japan on penalties, and still left with the Golden Glove as the best goalkeeper of the tournament and the Bronze Ball as its third-best player.

The 2015 World Cup in Canada was the complete version. Solo played all 630 minutes of the United States’ seven games, went 540 minutes without conceding, the second-longest run in tournament history, and allowed three goals in total. In the semifinal against Germany, she delayed Célia Šašić’s penalty long enough to unsettle the tournament’s top scorer, who missed. In the final, the United States beat Japan 5–2 in Vancouver in front of what was then the largest American television audience ever recorded for a soccer match, and Solo won her second Golden Glove. The team became the first women’s sports team honored with a ticker-tape parade in New York.

She had passed Briana Scurry’s national shutout record in September 2014, and in July 2016, against South Africa in Chicago, she became the first female goalkeeper to reach 100 international clean sheets. At the Rio Olympics a month later she played her 200th game. Her final numbers for the United States are 202 appearances, 153 wins, 102 shutouts and a 55-game unbeaten streak, all national records for a goalkeeper.

The goalkeeper who never stayed quiet

The same years produced a second record, and it is the one her critics prefer. During London 2012 she lashed out on Twitter at the former international Brandi Chastain over her television commentary. In June 2014 she was arrested in Kirkland, Washington, and charged with two misdemeanor counts of assault involving her half-sister and nephew; Solo said she had been defending herself. A judge dismissed the charges in January 2015 for lack of cooperation from the alleged victims, prosecutors won an appeal to reinstate them later that year, and the city finally dropped the case in May 2018. The episode drew a letter from Senator Richard Blumenthal accusing U.S. Soccer of a double standard for keeping her on the World Cup roster at a time when the NFL was suspending players over domestic violence.

In January 2015 she was suspended for thirty days after her husband, the former NFL tight end Jerramy Stevens, was arrested for driving the team van under the influence during a training camp with Solo in the vehicle. The federation cited her judgment. Her supporters point out that none of the domestic charges ever reached a conviction and that the scrutiny she faced was far heavier than that applied to male players in similar situations. Her critics point out that the incidents kept coming. Both observations are accurate, and neither cancels the other. That, more than any single episode, is what makes her hard to summarize.

Her public life off the pitch was just as crowded. After the 2011 World Cup she reached the semifinals of Dancing with the Stars with Maksim Chmerkovskiy, finishing fourth, and posed for the ESPN The Magazine Body Issue, calling herself simply an athlete. Solo: A Memoir of Hope entered The New York Times hardcover non-fiction list at number three in 2012, the highest debut for a soccer book. In 2014 she was one of the women whose private photographs were stolen in the iCloud leak, and she condemned it as an act beyond the bounds of human decency.

Rio, and the word that ended it

The end came quickly. At the Rio Olympics in 2016, Brazilian crowds chanted “Zika” at her after she had posted photos of mosquito repellent before the Games. In the quarterfinal, Sweden, now coached by Pia Sundhage, who had led Solo to two Olympic gold medals, sat deep, held the United States to a draw and won the penalty shootout after Solo stopped play to change her gloves before the decisive kick. Afterwards she called the Swedish team “a bunch of cowards.”

On August 24, 2016, U.S. Soccer suspended her for six months and terminated her national team contract, citing the comments and her previous conduct. Solo said the remarks were a pretext and that she was being removed because of her leading role in the players’ campaign for equal pay. Megan Rapinoe publicly wondered whether the decision was part of a legal strategy. The players’ lawyer called the sanction excessive and unprecedented. Solo never played for the United States again. The Seattle Reign gave her leave for the rest of the season, and at 35 her professional career was over.

The equal pay fight that went on without her

This is the part of the story that has aged most in her favour. In March 2016, Solo was one of five players, with Carli Lloyd, Alex Morgan, Megan Rapinoe and Becky Sauerbrunn, who filed the federal complaint accusing U.S. Soccer of wage discrimination. After her removal, the campaign continued without her. In February 2018 she ran for president of U.S. Soccer and used her five-minute speech at the federation’s meeting in Orlando to accuse the establishment of silence on equal pay; Carlos Cordeiro won. In August 2018 she filed her own lawsuit under the Equal Pay Act.

When the national team players reached a $24 million settlement with the federation in 2022, Solo objected in court, in part over the legal fees, arguing that the deal did not deliver what the fight had been about. Her own case was dismissed by agreement in February 2023, closing the last open front of the dispute. Netflix‘s documentary Untold: Hope Solo vs. U.S. Soccer, released in September 2024 and directed by Nina Meredith, told the whole story largely from her side. The film noted that most federation officials, former teammates and journalists had declined to take part, and on its release many viewers who remembered only the controversies discovered the advocacy for the first time.

Arrest, treatment and the Hall of Fame

The hardest chapter came after football. On March 31, 2022, Solo was arrested in a Walmart parking lot in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, for driving while impaired, with her two-year-old twins in the car. She pleaded guilty to the impaired driving charge; the charges of resisting arrest and misdemeanor child abuse were dismissed. Two months earlier she had been elected to the National Soccer Hall of Fame. She asked to postpone her induction, said publicly that she was entering an in-patient program to deal with her challenges with alcohol, and did not appear at the 2022 ceremony.

She was inducted a year later, on May 6, 2023, in Frisco, Texas, in a class that included Landon Donovan and Jill Ellis, the coach who had won the 2015 World Cup with her in goal. The order of those events matters to how she is judged: the recognition was voted before the arrest, delayed by her own request, and delivered after treatment. It was the first formal embrace of her career by the American game since 2016, and it came from the Hall of Fame rather than the federation.

Solo FC and the road down from the mountains

Solo now lives with Stevens, whom she married in November 2012, and their twins, born on March 4, 2020, in the mountains around Asheville, North Carolina. She had worked as a pundit for the BBC at the 2019 World Cup, but for most of the years after her dismissal she stayed away from organised football. “You know, it was really hard to get me to come down from the mountains last year,” she said in 2026.

What brought her down was The Soccer Tournament, a seven-a-side event in Cary, North Carolina, with a million-dollar prize. In 2025, at 43, she created Solo FC and entered it in the women’s competition, blending experienced players with emerging talent from communities she felt had been denied visibility. It was the first time she had played competitively at any level since 2016. For her twins, who had never seen her play professionally, it was a first look. Solo FC reached the quarterfinals, and she saved a penalty along the way. “I probably wouldn’t be back in the game if it weren’t for TST,” she said afterwards.

In 2026 she came back with two teams, a women’s side and a mixed side in the tournament’s new co-ed format, held at WakeMed Soccer Park from May 27 to June 1. She took on the role of general manager for both, planned to keep playing herself while giving other goalkeepers more minutes, and tried to bring in a Palestinian international and a Somali refugee despite visa hurdles. “It’s very important to me to field a very diverse team,” she said. The role is modest next to a World Cup final, but it is the first one in years that she has chosen entirely on her own terms.

What the record still says

Solo’s place in the sport is not really in question anymore. She is in the Hall of Fame, she was named to the IFFHS world team of the decade for 2011 to 2020, and her 102 international shutouts remain the reference point for goalkeepers in the women’s game. What is still in question is the story around the numbers. For years the default account treated her as a talent who kept getting in her own way. The Netflix film, the equal pay settlement and her own candour about alcohol have pushed that account toward something more complicated: a player who was right about several of the fights she picked, wrong about others, and punished for all of them at once.

She has never asked to be remembered as easy. Her return to the pitch, at 43, in a tournament with no federation badge on the shirt, is consistent with everything that came before it. Hope Solo still wants to be in goal, still wants to pick her own team, and still does not accept that anyone else gets to decide when she is finished.