The Craig Hall Chronicles :: Emme Fernandez

Her given name is a nod to her mom's French-Canadian background. Her surname comes from Spain, the homeland of her dad's family so many generations ago.

She was born and raised in Texas, knows Latin, and it's a Brazilian, one so accomplished in the soccer world that he needs only a single name, a one-word honorific, who wishes he could clone her and sprinkle her doppelgangers throughout the teams he coaches in the Sting Soccer Club.

He knows they would be better for it.

"She's a country girl. She's not the Dallas kind of player," says Tatu, his way of giving Emme Fernandez the highest praise, hinting that she's substance over style, a result of her upbringing.

"I love to coach kids like that, because it's not a prima-donna mentality. She knows she has to earn every minute she has on the field. That's the beauty of it, because that's life."

She would arrive for practice in the Metroplex, its population approaching eight million, from the family's home in Van Alstyne, 45 miles to the north and home to just a few thousand, like she was arriving from another world.

And not just Van Alstyne but the family's home, which sits on 32 acres on the outskirts of town, where Anthony and Stephanie raised three daughters and later added the girls' cousin to the mix.

There were the horses, the pen for the goat and the pig. For a while there were chickens and an aggressive rooster they came to call Chickenzilla, until the chickens were eaten by the coyotes. Cosmopolitan Dallas it was not.

"Ask her to show you the pictures of hunting hogs and all those kind of things," Tatu adds. "My god, Emme, you do this?

"She's coming from a country situation. She has three sisters and comes from a very competitive environment. That's the main asset for her. She's a down-to-earth type of kid."

Hannah, the oldest of the girls, would go on to play at Texas Tech from 2015-18. Emme was four years younger.

"She always kept up and always gave me a run for my money if we ever had any run-ins. She holds her own," says Hannah, who is three semesters away from a nursing degree from Texas Tech.

"She definitely got the middle-sister vibe or whatever you want to call it."

On Friday afternoon in Grand Forks, Fernandez became one of the few players in Montana soccer history to start her first game as a true freshman.

Twice in the second half she had possession of the ball near the end line, a hapless North Dakota defender doing everything she could to keep Fernandez from turning toward goal.

Both times the defender did all she could to just get a toe on the ball and knock it out of bounds, her reasoning, and it's hard to argue, being that a dangerous corner kick was the lesser of two evils.

Certainly taking possession from Fernandez wasn't an option. She's 5-foot-7 in stature, a brick statue in strength.

"She played in (an ECNL game this summer) and was just wrecking people," says Citowicki, who was seeing Fernandez in action for the first time. "There was this kid who was wrestling her and couldn't pull Emme to the ground. She threw her off of her like it was nothing. The kid's a beast."

One thing came to Citowicki's mind that day: Emme Fernandez is Alexa Coyle in a smaller package. And everything about it is good.

"People can't stop her, so they hang onto her, and you still can't stop her," he says. "We teach our defenders to body up on people, to get tight, to be a menace. I want them to have a nightmare of a game against us. She flips that. Defenders have a nightmare playing against Emme."

It's been a process of discovery for the coach since the day he took the job in May 2018 and saw a name on a piece of paper, a player he'd never seen nor heard of with a scholarship offer and verbal commitment.

He didn't have any video, just a player who had torn her ACL as a junior and a club coach with a thick Brazilian accent who could hardly contain his enthusiasm.

She wreck people! She destroy people for you! is how Tatu described Fernandez to Citowicki. A former Montana coach told Citowicki teams in the Big Sky would struggle with her physicality.

"I wouldn't say I'm the most technical player, but I do like to work hard. I like to be a bully on the field," says Fernandez, who then adds that she means this strictly in the sporting sense.

"I don't like to lose the ball. I don't like to have to go chase someone down if I don't have to. I'd rather just keep it. If I have to nudge on you to do it, that's what I'm going to do."

Texas has more than 140 colleges and universities, many of which offer women's soccer, so how does someone like Fernandez end up at Montana instead of embracing the more common Texas 4 Life mentality?

For starters, she knew one of the Grizzlies' former coaches, who worked with her older sister when Hannah was in the Texas Olympic Development Program. That started it.

And that whole Everything is bigger and better in Texas mindset, the one that is supposedly handed out at birth, the one that keeps so many there for life? Yeah, she passed.

"I've seen a lot of Texas. I guess I'm done and over with it," she says. Her dream? She wants to be a game warden, hopefully in Montana.

"My whole goal in life is go to school, play soccer and live in Montana for the rest of my life with all my dogs." All of them border collies. What can she say? Emme Fernandez knows what she wants.

"Emme is an adventurer," adds Hannah, who says she'll probably head for the Dallas area after her graduation, nursing degree in hand, Texas forever. Not her sister.

"She's a little different from us. I could see Emme staying up there or somewhere else and not coming back to Texas."

She's not like most freshman soccer players who arrive at Montana in another way: her school, because of its size and classification, didn't even offer soccer as a sport, so she lettered in basketball, track and softball, to varying degrees of success.

Softball? Well, there was the time she tracked down a fly ball and had a brief moment when she got her sport skills confused. She rose up to head the ball before she remembered she had a glove on her hand for a reason. Too late. It hit her in the face. "I finished out the season," she says.

It was on the track where her mentality -- She wreck people! She destroy people for you! -- expressed itself best, particularly the hurdles, which at the highest level is a surprisingly violent, aggressive event.

The best in the event aren't those who gracefully glide over the hurdles, covering long distances in the air. The best are those who know the fastest way to the finish line is to get their foot back down to the ground as soon as possible after clearing the hurdle.

It's the best way to maintain speed. And it's not always graceful.

It's why she was a district champion in the 300-meter hurdles as a sophomore, in 2017, then the area champion. And why she had the fastest time coming out of the preliminaries at the regional meet, one race away from state, which in Texas is a pretty big deal.

It's why she was burning off her nervous energy before the regional final by talking about dogs with her dad. He had long put off her request to own one, knowing she was going to be heading off to college in a few short years, where she would likely live in a dorm.

"I'd been killing it all season. I have my uncle to thank for that. I wasn't the best form-wise, but I was good at getting down from my hurdle step," she says.

"I was trying to stay happy and out of my head. If I get in my head, there is no telling what's going to happen. I got him to agree that if I won and went to state, he had to let me get a dog."

She won. She competed at state. She named her dog Possum after the Latin word that means "to be able."

Less than a year later, she was unable to do much of anything due to a torn ACL, her own coming just months after her older sister's ACL injury as a junior at Texas Tech.

She was in Houston at an ECNL event. She was going for a 50-50 ball that had been thrown down the line. "This girl and I were kind of nudging," she says, "nudging" being a relative term here, a softening of an action that would send most of us to the ground, swearing to never mess with her again.

"She hit me when I went to stretch for the ball. You just hear three or four good pops go through your body. That was that for me."

It wasn't the only time she was able to learn from her older sister, who had gone through the recruiting process years before she took the lead on ACL recovery.

What she learned: Go somewhere you'd want to be if soccer is taken away from you. And learn everything you can about the coaches who are recruiting you.

"I learned I needed to have multiple options. I had a list of schools I was interested in, but I went ahead and did 15 or 20 other schools," Fernandez says. "My parents wanted me to be able to narrow it down."

She went on some of her sister's school visits. She kept an eye on the coaches when they would show up to her sister's games. She read them, evaluated them from a distance.

"You learn to pick out who's a car salesman and not really interested in you. You need to find programs that are invested in you and not just out to get you there. You need to read people and find out who's a good match for you."

She committed to Montana before Citowicki was hired, meaning both sides were going into it blind.

Fernandez didn't have much available recent video to share because of her knee injury. Citowicki came from a Division III school in Minnesota, with a one-year stopover in North Dakota, a relative unknown.

He had a vision, a program that would become the embodiment of his Dream-Work-Achieve philosophy. She had Tatu.

"She has the heart of a lion. She'll go through a wall for you," he says. "If you expect beauty and finesse, you're going to be disappointed, but if you're looking for someone to put her cleats down and say she's ready to work, she's that kind of kid.

"She'll get the job done. That's the beauty about it." She fits Montana.

She played 83 minutes on Friday at North Dakota, which was just the start. She's had good coaches in her career, but she missed an entire year of development with her ACL injury and subsequent meniscus damage.

Even she says she's not technically proficient. Yet. It's why Citowicki is so fired up about not only Fernandez's future but his program's as well.

"She's got what it takes to be an impact player," he says, knowing he'd rather inherit Fernandez's mindset and get to work on the finer points of her game than the opposite.

She'll get to where she needs to go on the field, with the ball at her feet, defenders trying but largely failing to slow her down. That's never been an issue. Her game now is all about power.

Call her a bull in a china shop if you must, the typical go-to cliché. But what if they bull just starts taking the china and going home with it, daring you to stop her on the way out the door? What if she adds a dash of finesse, a bit of touch?

"Then she's good to go," Citowicki says. "She'll be amazing." Of course he never wants her to lose that which defines her and makes her a special player.

If he turns her into someone you can't knock off the ball, who marries that with some sweet footwork? That would be the best of both worlds, destroying opponents in spirit and the scoreboard.

"Now it's just focusing it in, channeling it where it needs to go, giving her the support she needs and then letting her go," adds Citowicki. "As Tatu said, let her wreck people."

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