How Soccer Star Savy King Turned a Cardiac Health Crisis Into a Remarkable Comeback


"Savy, we need you to stay with us. Stay with us." In the back of an ambulance, a medic vigorously taps Savy King's face, coaxing the Angel City FC defender to remain conscious as they speed toward Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. This plea is the last thing Savy remembers before everything fades to dark.

It was May 9, 2025, and just hours earlier, Savy was playing alongside her Angel City teammates against the Utah Royals. She doesn't recall too much about that day, but she does remember that it started so normally, like every day in the prior weeks. In fact, the only thing that made this game stand out was that it was Mother's Day, and both of her moms were in the crowd, proudly cheering Savy on.

Nothing felt out of the ordinary until the 74th minute. "We had just scored, and I started to feel a little bit dizzy. I took a deep breath, looked up into the crowd, and thought, Whoa, there are 20,000 people out there. I don't feel okay. I'm in the middle of the field. There's no way for me to hide," Savy says, noting that, as an athlete, she's accustomed to pushing through pain and discomfort. However, she soon realized that she could not even stay on her feet. "I remember laying down, I remember grabbing my calf to distract myself because I was not doing well at that point, and that's it."

Thanks to video footage of the game, Savy now knows that her body went limp and she collapsed on the field, as teammates and medical staff rushed over. ACFC head athletic trainer Hollie Walusz took immediate action, performing the CPR on Savy that ultimately saved her life and prevented further heart damage.

The next few days involved a hurricane of tests and specialists, culminating in emergency open-heart surgery. When Savy woke up from her procedure on May 13, there was one question that popped into her mind: Will I ever play soccer again?

Roots of resilience

Since day one, Savy has been an athlete. Born into a warm, supportive, athletic household (her mom Karrie King was a professional runner and cyclist, and her mom Kim Parker King played basketball), Savy and her twin brother, Parker, dabbled in just about every sport available, from flag football to track and field.

"I've always been competitive, in every single thing I've done," she says. In elementary school, when one of her best friends (and a worthy competitor) went out for soccer, Savy also decided to give it a try. "As soon as I stepped on the field, I was like, Yeah, this is the one," she says. By the time she hit her teens, Savy realized she could see a future with the sport. She put her all into training, which ultimately landed her a spot on the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill women's soccer team in 2023. After her freshman year, Savy was drafted second overall by Bay FC, a new expansion team in the National Women's Soccer League. At just 18 years old, she was the third-youngest player ever drafted in the NWSL. Following her rookie season, Savy felt the team wasn't quite the right fit for her and requested a transfer to Angel City FC.

Back at home in Los Angeles, she was near her family and friends and with a team she greatly admired—even playing alongside a number of women she had looked up to as a young player, like Sydney Leroux and Crystal Dunn.

The Angel City FC Performance Center in Thousand Oaks, California, is just miles from where she grew up; the route she took to high school is now the route she takes to practice.

This is where I meet Savy in the spring of 2026, observing her from the sidelines as she warms up with leg swings and hip rotations before hitting the field. Wearing a workout set that mirrors the cloudless valley sky, Savy moves through drills. Her footwork is effortless yet precise, as if she's gliding through an intricate partnered dance with the soccer ball.

On my left, her mom Kim leans toward me and whispers, "Can you believe she had open-heart surgery last year?"

Honestly, I can't.

After watching Savy complete a tough strength workout in the Angel City training gym just an hour earlier and now marveling at her masterful footwork, I find it genuinely hard to wrap my mind around the fact that a year ago, the 21-year-old was undergoing emergency heart surgery.

A lifesaving procedure

At Cedars-Sinai after the on-field incident, Savy underwent rigorous testing to figure out what caused her cardiac event. "I've never had any prior medical issues or injuries or anything with my heart," she says. "I don't drink caffeine, I don't drink [alcohol]. So they were so confused about what was going on, because this isn't something that happens to a healthy 20-year-old with no medical history."

The doctors eventually found that Savy had an anomalous coronary artery, a rare congenital heart defect in which a coronary artery arises from the wrong location or has an abnormal shape or course. Her left artery in particular was not in the right place, which caused severe narrowing and obstructed blood flow to her heart. On May 13, she successfully underwent open-heart surgery to correct the problem.

And while she never had any previous heart issues, it's scary for Savy to think that this incident could have occurred at so many points in her life—especially as an athlete: "It happened at the right time with the right people, and I'm grateful, even though being in that public place also made it a lot scarier."

The event was, of course, traumatic, but "I also feel a lot of pain knowing how much trauma it caused for other people," she says. "While I didn't have any control over it, I still feel horrible that I caused so much fear." And that's precisely why getting back on the field was so important to Savy—not just to return to the sport she loves, but also to show the world (and herself) that she's undeniably resilient.

The road to recovery

Post-surgery, doctors assured Savy that playing soccer again would be possible, but it was going to take a lot of work…and patience.

At first, she could walk at only two miles per hour for less than 10 minutes a day, slowly rebuilding heart muscle endurance while avoiding dangerous spikes in her heart rate. "Even just going out in public was scary, because I couldn't move [too] fast or do anything strenuous. I wasn't allowed to sweat. I wasn't allowed to do a lot of things," Essentially, anything that hinted at overexertion was a no-go for the sake of her heart. (While riding in a car, she had to sit in the back seat with a pillow on her chest, in case of impact; she had to sleep on her back; she couldn't even shower on her own.)

For the next three months, Savy went through every stage of cardiac rehab, which included rigorous monitoring as she gradually scaled up her movement intensity. Walking was first, then she slowly made her way to jogging and eventually was able to run. "It was definitely a process. I was the youngest one there [at cardiac rehab], but it was an amazing experience to go through recovery with other people, to hear their stories and to create relationships."

While all her teammates and coaches were incredibly supportive during this time, she hated feeling removed from the team. She wasn't at the training facility or the games as she focused on recovery at home. Savy was cleared to return to practice in August, and she says it was like she "could finally breathe again."

Still, she needed to take things very slowly. "It was a day-by-day, step-by-step process that, for me, was really frustrating. I constantly wanted to push to be back earlier, but this wasn't the type of thing I could really push through," Savy says. It went against all of her natural competitive instincts: For the first time in her young life, she had to quell her ambition in favor of slow, steady recovery.

Part of doing everything in her power to expedite a successful comeback was keeping a positive mindset and not letting the frustration consume her: "I had to make sure that I was mentally okay so that I could be physically okay."

Savy credits her support system and peers for helping her push forward. She especially looked to teammates who had been through difficult injuries (ACL tears and the like) and took inspiration from their comebacks. Opening up about her experience and being honest about her recovery with others was therapeutic, too. "For me, talking is a big thing. I need to talk about it," she says. "It helped get out my emotions, and I wanted to inspire other people to take this approach as well."

Savy also prayed a lot and leaned into her faith for strength. "I tried to remember God has a plan for me. I may not know exactly why things happen, but I tried to trust in that process and know He has a purpose and plan for me greater than I could ever imagine," she says. "That was huge for getting through it all."

About nine months after surgery, Savy was back on the field, practicing with her team again. In the first few weeks, a cloud of caution hung over the pro soccer player. She worried about the ball hitting her chest and about overexerting herself. To help quell some of those anxieties, she wore chest-protective tape for a bit more padding. "Otherwise, I trusted that if I'd been cleared to be back, then I was going to be fine."

In the back of her mind, Savy set a goal to return for the first game of the season—and when it arrived in March 2026, she was ready. "I was nervous for about a week leading up to it, because this is the moment I'd been talking about for months," she says. She felt a flood of emotions on game day: happiness, fear, but mostly excitement.

Right before the game, Savy practiced visualization: She walked the pitch with ACFC trainer Walusz, whom she now calls her "safe person," and imagined a successful game.

As Savy took the field in that home opener, she thought, I'm back. This is exactly what I've been waiting for. "This thing that happened to me, I don't want that to be what people associate with me—I want it to be about soccer and what I do on the field," she says. In that moment, "it was just cool to feel like a player again."

Turning obstacles into action

Though Savy doesn't want her cardiac event to completely define her, she also refuses to let it be meaningless. In late 2025, she launched Savy King of Hearts, a nonprofit focused on raising awareness about CPR, expanding access to health screenings, and empowering individuals to take action when needed. Her motivation: "I'm going to turn what happened to me into something so positive and change so many lives."

The nonprofit has collaborated closely with the American Heart Association (AHA) and the NWSL to ensure that everyone in the league—staff and players included—is CPR certified, making it the first professional league in America with this kind of universal training. More recently, Savy King of Hearts partnered with Walgreens to launch a national ad campaign promoting CPR awareness as part of the AHA's Nation of Lifesavers initiative.

Through this work, Savy connected with Damar Hamlin, the Buffalo Bills safety who suffered cardiac arrest during a game in 2023. "It was awesome to [meet] someone who went through something similar," she says. "Obviously, everyone's been so supportive, but it's a different level of connection." The two teamed up for some advocacy work at the 2025 Super Bowl and plan to collaborate more in their shared goal of spreading awareness about CPR.

As Savy sees it, creating something purposeful from a challenging experience is her true act of resilience. "There were a lot of things thrown my way during the past year, so it was all about how I responded to it," she says. She could have chosen either to feel sorry for herself or to take an entirely different approach: accept that this traumatic thing happened, face it with grit, and come out the other side as the strongest person she can possibly be. She chose the latter.

"I knew that there was so much left for me in my career," she says. "Because little Savy would have wanted me to keep going, and that's all that I was thinking about throughout this entire process. She wanted this so much, and I wasn't going to roll over and let this be my defining moment."

At just 21, Savy has been given the rare gift of perspective—something that takes most people decades, or even a lifetime, to unearth. "When you go through something like this, you realize every day is not promised. You never know what can happen at any point, and I don't want to have any regrets. I want to do everything I'm passionate about," she says.

While that includes soccer, she also has dreams beyond her career as a pro athlete. She hopes to travel the world, visiting Australia and Europe and tropical islands. She'd love to pick up more hobbies, like learning guitar. One day, she wants to write a book about her experience. She wants to show the world the real Savy: a joyful, bubbly person who was once very shy and introverted but has found her more outgoing, extroverted side through her advocacy work.

"I want to be proud of the person that I am. There are little girls that look up to me as an inspiration, and the legacy I want to leave goes far beyond what I do on the field," Savy says. "I want it to be about the way I treated people, the way I approach situations, my nonprofit, and the impact it can leave."

With her second chance at life fully under way, Savy isn't taking a moment for granted. Soccer remains at the center, but she now knows her purpose is bigger than the sport she loves.