Abby Wambach Says the Decision to Cut Her Hair Short Changed Her Life: ‘I Stopped Worrying Too Much’ (Exclusive)

• Abby Wambach published her first children’s picture book, “The Wolfpack Way,” on Tuesday, Oct. 8
• The retired U.S. Women’s National Team star tells PEOPLE the book is about helping children find the “empowerment” to be themselves
• Wambach’s new book has led her to reflect on her decision to cut her hair short in 2010 and live “openly, outwardly gay,” a choice she says changed her life for the better

Abby Wambach can tell you the exact moment she found her true form.

While catching up with PEOPLE recently, the retired U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team reflected on the moment she decided to finally cut her hair short for the first time during the 2010 season — a decision that lifted a weight off Wambach’s shoulders she never imagined possible.

“I played soccer for 30 years of my life and the first year that I cut my hair short, that year and the ones right after were the most important years of my career,” Wambach, 44, says. “They’re the years I won the most, the years I had the most personal accolades. And I think if I look back and kind of analyze the data, the years that I played the best, too. It was the time that I felt like myself the most.”

It was Wambach’s coach Pia Sundhage who first gave the U.S. women’s soccer star the idea — even if she didn’t explicitly tell the team’s leading scorer she should trim her hair.

“I had never seen a woman or a coach or a leader in my life be more themselves than her,” Wambach says, telling stories about how the beloved gray-haired Swedish coach would host team meetings with an acoustic guitar in her lap, strumming along while talking about different strategies she wanted her players to use in their next match. 

Wambach laughed about Sundhage’s blissful, care-free approach at first. 

And then the team kept winning.

“It was hilarious to us at first, but then the more and more I leaned in towards her leadership, the more I understood it,” Wambach recalls. “Having that exposure at that age was an important element for me to start saying, ‘Okay, what is she doing?’ I want that. So, I started to employ more of myself inside the game and stopped worrying too much about if I was openly, outwardly gay in the marketing world, and what that would mean if I had shorter hair, and what that would mean for my endorsement deals. Like, these are things that a gay woman in the early 2000s really was afraid of because the world wasn’t as accepting as it is now around homosexuality and being a queer icon.”

So out came the trimmers, and Wambach never looked back. 

That season, the Rochester, New York native exploded for 16 goals in 18 matches. The following season, she led the USWNT to the World Cup Final with four goals in the tournament. And by the next season, in 2012, Wambach found herself with an Olympic gold medal around her neck.

She was only getting started. Wambach etched her name in U.S. soccer lore, becoming the country’s all-time leading scorer with 184 goals by the time she ended her 14-year international career in 2015.

“I believe that being fully ourselves actually makes the world better,” Wambach says, pointing to that year as an example. 

“That is quite possibly the most important thing I can ever teach my children,” she says. “That the more ‘you’ you can bring to every world that you’re involved in — to every classroom, every stage, every field — the more ‘you’ you bring to the table, the better that table will be.”

Wambach is reflecting on those years — the years she found the courage to shed self consciousness and introduce her true self to her worlds — on the heels of the publication of her first children’s book, The Wolfpack Way, out Tuesday, Oct. 8. 

The picture book was largely adapted from Wambach’s viral 2018 commencement speech at Barnard College. Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group says Wambach’s debut picture book “encourages kids to be their true selves, dream big, and work together as a Pack to change the world.”

At its crux, Wambach says her new book is about helping children discover the “empowerment” to be themselves and developing a “leadership” that looks out for everyone.

“It’s about working together as a team. It’s about seeing and being around all kinds of people, and being able to figure out how to become a team with everybody, whether it’s in a classroom, whether it’s in your family, whether it’s in your workforce,” she says over the phone, speaking with PEOPLE from the backseat of a van while on tour with her daughter Tish Melton, who’s carving out her own identity as a singer-songwriter.

Wambach shares three children with her wife Glennon Doyle, whom she married in 2016: Chase, Tish and Amma.

All three children receive nods throughout the pages of “The Wolfpack Way,” which Wambach hopes can reach children, including her own, to help them find more comfort and confidence in their own skin.

“As a child, I feel like I didn’t have much choice,” Wambach says, reflecting on the decades before the Samson-like decision to cut her hair and find strength in her own identity. “And my goodness, the more choices I started to learn that I have, the more myself I could become. And that really does make the world better.”