Mili Hernandez - the girl once barred from a soccer tournament for looking like a boy - is now a top player in her state with national team aspirations

• Mili Hernandez went viral at age 8 when her team was barred from a soccer tournament over her looks.
• Now 12, Hernandez is one of the best players in the state and thriving.
• USWNT icon Abby Wambach told Insider she resonated with the experience as a girl with short hair.

Mili Hernandez was just a kid when she first made headlines.

But four years later, the budding star is eyeing fame based on her brilliance on the soccer field rather than the discrimination that famously kept her sidelined what feels like ages ago.

"I remember a little bit," Hernandez, now 12, told Insider. "I don't think about it at all because it was important at that time but not anymore."

When Mili Hernandez was 8 years old, her team was booted from the finals of a tournament because she 'looks like a boy'

Hernandez's aptitude for The Beautiful Game was apparent from an early age. Just three years after she first started playing soccer, she joined forces with a team of 11-year-olds because her talent level was so far beyond that of players her age.

And even then, Hernandez was clearly a star for the Azzuri Cachorros Chicas. In June of 2017, she cruised as she led the squad on a dominant run through a local competition near her hometown of Omaha, Nebraska. But once the Chicas reached the tournament's championship game, everything changed.

Moments before Hernandez and her teammates were set to take the field for the finals, their head coach received some startling news; the team had been disqualified from the Springfield Soccer Club tournament because someone had complained that Hernandez - who wore her hair short - was a boy. And while the event's organizers insisted that a typo left the Azzuri Cachorros star listed as male on the team's roster, the Hernandez family was convinced that the 8-year-old's physical appearance played a significant role.

"Just because I look like a boy doesn't mean I am a boy," Hernandez told local television station WOWT 6. "They don't have a reason to kick the whole club out."

After a tearful reaction from Hernandez and utter disbelief from her parents, what followed was an outpouring of support the likes of which the Hernandez family could never have imagined. Her story, first picked up by local news outlets in Nebraska, spread nationwide when The New York Times, CBS News, Sports Illustrated, NBC News, The Washington Post, Forbes, and more began sharing it with their audiences. And later, when Hernandez's Chicas teammates chopped their own hair in solidarity after practice, ESPN ran a story on that, too.

Then the titans of women's sports caught wind of what happened to Hernandez. US Women's National Team icon Mia Hamm invited her to join a soccer camp she and former USWNT teammate Kristine Lilly hosted in nearby Wisconsin. Billie Jean King - the tennis champion best known for leveling the playing field for women in the sport - encouraged the budding star to "dream big" via Twitter. And USWNT all-time leading scorer Abby Wambach posted a video to Instagram offering support to Hernandez before penning an op-ed for TIME. She described facing similar adversity during her soccer career.

"It was overwhelming for a little bit, but also encouraging for [Mili]," her father, Gerardo Hernandez, told Insider. "I actually cried that people from that level reached out to my kid to support her. It was an emotional moment."

According to her dad, Mili didn't understand the full extent of the whirlwind sweeping her up but "was excited about the situation" with the superstar athletes, so the sting of her initial ouster from the tournament subsided quickly. Her confidence never waned, she said, and her father insisted that she even started playing better after the incident that fateful day in June.

Hernandez still rocks a pixie cut as one of the top players in the state

Fast forward four years, and not much has changed for Hernandez. She still wears her hair short, and she still loves the game of soccer. She says she "would play all day" if only she were allowed. Sixth-grade responsibilities often get in the way of that dream, but she plays for multiple teams so that she can maximize her time on the pitch.

After the 2017 incident, Hernandez spent another season with the Azzuri Cachorros before taking her talents to FC Roja, an all-girls non-profit soccer club where she plays for two teams. Not only is Hernandez a star for the top team in her age bracket, but she also "has the skill, knowledge, and ability to play up an age" with the 2007 premier squad helmed by husband-wife coaching duo Stephen and LeeShell Lewis.

"Mili is a force on the field," LeeShell Lewis told Insider. "Her presence and ball-handling skills easily make her one of the top players in the state ... Her skill set on the field is beyond her years, and she is so motivated to continue to grow and develop."

"She has one of the best soccer IQs at her age in the state," she added. "We always say 'she's all in' when at practice or on the field. She's just fun to watch."

Hernandez's dominance on the pitch has attracted plenty of attention and, with that, plenty of naysayers

Lewis said she's watched opposing teams target her star player for her appearance on multiple occasions. As leaders of the team, she and her husband always try to "use these opportunities and others we have experienced as a team and club to teach all of girls to be better [and] empower them as players and as young women to remain strong and persevere when others are being ignorant."

"We have had several incidents with out-of-state teams," Lewis said. "There hasn't been an issue with refs or players thinking she was a boy but opposing parents on the sidelines yelling 'get that boy off the field.' ... It's heartbreaking and disappointing that the hate Mili and other girls in our club have faced coming from grown adults who should know better."

But the hate Lewis describes has not slowed Hernandez down in the least. Quite the opposite, actually, as Lewis says, Hernandez's "confidence as a young woman and player has grown in the last couple of years" and that she's "really come out of her shell... and found her voice on the team."

Hernandez's parents have observed the same phenomenon. Teammates, even the ones who are older, often seek out their daughter for extra advice and guidance, they said. And though Hernandez is naturally quiet and "absorbs everything," she has no shortage of self-assurance once she's on the pitch.

"Mili's always exceeding, and as a parent, you want your children to exceed," Mili's mother, Maria Hernandez, told Insider. "Her dad is always trying to challenge her into doing more, into doing better, and into having the confidence that she can do it. He has a can-do mentality that spills over into Mili."

That confidence has propelled Hernandez to the upper echelons of the sport - and onto the national team track

Hernandez is involved in Nebraska's Olympic Development Program (ODP), a highly selective soccer environment run through US Youth Soccer that works to "identify and provide opportunities for high potential players" with an eye towards national team exposure and preparation.

Simply put, ODP is a huge deal.

Of the 23 players featured on the US Women's National Team's 2019 World Cup-winning roster, 21 of them had played for an ODP squad in their youth. And considering Hernandez says her "dream is to be professional soccer player" and that she hopes to suit up for the USWNT someday, two consecutive years of ODP training and competition are a promising start.

"I didn't know that the women in the World Cup once played on ODP teams," Hernandez said. "That's exciting knowing that I am following in their footsteps."

USWNT icon Abby Wambach sees herself in Mili Hernandez

With 184 goals in just 255 appearances for the national team, Wambach was one of the greatest scorers to ever play for the red, white, and blue. But not so long before she became a bona fide legend and the second-leading international goal scorer - for both men and women - in the history of the sport, Wambach was just a kid struggling with many of the same challenges Hernandez has faced.

Wambach spoke to Insider about battling adversity on the field and "not feeling like I belonged anymore" as a young player.

"When I think about my younger self, I think about [how] I played on a boys' team, and I got teased," Wambach told Insider. "I remember the time when my mom and I started talking about maybe it's time for me to start going and playing with the girls because it started to become a problem socially."

For the majority of her professional and USWNT careers, Wambach wore her hair short - much like Hernandez did at the time of that infamous 2017 incident and still does to this day.

Between her 'do, above-average height of 5-foot-11, and muscular build, Wambach often received inappropriate and demoralizing questions about her gender.

"I know that that's been said about me throughout my life, throughout my career," Wambach said. "They wanted me to get gender tested in a lot of countries. A lot of people on Twitter have bullied me and maybe tried to get me gender tested because I was too manly or I was too big."

"I get what it feels like for Mili to experience looking a certain way or presenting a certain way, not feeling like you belong," she added.

Six US Soccer Athlete of the Year awards, two Olympic gold medals, a World Cup championship, a FIFA World Player of the Year honor, and an AP Athlete of the Year nod later, Wambach is more equipped than virtually anyone on the planet to deliver advice to Hernandez.

"If you still are true to who you are, and you never depart from yourself to make somebody else feel more comfortable, you always stay true to yourself and make other people feel uncomfortable," Wambach said. "That is what I was trying to relay in the conversations that I had with her, because at the end of the day, especially if she's feeling it on the field, especially if she's superior on the field and crushing it in certain ways, everybody's going to have an opinion."

"My hope is that everybody who hears the story just stays true to themselves and lets everybody out there be uncomfortable. It's whatever it is," she added. "And I hope like heck that Mili just keeps going out and killing it and proves to the world that whoever she wants to be, she's allowed to be."

She's doing just that.

"It doesn't matter what people think," Hernandez said. "I would say to my younger self, just keep going and don't stop doing what you love."