The Craig Hall Chronicles :: Allie Larsen

Claire Howard didn't know how she came to be there, the road Allie Larsen took to Missoula, to earning MVP honors at the program's elite camp last week or an offer to join the Montana soccer team last summer.

She had no idea of the fates involved, how Larsen's dad headed to Colorado from Iowa to attend college, her mom from New York, both going full-on John Muir. The mountains are calling ...

Or how they met and started a family, bringing three kids into this world with soccer in their blood.

Howard didn't know that had Adrian Blewitt not had the success he did as the coach at Arkansas-Little Rock and turned that into the job at West Point two winters ago, Larsen might have been making her way across Kansas or Oklahoma this week, on her way to becoming a Trojan.

And she had no clue that Larsen, almost always the smallest girl on the field until a growth spurt in high school allowed her to catch up to her peers, developed her never-back-down-from-anything-or-anyone-at-any-time playing style out of sheer necessity.

Her safety and any success she hoped to have on the soccer field required it.

No, Howard didn't know any of that last week as she spent time in goal at Montana's elite camp. All she knew was that Larsen, a 5-foot-5 defender, was one of the team's 11 incoming freshmen, one of a dozen newcomers in all, and that Montana -- its back line in particular -- was in good hands.

"She had such a good camp. She played older than she was. If you watched her, you wouldn't think she was an incoming freshman, which was super exciting for us on the back line," said Howard.

Montana's back line, with starters Caitlin Rogers in the center and Avery Adams and Taylor Hansen on the outside -- not to mention Howard, the Big Sky Conference's top goalkeeper -- should be an area of strength in 2019, as it was last fall when it produced 10 shutouts and a 1.06 goals-against average.

But that's assuming everything remains the same, which won't necessarily be the case as second-year coach Chris Citowicki begins tinkering with formations and personnel switches, because as stingy as Hansen is on defense, she is equally dynamic when she moves up the field and plays forward.

And why wouldn't the inquisitive coach want to move some pieces around the field, just to see what might develop? He has both a talented and deep roster.

No matter what happens and what opportunities come her way, Larsen is ready for whatever she is asked to do, wherever she is asked to play. And so very, very thankful for any of it.

Arkansas-Little Rock had gone 25 years, a full quarter century, without a winning record when Blewitt took over the program prior to the 2013 season.

By 2014 the Trojans were going 11-8-1. Two years after that they won 12 matches. It was a program on the rise. And Larsen, who is from Louisville, Colo., and was playing at the time for FC Boulder, had been offered a full-ride scholarship. She said yes.

Then life, as it so often does, tossed some tacks along the path that we assume will be straight and true and lined with roses. In December 2017 Blewitt left Little Rock to take over the program at Army.

Larsen had found the coach she thought she wanted to play for, but she wasn't interested in going to West Point and signing up for the military lifestyle. And central Arkansas wasn't exactly connecting with her heart, not to the girl who was raised on the slopes of the Rockies with skis tethered to her feet.

And the girl who thrives on being in control was anything but.

"When the coach left, I realized that wasn't where I wanted to go. I like the mountains. I like to ski. It felt like I would have been sacrificing so much to go there," Larsen says.

"They had a soccer team and had the degree I wanted and offered me a full ride, but it wasn't the school of my dreams."

Juniors were committing left and right. Larsen? In the recruiting game of musical chairs, she was left standing when so many others had found a spot. "It was a scramble," says Larsen's mom, Kristalyn. "By that time in your junior year, schools are full."

Instead of reviewing standing offers, because there weren't any, Larsen began working backwards, big picture in. She wanted to remain in the West but not in Colorado. She wanted the mountains, a college town like Boulder -- "but not Boulder" -- and a successful program. Which led her to look at Montana.

Except the Grizzlies were under an interim coach in Katie Benz and weeks away from announcing the next head coach, whoever that was going to be.

She made an unofficial visit to Missoula that spring and what she discovered -- that she totally and completely loved it -- only made things worse. She was hooked and desperately wanted to join a soccer program that didn't have a head coach. The love, for the time being, only ran one way.

"I remember I got off the plane and smelled the air. I was like, This is amazing. When I got on campus, I just stood there and looked around. It was so cool that something like this existed," she says.

She wanted Montana but the Grizzlies were a program in transition. It wasn't until early May that Citowicki was hired. And would he even want her on his team?

Larsen gave the news a few moments before hitting the new coach with an all-out blitz.

"After I took the job, I remember this person persistently reaching out to me about wanting to be part of the program. She was sending me videos, but it's hard to really get a sense of a player when you watch them on film," says Citowicki, who had to take a position on the fence.

"So I kept holding off, not knowing if she was a fit. I kept pushing her off until we had a chance to see her live."

Citowicki's prudent wait-and-see approach felt, at the time, like a vote of no confidence to Larsen. What was he not seeing on video? Wasn't she the same player who had been offered a full-ride scholarship to another Division I program? How could one coach see one thing and another not something similar?

"I felt from being on the phone with them that they didn't want me, and this was my dream school," Larsen says. "I was in love with the school and the campus and would have done pretty much anything to come here.

"It was a feeling of helplessness, when you can't control the situation, and I really like being in control of things. I was devastated but determined to make them want me."

Her chance came at a recruiting tournament in San Diego last summer, by which time she was playing for Colorado Rush DA. She would only get one match to make a first impression, to show in person what the video had hidden from view.

Turns out she had just what Citowicki was looking for.

"I was sitting on the ground and she's playing right in front of me. She was just a beast. She plays with such intensity and passion, almost on the edge. I love my players having that type of an edge to them," Citowicki says.

Wanting to make sure it wasn't a one-match fluke, he followed Larsen to another one of Rush's matches. Same thing.

"There it was again. I thought right away that this is the type of person who fits," Citowicki said. "We had to have her."

Both coach and player went their respective ways. Soon a phone call with an offer was made. Moments later a phone call from daughter to mother to relay the news. Tears all around.

"I called my mom and was like, 'Guess what!' It was just the happiest moment," Larsen says.

It was a turn of events -- of getting to remain in the beloved West -- that Kristalyn Larsen could appreciate, considering she followed her heart to the Rockies so many years before.

Growing up in New York, she'd been told she could attend college anywhere within driving distance of her hometown. For her that meant spending two years at Syracuse.

She had friends who had ended up in Colorado, and when they returned they brought with them stories of blue skies and the best snow a skier could find. "I was like, Okay, I'm transferring," she says.

Trent, today a chemical engineer for KBI in Boulder, felt the same pull after growing up in Iowa. He was in his third year attending Colorado when his future wife popped up on campus.

In 2001, Allie Larsen arrived. Four years later she was captured on video laying out how she expected the upcoming years of her life to unfold.

"I had this whole thing, of how I was going to play college soccer and how I was going to play professionally, so it's been a pretty big dream of mine since I was really young," she says.

The passion and the intent were there. The size wasn't, for a long time. So Larsen made up for it by outworking every other girl on the field.

It was a blessing, her parents and grandparents told her. She would develop traits that those who could physically dominate at a young age because of their size never would.

When that size discrepancy eventually balanced out? Advantage to the player who learned over the years how to take it right up to the edge.

"People called her the Energizer Bunny," says Kristalyn. "She just kept going and going. She was really little, so we just told her to keep working hard.

"A lot of kids hit their growth spurt young. She'd get knocked off the ball a lot. She had to work much harder to hold her own."

At first it was as a forward -- "I liked it. I was the person who was crazy for goals. I just wanted to score, score, score," she says. -- then a coach presented her with another option: instead of scoring goals, how would she feel about being the person who stopped them?

Her outlook, her entire world, changed in a moment.

"I tried it and was like, Wow, I'm pretty good at defending," she says. "I felt like I knew what the forwards wanted to do because of my experience.

"As I got older, I found more pleasure in winning a big tackle than scoring a goal. I kind of formed the mentality that saving a goal is more important than scoring a goal. Now I love getting the big tackle that stops a goal or a slide that blocks a shot. That's just super thrilling for me."

The long-awaited growth spurt happened in high school, and she retained every ounce of the scrappy sauce she needed to survive as an undersized youth player. That's when the first college offer rolled in.

She played for years for FC Boulder, conveniently based just 10 miles from Louisville (please say it as LEWIS-ville, not like the city and school in Kentucky) but it wasn't a club that did its best work in getting its players to the next level.

So she made the move to Colorado Rush, based an hour (or more) away, through Denver traffic, in Littleton. It was a sacrifice of time for both her and her family, but it was so, so worth it.

There is a reason certain clubs have a certain cachet. They have the best coaches and the best history of placing their players in colleges and they get tagged with the best initials (ECNL, DA). So the top players want to be in those clubs, which ups the clubs' status, and the whole process feeds itself.

And almost everyone wins.

"I wouldn't be here if I hadn't switched clubs. I don't know where I'd be," says Larsen, who was told by UALR after Blewitt left that her scholarship offer would be honored by the new coach.

"I probably wouldn't have de-committed from Little Rock and gone there."

Instead she finds herself in Missoula this month, with most of the incoming freshmen. They are spread across town, living with the returning players, everyone getting a jump on the season, which opens Aug. 7 with the first official practice.

Lessons are being imparted each morning, when the Grizzlies gather for player-run practices. After getting the taste of a Big Sky championship in November, the 15 returners want the 12 newcomers to know that anything less than a repeat is unacceptable.

And they put in the work to make it so.

"It's thrilling to come into a program with high expectations," says Larsen. "It's exciting you get to start over and know that it's your hard work that is going to get you where you want on the team.

"You've got to prove yourself every single day you're here. It's pressure but it's also exciting to push yourself and try to prove yourself in front of all these girls who are really good."

One of those being Howard, who got to play behind Larsen last week. She liked what she saw, and in the world of Griz soccer, that's like receiving a papal blessing.

"I don't know where I'm going to fit in the team, but I'm going to work as hard as I can to do my part to be an impact player and help them win the championship they want to win," says Larsen.

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