The Craig Hall Chronicles :: Elizabeth Todd

Allen Todd spent 20 years in the Navy before retiring in 1998. During those two decades, he served on five different fast-attack, nuclear-powered submarines. He was a nuclear-trained mechanic. When those submarines were underway, his job was to oversee their power plants.

In other words, dude made sure when they had to go, when fast-attack became more than just harnessed potential, they went.

The submarines were deployed to keep the peace by being constant, stealthy threats. Whether they ever did or not, they were designed to seek and destroy enemy submarines and surface ships. They could fire Tomahawk cruise missiles. They could engage in mine warfare.

His stories from those days come with their own chest hair, with flexed muscles, suffused with testosterone.

When the former football player retired, he moved from San Diego to Oakland and took a job with Cummins. When hotels and hospitals and other buildings that rely on diesel generators have needed help, his has been the number they've dialed the last two decades.

His professional life would best be accompanied by a soundtrack of Tim Taylor hooting his approval. It's been a guy's guy type of career.

Today? He's still at it with Cummins. But he's also the junior varsity girls' soccer coach at Bishop O'Dowd High, a sport he knew nothing about until maybe a decade ago. And he's trying to determine if corn can be grown hydroponically. Lettuce, peas, spinach, basil? Already accomplished.

That's the power of Elizabeth Todd, his daughter. First, her household. Tomorrow, she's going to change the world.

She's in her first month in Missoula. In a few weeks she'll attend her first official practice as a freshman goalkeeper for the Grizzly soccer team.

She was one of 25 or so incoming freshmen to receive one of Montana's prestigious Presidential Leadership Scholarships. She'll be enrolled in the Davidson Honors College when classes begin in late August.

Yeah, she's got it going on. Go ahead and put her on every piece of recruiting material UM sends out going forward.

"If we're going to be the institution we want to be in the future, we need people like her here," said Griz soccer coach Chris Citowicki. "She completely bolsters everything. Athletically. Academically."

And don't think about constraining her to the limits of campus. It won't be able to contain her or her ambitions. Not that it would ever want to.

"Missoula is a perfect place for her. The city is going to love someone like her because of the impact she could make during her time here, with the work she likes to do and the passion that she has. It fits the community really well," he said.

"And, by the way, she is an amazing goalkeeper too."

It wasn't long ago that Todd could have been read those words -- impact, passion -- and been left to wonder, Who are they talking about? They wouldn't have really applied when she was in middle school. She was a good enough student. She was just a little indifferent.

But she had one thing on her mind day after day after day: soccer, soccer, soccer.

She would have been as surprised as anyone had she been shown the future as a seventh or eighth grader, of what she would become and what she wants to do and intends to accomplish.

"I would have said, 'What happened?' I feel like everyone would be very surprised. Back then, I didn't need any of that. Just put me on the field," she admits.

Inspiration comes in many forms. For Todd, it came in waves, first athletically, then educationally, finally in her life's purpose.

She had a start at goalkeeper not uncommon for those who end up gravitating toward it as their position of choice.

It was a rec league, before any real soccer skills had appeared for any of the kids running around the field those days. Everybody had to rotate through every position, including goalkeeper.

It was there, positioned in front of goal, that Todd found her happy place. "I liked it in the beginning because I didn't have to run," she says. "I get to stand here and every 10 minutes the ball comes to me? Great!"

But it was more than avoiding the running that everyone else was doing. There was something there. Something special. A gift.

A coach spotted her -- and that gift -- and invited her to join the local Montclair Clippers. Later she was at a training session and she stuck out again, to another coach, this one from the Pleasanton RAGE, which offered an ECNL team.

"From there it kind of took off," she says. "I loved the thrill of it. The thrill and the pressure. And the responsibility. It sucks when you make a small mistake, but when you make a major save, it's the best feeling in the world."

Allen Todd says it's his best friend who left home for Missoula this month. It was soccer that made it so.

He thought he was just dropping his daughter off for her very first day of organized rec-level soccer so many years ago. But he decided to stick around and watch.

And when the coach who was assigned to the team asked for a parent volunteer, the father took his limited soccer experience and stepped onto the field, having no idea he was about to get hooked.

"I remember it like it was yesterday," he says. "I helped out the first day and said, 'I love this. I want to do this every day.'

"What a great thing to be able to do, to come home after a long day of work and play on the soccer field with a bunch of kids."

He filmed most of his daughter's matches over the years. He served as manager for her Pleasanton RAGE teams, which means Citowicki met dad before the coach ever talked to player. And even with his daughter in Missoula, he'll continue coaching her former school's JV team.

It was Bishop O'Dowd High that shook the academic indifference out of Elizabeth Todd, after she had done just fine while mostly coasting through the local public middle school.

Todd and his wife, Cathy, recognized it and wanted more for their only child. More opportunity. More challenge. A better chance to prepare for the future.

"We live in a very diverse neighborhood and the high schools in our area teach ... to the common denominator," says Allen, who walks carefully down the path of words he chooses.

"If you have a student who is excelling, you want to put them in a school that is going to push them and test them."

And Bishop O'Dowd did.

"The expectations were just a lot different. I had to learn that homework and studying and paying attention in class were really important," says Todd. "I had to change all my habits to become a better student."

She would graduate with a GPA of 3.97. "There were a few B's. Calculus, some English classes. AP (courses helped my GPA). Science was my strong point. That's where my A's were."

What was the origin of what would become your life's passion? Citowicki remembers his. The first time he watched the movie "Miracle" and saw what (and more importantly how) Herb Brooks did to take a team of teenagers and shock not only the USSR but the world at the 1980 Olympics.

A fire was ignited that day. And it's been fueling his rise in the profession and sport ever since, from cutting his teeth -- or "throwing things against the wall and seeing if they stuck" -- at Division III St. Catherine to a year at North Dakota and now to Montana.

It's no surprise he felt like he'd found a kindred spirit when he learned more about Elizabeth Todd.

Her inspiration came from an unlikely and completely random source. She was taking the SAT. And the test package she was given had as part of its reading comprehension section a passage on vertical farming in the Netherlands.

The more she read, the more she found it difficult to focus on the actual test. Something had been triggered inside of her. Flame, meet wick, meet blasting cap. And ... boom.

"As soon as I finished, I ran home and started researching it and found out how life-changing it could be to a city like mine," she says of Oakland, which falls under the definition of a "food desert," or an urban area where it is a challenge to find and purchase not only affordable but quality fresh food.

Where there isn't land to farm, as in Oakland and other urban areas, it takes some creativity to look up, which is where vertical farming comes in.

It's why Allen Todd is back home, tending to his daughter's small-scale, hydroponic vertical-farming experiment while she is ready to begin pursuing a double major in business and environmental science, with a minor in nonprofit administration.

She is all in. She has a registered nonprofit, Califarm Fresh, she has a website, and she has a dream.

"I see a tall building that is producing a lot of fresh produce," she says. "It's pretty much a greenhouse, with a hydroponic system and volunteers."

What she doesn't see are dollar signs, and she's not looking for them. What she sees is a local operation that benefits local people who need some assistance. Low-income, homeless.

She's not talking about setting up a farmer's market, where those in society who already have can get more. "Food banks. Homeless shelters. And not just Oakland. I want to change inner-cities everywhere. I understand it's a large thing to go for."

Her nonprofit is going to need a helping hand. She won't be able to stay true to her mission if it has to pay for itself. She has an in at Kaiser Permanente, which is based in Oakland and had revenues of nearly $80 billion in 2018.

And she's looking at you, Mark Zuckerberg, and your friends down the road from Oakland. Silicon Valley, which should be all over this type of endeavor, isn't far away.

"It's all an end goal. I don't think I'll be able to go right from college into vertical farming. I won't have enough money to build it. I'll have to grow into it. I have to work my way there and have a plan to do it," she says.

Had Citowicki never met Todd, the soccer player, but learned about her past and her future goals, he believes with some certainty that he could have picked out her position.

Yep, that's gotta be a goalkeeper.

"I like the way her brain operates. It's different. It's classic goalkeeper. I feel like you could split field players into certain personalities and goalkeepers into certain personalities and she slots right into goalkeeper," says Citowicki.

"She analyzes things so quickly, and it's a massive strength. She is just an achiever on so many levels. I'm glad we got her as an institution, as a city and as a soccer program."

Before the vertical farming, before the Presidential Leadership Scholarship and Davidson Honors College, it was just Citowicki watching a goalkeeper he knew nothing about.

But what he identified from the first time he saw Todd, back when he was still working as an assistant at North Dakota, was her technique while in goal.

"It's so clean. You can tell she's a perfectionist in that area," he says. "She has so much pride in it. You never saw her make these extraordinary saves because her footwork was so good. She didn't have to dive."

Todd credits Walter Pratte, her goalkeeper coach with the Pleasanton RAGE, for that.

For years she had been placed in front of the goal and had shots fired at her in what passed for goalkeeper training. The how had never really mattered. It was just rote. Make the save? She must have done it right. Let in a goal? She must have done something incorrectly.

She didn't know it, but she was thirsty for the why. The how. That's the way to reach an analytical mind like hers.

"Before RAGE, it was, I'm going to kick balls at you. Make the save, then dropkick it as far as you can. That's all you need. Just kick it as far away from the goal as you can," she says.

But that's not what the better teams in her area were doing. It wasn't what she saw the national team doing. Why was she being taught at such a low level? Enter: Pratte.

"He taught me that a goalkeeper needs to be good not only with her hands but with her feet and that she needs to be a part of what the other 10 players are doing," Todd says.

"He taught me how to be technical with the ball, how to make sure my passes are safe. How not just to be a goalkeeper but an all-around player."

It wasn't long after Citowicki was hired by Montana 14 months ago that he reached out to Todd.

What he didn't know was that he had no chance with her, until she did what she had done when she first heard about vertical farming. She studied up on it, fell hard for what she saw and went all in.

"The first time I heard from him, I was like, Montana? It's just going to be cows and farms. I don't know why I'd go there," says Todd, who was pushed to look into it by her dad, who spent some time stationed in Idaho Falls during his Navy career.

"He told me that Montana is a great place and that I should check it out. I did my research and realized how amazing Missoula is."

At first she believed she was prepared to arrive at college and be the starting goalkeeper for a team from her first day on campus.

Then she made her official visit to Montana last fall and saw Claire Howard in action. In two years as the team's starter, Howard has 17 shutouts and a 0.91 goals-against average.

She is on her way to being recognized as the best goalkeeper in program history.

"I'm going to be able to learn so much from her. She was so good with her feet, both with the ball and the way she moved in front of the goal. She's a great shot-stopper and has really good communication skills. She's one of the most well-rounded goalkeepers I've met," says Todd.

"The way she made the team feel very comfortable and the way she took away pressure, I thought she was perfect. Probably not the best word but as close to perfect as possible."

Her own journey is only now beginning, a player who defies the belief that soccer is life. She'll be all in on the Grizzlies, until she isn't. Then she'll move on. Bigger things await. A world needs changing.

Elizabeth Todd is ready.

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