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New Mexico’s Hair-Pulling Defender, Elizabeth Lambert, Is Back On The Pitch

Playing women’s soccer in the Mountain West Conference just became a much more dangerous proposition.

That’s thanks to the reinstatement of University of New Mexico defender Elizabeth Lambert, who catapulted the conference into infamy with her hair-pulling, spine-punching antics in last fall’s conference tournament.

The brutality, which became an Internet sensation and elicited response from everyone’s moral compass, “The Today Show,” earned Lambert a two-game ban from the university that carried over to 2010 when a slightly bruised BYU bounced the Lobos out of the MWC tourney.

Now nine months later, Lambert is ready to return to the Lobos, who opened the 2010 season with a pair of wins by a combined school of 10-0. The senior is eligible to return on Friday when the Lobos travel to Wisconsin to tangle with UW-Milwaukee.

Where Lambert will take her senior season, we’re not sure. We can’t say for sure if the “sexual aggression” that many suggested was at the root of her outbursts has been alleviated (though this video suggests not).

The overwhelming response in the aftermath of the violence was negative, including myriad hate mail and the publishing of her parents’ home phone number in Southern California. Lambert apologized profusely in an interview with the New York Times, saying that she, “still deeply regret[s] it and will always regret it and will carry it through the rest of my life not to retaliate.”

The summer hiatus seems to have turned the tide of public opinion in Lambert’s favor, as the almost 10,000 fans she has accumulated in various Facebook pages attest (see here, here, and here).

In addition to being added to the pantheon of athletes whose names have become verbs, she’s also earned the right of a pair of “Marry Me, Elizabeth Lambert” groups for English and Spanish suitors. She’s even got an “Elizabeth Lambert for President” group that has almost six times as many fans as the outnumbered “I Hate Elizabeth Lambert” group.

For the storm she generated, Lambert has maintained a relatively normal life. She was named to the MWC All-Academic team last fall, the second time she has received the honor, and spearheaded the team’s charitable campaign for Locks of Love over the winter, to provide hairpieces to financially disadvantaged youth.

The only thing we can hope she didn’t do during the offseason was add her unique brand of discipline to the curriculum of the occupational therapy courses she’s taking.

Photo via