Kristen McNabb’s first game in the National Women’s Soccer League came with an assignment: mark Sam Kerr.

“I was so out of my wits,” McNabb says now. She hadn’t fully absorbed how iconic Kerr already was (That season, Kerr scored a then-NWSL record 17 goals, won the NWSL Golden Boot and was named NWSL Most Valuable Player). She just knew the job. She did it well enough that, years later, it’s the first defensive moment she thinks of. “Being my first game ever, that’s something I’m pretty proud of.”

More than a decade of professional soccer later, McNabb is still marking the league’s best. She’s the longest-tenured player in Wave history, and the only one left from the 2022 inaugural squad. On April 3, she set a club record with her 87th regular-season appearance, a win over Boston Legacy FC. She hit 100 on August 2. In April she signed an extension that keeps her in San Diego through the 2027 season. To date, she has played 109 regular-season matches for the Wave, started 101 of them, and played 9,204 minutes.

McNabb attended high school in Montville, New Jersey, in a house where soccer was the family language. Her father was an All-American at Babson. Her older sister, Lindsey, played at Rutgers.

“We were always going to the field with my dad, kicking around,” she says. “My sister and I always came back to the field fighting for something I won, she won.” She laughs about it now. “We were so competitive.”

It’s still a family affair. Her dad is the first person she calls after games. “I really trust his opinion. He sees the game kind of similar to how I see it.” They break down the match, her own play, the team. “I think it’s really special.”

She wasn’t a one-sport kid. She swam, played softball and went to tennis and lacrosse camps. But she says soccer was always the main sport, and she settled on it for good around seventh grade. She played club soccer for PDA Charge, where she captained the team to national championship games twice, and TopDrawerSoccer ranked her 34th in the country.

At the University of Virginia, McNabb’s college career started with a knee injury, redshirting her freshman year in 2012. Then it happened again. Midway through the 2013 season, she suffered a season-ending knee injury against Virginia Tech on Oct. 31.

“My first ACL, I thought nothing of it. I was 18. I was like, no big deal,” she says. “And then when I tore it again, I think that’s when I was like, okay.” She decided she wouldn’t let it ruin her college experience. She’d picked a school, she says, where she’d be happy even if she couldn’t play all four years.

The injury changed her more than her knee. “I was crazy intense. If I played bad, I would ruin the day for everybody,” she says. Rehab forced perspective. “The game is really important to me, but there are other things in life. … I’m still intense in how I play, but it’s not the end-all, be-all. I think that has actually contributed a lot to my long-term success.”

Asked what the 18-year-old version of herself would think of where she is now, she doesn’t hesitate. “She wouldn’t believe it.”

She returned to captain Virginia in 2016, a team that reached the Round of 16 of the NCAA tournament for the twelfth straight season. She credits the coaching staff there, “the best people, but also amazing coaches,” for her long-term success after college.

After UVA came five seasons with the Seattle Reign, including a stint on loan with Melbourne Victory in the offseason. She also represented the United States at the under-18 and under-23 levels.

Seattle is where she grew up as a pro, she says. “I was a young rookie and had no idea what to expect. I matured a lot, as a player and as a person.”

In 2022 she became one of the first players signed by an expansion team, the Wave, that went on to become the first expansion team in league history to make the playoffs in its first season. She says the key was grit. “You kind of have to be as an expansion team. You’re all put in the same room and are trying to figure things out from the jump. We were learning on the fly a lot. That grit really took us far, and we had far more success than I think they thought we were going to have.” The Wave won the NWSL Shield in 2023 and the Challenge Cup in 2024.

Grit is the word she uses most. This season’s team has it too, she says, but with a better style on top. “We have a strong identity in how we play. .. But we do have that grit as well. … We’ve used that grit to win games when we haven’t played our best this year.”

She repeated that idea to reporters ahead of a late-season push: talent matters, but grit is something you can “always fall back on.”

Not every season was easy. In 2023, she hurt her hip, came back, and hurt it again. “I hadn’t had an injury that had taken me out for that long of a period in a while,” she says. It was a hard stretch, even as the team thrived. “Their success was my success.”

The next year was harder for the club. “There was so much change,” she says. But it brought the group together. “When there are all these outside factors that we can’t control, we all leaned and relied on each other. … We managed to still have fun at practice and push ourselves.”

When highlight reels run, McNabb shares that fans might miss the small details. “You can see a huge block, and if you don’t know the game that well, you are like, wow, that was amazing. … But the movements you do 30 seconds before a play develops are really important. The difference between a foot, one step over is a big difference on if they’re going to score.”

She says the Wave’s back line has improved since last year because the same group has played together. “We have a really good relationship with our back four. … When you’re higher up the field you want to stay connected.” She says the team’s defending in its own box has been “miles better than last year.”

She says the biggest change this season is how many players contribute. “We have so many superstars, but there’s not one player who’s more important than the other. We’re a really deep team.”

Off the field, McNabb is the kind of person who fills her free time.

Her seven-year-old dog, Renly, is named after a Game of Thrones character. “A kind of irrelevant one,” she admits. She says she just liked the name. Most people call him Ren, and plenty assume it’s for Ren & Stimpy. When she got his DNA results back, she was thrown: “At least 40-something percent Chihuahua,” then poodle, then Pomeranian, then some type of miniature terrier. She calls him a “chapoodle.” “I don’t really like chihuahuas or poodles, but he’s hilarious.” On game days, he matches her mood. “We just chill all day.”

Her best-loved food is a New England lobster roll, and she knows exactly why. Growing up, her grandparents had a beach house in New Hampshire, and her parents have had one for 20 years. This summer she took her boyfriend there for the first time. “I was so excited to show him New England,” she says. They ate lobster rolls, fried clams and whoopie pies, all the New England specialties.

Her favorite fan memory is a recent one. She worked with a young girl through the childhood cancer foundation Triumph Together. They designed a shoe together. “She was so shy. I was trying really hard to bring her out of her shell. And when I saw her again, she was so excited and she lit up at the shoe.”

And the thing she thinks fans would be surprised to learn? She crochets. “I’ve had a lot of hobbies in my day because … I like to fill my time.” She makes purses and blankets for friends. “It’s my grandma hobby,” she joked. “I bring my crochet on the plane.”

Her support system is as simple as her routine. Her dad, her mom and her sister come first, then an aunt who she describes as a super fan who watches every game and texts her afterward. “I have a great group of family that I can lean on.”

Website photo: Miguel Mejia/Miguel Mejia Photography