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Jeff Kassouf
United States women’s national team captain Lindsey Heaps is heading home in June, when she will return to the NWSL to join expansion side Denver Summit FC.
Heaps is expected to join Denver in June after finishing the season and her current contract with French powerhouse OL Lyonnes. She is signed with Denver through the 2029 NWSL season.
It’s a move that, for some, may have felt inevitable for the Colorado native, but she told ESPN that she wasn’t sure the timing would work out when rumors of Denver expansion first surfaced years ago.
«I didn’t want to just say, ‘I want to do it because it’s Denver,'» Heaps told ESPN. «I want it to be the right place for me and my career. So I tried to take as much of the Denver aspect out of it as possible, but it’s very difficult.»
Heaps added that «the more I thought about it, the more it became real.»
The hardest part, she said, was keeping the news from her parents. Heaps, who turns 32 in May, grew up in Golden, Colorado, just outside of Denver. At 18 years old, she signed with Paris Saint-Germain in 2012, becoming the first U.S. women’s player to skip college and turn professional straight out of high school.
Four years later, at the request of U.S. Soccer, Heaps returned to the U.S. to join the Portland Thorns FC, where she won two NWSL Shields and the NWSL Championship, in addition to league MVP in 2018, before she left for France again to join Lyonnes.
The midfielder helped Lyonnes win its record eighth European title in 2022, in addition to three straight league titles. She scored 12 goals with eight assists in 15 starts last season.
Heaps has made 170 appearances to date for the USWNT across various midfield roles. She was part of the team’s 2019 World Cup winning squad, and she captained the 2024 Olympic gold medal team. Her 2024 campaign led to a fifth-place finish in that year’s Ballon d’Or voting.
Heaps’ arrival will be a huge deal for Summit FC, a team that kicks off in March and hopes to compete from the start. General manager Curt Johnson, who previously held a similar role with the North Carolina Courage during their trophy-winning years, told ESPN last year that signing top-level players with Colorado roots is a high priority.
He said recently that bringing Heaps to Denver is something he thought about before he officially got the GM job.
«We just felt like Lindsey was the ideal piece as we work to build a strong team, as well as with the DNA of Denver and Colorado,» Johnson told ESPN, adding that Denver has around 20 players committed to the roster.
«This is one of those moments that’s just special. It sends a message to our fans, our players on our roster, to prospective players, global soccer, that this is going to be a formidable team, an attractive place to come, and that we are going to recruit the best of the best.»
Johnson said he ran into Heaps by chance when the U.S. team played Ireland in the Denver area in June 2025, and they spoke about the team.
«Lindsey’s the type of player that impacts every single game,» Johnson said. «She commands the ball, demands the ball, impacts the tempo of every game. She can score goals; she makes the final pass. She covers a lot of ground and sets the defensive tone. She’s the maestro in the middle of the field in the attacking third that has her fingerprints on every single game, and that’s what we think she’ll do for us.»
Heaps’ return is also positive news for the NWSL at a time when the league is fighting to keep top Americans at home.
The NWSL has lost several top stars over the past year, including the imminent loss of U.S. midfielder Sam Coffey from the Portland Thorns to Manchester City, according to ESPN sources.
The NWSL has responded to that trend, along with the ongoing uncertainty around U.S. forward Trinity Rodman, by creating the High Impact Player rule that will allow teams to pay players up to $1 million above the salary cap.
Heaps is eligible to be a HIP player — potentially the league’s first — based on her qualification for multiple criteria and her contract structure, Johnson confirmed to ESPN, but it is unclear whether or how she (or any player) will count as a HIP player.
The NWSL Players Association has challenged the league’s creation of the HIP mechanism, and sources around the league have spoken about the final terms of the rule with uncertainty. None of that would affect Heaps’ actual contract; it would matter for Denver’s bookkeeping around the salary cap.
Johnson and Denver are working with the NWSL on exactly how Heaps’ deal will affect Denver’s salary cap come summer. Summit FC also has special allocation money as an expansion team that is good through 2027 and can be used to buy down salary cap hits.
Heaps said she is excited to return to an NWSL with «much more investment» than the one she left four years ago.
She pointed to Denver’s hiring of Nick Cushing, «a really big-time coach,» as an example of that. Heaps will join Denver’s inaugural season in progress and will be expected to lead a new, young franchise navigating a temporary situation.
Among the team’s investments will be a new stadium due to open in 2028. It would be only the second stadium built specifically for an NWSL team.
Expansion is not an experience that every player embraces, but Heaps said she is especially well prepared after watching her husband, Tyler Heaps, go through an expansion year as the sporting director and general manager of MLS‘ San Diego FC, which finished first in the Western Conference in its 2025 debut.
«I see their project; I see their view,» Heaps said about Denver Summit. «Obviously, you want it to be successful, but I think the main takeaway I had watching my husband was, you’ve got to develop these standards and this culture to make something successful outside of the field, and that really spoke to me. That was something I really wanted to be a part of.»
That the opportunity was in Denver only sweetened the pot. Her parents have mostly watched her career from afar, «maybe seeing me two or three times a year,» she said.
So Heaps kept from them even the possibility that she was considering a move to Summit FC, a team that was announced about a year ago.
«The one thing that I said to myself is I don’t want to talk to my parents about it because I will see their excitement and I don’t want it to influence my decision too much,» Heaps said.
She said the secret deliberation went on for months until she returned home around Christmas and asked them to join her for what she said was a U.S. Soccer photoshoot.
Her parents walked in and were surprised by the news that their daughter was soon heading home. Heaps said that reality of playing at home will probably hit her when she first drives to training in her home state.
«But maybe most, stepping out onto the field, putting the jersey on for the first time and seeing the crowd, which I know they’ll be absolutely fired up,» she said. «It’s going to be interesting; I could be super emotional, I don’t know — most likely, because I’m a sensitive person. I’m very excited for that moment.»
