KANSAS CITY, Mo. — When then-Manchester City midfielder Sam Mewis last March was ranked the best women's soccer player in the world by ESPN FC and espnW, the immensely humble and ever-hungry superstar appreciated the honor but essentially shrugged it off.
Anybody on that top 50 list could have been No. 1, she said in a recent interview with The Kansas City Star, and such a verdict "just kind of depends on what happens on the day of the vote or whatever."
Plus, for more than 20 years in the game now, she's fixed her gaze not on where she's been but on what's ahead of her: from a seemingly clairvoyant vision of the future as she watched the 1999 World Cup to the relentless pursuit of older sister Kristie, herself among soccer's elite, to her uncanny sense of what's around her on the pitch.
