The Craig Hall Chronicles :: Reese Elliott

This was supposed to be about Reese Elliott, and it will be. Eventually.

It was supposed to be about a player with Big Ten and Pac-12 talent who chose Montana over a list of Power 5 suitors, who has the academic bona fides and chops to have earned a spot in the Davidson Honors College.

Who's been playing since the age of three, following in her older sisters' footsteps but then veering off the beaten path and going in a new direction, to the other end of the field, becoming a dominant goal preventer to Alex and Gabby's need to score them.

About a player who took her first recruiting visit to a campus after her eighth-grade year, who had interest from not only her beloved Ohio State Buckeyes but also from That School Up North, which believed she might possibly consider suiting up in anything colored maize and blue. The nerve!

About a girl who was so sure she had found the perfect landing spot at Montana that she packed up last month, without hesitation or doubts and second guesses, and moved nearly 2,000 miles from her home near Columbus, Ohio, ready for the next chapter of her life and the pursuit of championships.

This was supposed to be about Reese Elliott, and it will be, in time, but I haven't been able to get my mind off Rex Elliott, her dad, even 24 hours after our phone conversation on Thursday.

If he's not the most interesting man in the world, he at least can lay claim to that title in central Ohio. Just know this: If he's at a dinner party in Columbus, you want to be at his table. Trust me.

Want the inside scoop on all things Buckeyes? He represented Jim Tressel in 2011 when the Ohio State football coach resigned following a high-profile memorabilia-for-tattoos scandal. That would certainly cover hors d'oeuvres.

For the main course: He got a call from Gene Smith two Augusts ago, when the Ohio State athletic director needed someone to shepherd him through the legal aspects of another national story, this one about Urban Meyer and Zach Smith and about who knew what and when they knew it.

He's remained close friends with Gene Smith. How tight? He can frequently be found on fall Saturdays in the AD's box at Ohio State home football games.

Dessert? Ah, the sweet stuff: As a trial lawyer specializing in civil litigation for the firm Cooper Elliott, he's been involved in jury verdicts or settlements that have exceeded $1 million on more than 15 occasions.

So, yeah, he's got some stories. And the kind of made-for-television life that most of us could only dream about entering, from the box at the Horseshoe -- can you imagine how well that's catered? -- to high-pressure courtrooms that have seven-figure outcomes hanging in the balance.

But that's not why I haven't been able to get him off my mind.

After nearly an hour on the phone, I had one final question. Given all he's seen, all he's been involved with, for what does he want to be known? I already know the answer, because I've heard how his voice changes when our conservation goes back to his daughters.

There is a love, unmistakable, that bridges the distance between us and comes through the phone. He may be the most interesting man in the world, but that's not what he's thinking about when he wakes up every morning. It's clear: His life is all about them. The rest is just background content.

"At the end of the day, the only thing I do that's truly important is how I am as a father and husband. The rest is a means to an end," he says.

"What's really important to me, what really matters, is just being the best dad, the best role model for my girls. Nothing else is as significant as that."

He then asks about my family, so I tell him about my own girls, ages six and two. "I would give anything to go back to six and two," he says. "It's the greatest thing I've ever done."

It stuck with me because I didn't see it coming, not from a guy with his lengthy brag list. He may appear to have it all, but it turns out I have something he would give anything to have again.

He wouldn't trade what he has or what he's experienced, but he would also give anything to go back and do it all over again, to be where I am now. I couldn't forget it. I don't want to ever forget it.

That evening I took my girls to the playground. Usually we cap our visit at an hour, much to their disappointment. Despite their enjoyment, I tend to get bored after a while, and we need to get going with our evening routine at home.

But on this night, 7 p.m. came and went. Then 8 p.m. Laughs and giggles continued to fill the air, and Rex Elliott's voice stuck with me. I would do anything to go back to six and two.

And here I had it, right in front of me. I wasn't going to waste it.

As the world of the Big Sky Conference swirled that evening with rumors and speculation about what could be, all that mattered on that playground is what was, in that moment. Everything went on without us. We were blissfully ignorant.

His voice lingered in my head: Nothing else is as significant as that.

Finally 9 o'clock arrived and darkness started to set in. It was time to call it a night. The girls didn't want it to end. Neither did I.

Maybe that's the place to transition the story to Reese Elliott, how things might appear to be different on the surface than they truly are, something that can be applied to people or coaches or soccer programs.

How it's possible to strip life down to what really matters and discover, once again, the often overlooked joys in what we find there. All we have to do is prioritize it.

That's why Reese Elliott is at Montana, when everyone on the outside looking in would have guessed -- without knowing what was important to her -- that she was destined for something bigger and better. But that's semantics, and she's always had her own definition of what that meant.

It's what Alex Elliott was attempting to do eight years ago, when she was just starting her freshman season at Bowling Green. She was trying to arrange the perfect situation.

She had won a state championship as a senior at St. Francis DeSales High, going out in storybook fashion. She scored the game-winning goal in the semifinals, the clinching goal in the championship.

To make that feeling last and to stay involved in soccer through the spring and to best be prepared for the start of her collegiate career, she spent the second half of her senior year at IMG Academy, in Bradenton, Florida. Her soccer experiences just kept getting better and better.

She had chosen Bowling Green for seemingly the purest of reasons: It was a Division I program and close enough to Columbus that her parents and sisters could be part of her journey. You can't fault a kid for that, not one from as tight a family as the Elliotts.

But there was a problem. The location was right but the program wasn't. Playing under an interim coach in the fall of 2012, the Falcons went 1-17-1. It wasn't so much the losing that got to her but the step down in soccer experience from what she had become accustomed. It wasn't a championship culture.

She was so frustrated by the experience that she spent the next year out of school and out of soccer. The lesson: The right choice of colleges is everything, and it's not about location or conference or even NCAA division. Do everything you can to get it right the first time.

A year later, following a strong pitch by alumni ambassador Jim Tressel, who had played football there under his dad, Lee, Alex ended up at Baldwin Wallace, a Division III school just outside of Cleveland.

She would go on to score 34 goals. "She just had a tremendous experience," says Rex, who adds no buts to his statement -- but it wasn't Division I, but it wasn't as close to home as we would have liked.

It was the experience that mattered, and Alex's younger sister was taking it all in.

"It's amazing how much the younger girls were watching and observing that whole time. I didn't realize how much that impacted them," Rex says. "It was definitely on (Reese's) mind when it came to her own recruitment."

Montana coach Chris Citowicki wasn't yet a Grizzly the first time the center back caught his eye. He was recruiting for North Dakota and the program he was holding in his hands revealed that it was Reese Elliott and that she was uncommitted.

He was a bit surprised considering her fellow center back on that team was already committed to Louisville. How was Reese Elliott still available?

"She was probably way above what we could do at North Dakota, probably way above most places, but I was going to try. I thought, let's give it a shot," he says.

They started a conversation. It continued when he got the job at Montana in May 2018. By early September of that year, she and her parents were on campus and in Citowicki's office, which was a victory in itself.

In coaching and soccer terms, Citowicki was punching above his and his program's weight. Didn't he know who else she had knocking on her door? Didn't he know Elliott was out of his league? It's good to aim high, but didn't he know he wasn't going to out-recruit the Power 5 programs?

Utah had been going hard after Elliott for three years. The Utes could sell something Citowicki couldn't: the Pac-12, the same league that sent three teams to last fall's College Cup, or three-quarters of the field. Come here, play against the best.

But Elliott was a different kind of recruit. She wasn't looking for a name. She was in search of something special. She believed it was out there, but she hadn't found it. It's why she was still uncommitted.

Utah had everything going for it. Citowicki? He'd been on the job for three months. He was in his first year as a Division I head coach.

All he had was the Dream-Work-Achieve ethos he hoped to make the foundation of his program and the values of maximizing, impacting and empowering the young women who chose to go all in after hearing his pitch about making Montana the best place to play college soccer in America.

He was speaking the Elliotts' language. "It was one of those where you meet the family and you know right away that it's a perfect fit for what I want and what they want. We hit it off, but I didn't know if she would come here," he says.

But he pulled off a bit of an upset. Montana remained on Elliott's short list.

"Not many times do you pass up a Power 5 conference," says Rex. "The difference truly was Chris. We had been to probably 15 or 20 schools and we hadn't heard anything like his coaching philosophy and his concern about the whole kid.

"As a parent, it's paramount that you put your kids in the hands of a good person who teaches the right lessons and brings your child along and aids their growth in a positive way. Chris exudes all that."

She would eventually commit to Montana, and the rest of the soccer world would be left empty-handed and wondering how it was that Montana (Montana!) had outflanked them.

Her decision came through a perfect combination of elements, of taking what Alex had gone through, of her own desire to go west and that which Citowicki was promising. She was going to be a Grizzly.

"When I came here, it was exactly what I was looking for. The other schools I was looking at just weren't ..." Reese says, leaving her thought unfinished. "This is the one that stood out, with the family and the values."

It's what Rex Elliott found in the early 80s at Denison University in Granville, Ohio, 45 minutes outside of his hometown of Columbus.

The wide receiver originally committed to Furman, in South Carolina, but had a change of heart in July, just weeks before the start of what would be his freshman season. He wanted to play closer to home and he wanted to go to a school where he could be on the field all four years.

He would play for coach Keith Piper, renowned for his employment of the single-wing offensive formation for most of his 39 years at the school, and earn all-conference honors as a senior.

Furman would play for an NCAA I-AA national championship in 1985 and win the title in '88, so Elliott would have been joining a program in the early stages of that rise, but he does not bring that up or suggest that his time in college was in any way lesser because of where or at what level it took place.

"I had a great experience at Denison. Keith was a tremendous head coach. By the time I was through, he was truly like my second dad," he says. Reese has that in her blood, of going with what feels right and never looking back.

Elliott would earn a law degree from Syracuse, then work in New York City before returning to his hometown. Little did he know he was on his way to being part of a soccer family.

"I don't have boys, so I don't have football players," he says. "Alex kind of blazed the trail, with her sisters on the sideline. Because of that, they got the itch very early. We became one of those families that lives and breathes soccer."

Alex would be an attacking midfielder. Gabby would follow at forward (and also become a standout basketball player. She was a freshman guard last winter on Denison's 19-win team that tied for second in the North Coast Athletic Conference.)

Reese had the physical tools -- the speed, the ability to finish -- to add to the list of Elliott goal scorers, but she started gravitating toward the other end of the field early on, much to her dad's surprise.

It wasn't because she didn't want to be like her sisters. The position and its responsibilities were just a better fit for her personality.

"She's always kind of had the mentality that I want to roll up my sleeves and do the dirty work and keep the ball out of the net. That's just in her makeup," says Rex. "And she's a protector."

Reese, Rex and Citowicki all have their own stories to make fact of that claim.

"Every team needs that. You need someone who can dabble in the dark arts a little bit," says Citowicki. "I wanted that edge."

Rex remembers a time when he was coaching a youth team and Reese was on the field when one of her teammates got taken out.

"I knew it was going to happen. I probably should have pulled her out of the game, but I let her go," he says.

"She delivered a hit, in a clean way, not a dirty or dangerous way. The girl went down and Reese stood there, as if to say, don't do that again. Let's play soccer.

"She's always been taught to fight for the underdog and fight for the people around her. She's just a loyal soul."

Reese's turn: "I was playing in a club game my sophomore year. There was this girl just annihilating one of my teammates who wasn't very physical. It wasn't legal. She was going at her aggressively to the point that she was trying to hurt her.

"Later she was coming down the right side of the field and I just flattened her. I got a yellow card, but it was totally worth it. She didn't do it the rest of the game. It's like a bully. Once you get back at them, they stop doing it."

She's asked, Do you consider yourself a bully? "I do not consider myself a bully. I consider myself a nice person."

She would join Cincinnati United early on. At the end of her freshman year, her age-group team was playing for a U.S. Youth Soccer Association national championship. That they lost to National Union was hard to take. That National Union is based in That State Up North made it even worse.

A year later, she began playing for Ohio Elite. She and her teammates would advance to the semifinals of the ECNL national tournament.

Afterwards, Elliott was named a Player to Watch, earning recognition at an event that had some of the nation's top talent. Her star was on the rise. More and more schools kept reaching out to her. But she kept waiting.

It was during those years that Rex Elliott lived what he talks about today, that nothing is as significant in his life as what he was able to do for his daughters and their opportunities growing up.

Few people know Highway 71, the two-and-a-half-hour route between Columbus and Cincinnati, better than he and his wife do.

He may be a named partner at a law firm and Samantha may own and run three Goddard Schools in the greater Columbus area, but when club soccer season arrived each November, every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, someone was driving Reese to Cincinnati to pursue her dream.

On weekends, it was back on the road for games. The season didn't conclude until June.

It doesn't make for great dinner-party conversation but few parenting sacrifices do.

"We still laugh to this day. We have no idea how we did it," says Reese, who would leave school early and not be home and in bed until midnight. "How were we even functioning the next day?

"They are amazing for doing it. It was the best option for me, so they were all for it. They never complained. They are the reason I am where I am."

You have to go back a little further, to 1984, for another story about family. The Denison football roster included not just Rex, then a senior, but his younger brother, David, a freshman. "Playing with my brother was extraordinarily special," he says.

So he had that in mind the fall of 2018, when Reese said she wanted to play with Gabby on the team at St. Francis DeSales. How could he say no? He knew how memorable that could be for a pair of siblings.

He also knew soccer at the high school level could be dangerous, maybe more dangerous of an environment than he thought Reese should be playing in.

He didn't want to put her in a bubble, but he also wanted to protect the trajectory her soccer career was taking. But he didn't want to withhold something two of his daughters could remember for the rest of their lives. But what if something were to happen? An impossible choice.

"We debated whether it was a good idea. There is such a difference in quality of player (from club) in high school. You've got some great players and you've got some players who are decent athletes but not really soccer players," he says.

"Unfortunately our worst nightmare was realized. It was a train-wreck collision."

It happened on September 11, 2018, just 10 days after the Elliotts had made their visit to Missoula. She was still uncommitted on a school.

"She played on the same club as me when we were younger and was always a really dirty player," Reese says of the girl who caused the train wreck.

"The right outside back got beat down the sideline, and we were going for a 50-50 ball. I got there first and cleared it, but she didn't stop running. She ran right through my plant leg. I tore both my meniscuses and my ACL."

The nightmare wasn't necessarily the injury itself -- thousands and thousands of players have recovered from knee injuries suffered in high school and gone on to successful college careers -- but what it would do to her recruitment.

Junior year is the one a player can't afford to miss. It's when schools are finalizing their recruiting classes and looking for anything that might separate Player A from Player B. A knee injury is a good way to become Player B, the one whose name is taken off the board and tossed aside, to be forgotten.

"That's what was terrifying," says Reese, who was now viewed as damaged goods, at least to some programs. Rex adds, "TCU wanted to have her visit in December. After the injury, we never heard back from them.

"When she called to tell Chris, he said, 'Hey, it's okay. I'd rather have you do this now than when you get here.' He took all the pressure off her."

That was the moment she was sold on Montana. "That's when I knew that this is where I need to be. He wanted me in his soccer program not just as a soccer player but as a person. Tearing my ACL was a blessing because I ended up being in a place where they wanted me for me."

For as straightforward as an ACL repair may seem, there are nearly as many different ways to approach the surgery and recovery as there are doctors who perform it.

The first doctor they visited in Columbus? "He wasn't real sympathetic. He said, 'I don't know why you're crying.' It was a bad situation," says Reese.

Ultimately they landed on Dr. Tom Klootwyk, the team doctor for the Indianapolis Colts, who doesn't follow the typical protocol that you perform surgery as soon as possible after the swelling has gone down.

"His idea is to get the leg and the knee as strong as you possibly can for six weeks, then have surgery, at which point you'll have a stronger knee joint and you'll be back on the field quicker," Rex says.

"And it proved true. She was back on the field five and a half months after surgery."

There is another story Rex Elliott likes to tell about Citowicki, about how an ACL injury is as much a mental hurdle as it is a physical one, if not more so.

Elliott may have been back on the field five and a half months after surgery but her first game wasn't until June, at the ECNL playoffs in San Diego, following her junior year. The layoff between games had been more than nine months.

"She wasn't in the condition she's always been in. She started and played the whole game and was still effective, but she was nowhere near the Reese we knew," says Rex.

"After the game, Chris saw her. First of all: big hug. The first thing he said to her was, 'It's still all there! I can see it!' In a moment when she wasn't real confident about how this was going to work out, he was building her confidence. That had a lot to do with why she committed to Montana."

A few months prior to that, knowing the benefit of the experience Alex had enjoyed in Florida as a senior, Reese took a visit to IMG. "It's like Disney World for athletics," she says.

They had sought her out before, but she had everything she needed in Ohio and turned them down. This time she saw the benefit of turning her senior year into a running start on her college career, both in being away from home and playing against an even high level of competition.

She moved last August to Bradenton, where she was surrounded by some of the best soccer talent in the nation.

"My team in Cincinnati, we were talented, don't get me wrong, but it was our chemistry that took us to the next level," she says.

"My IMG team was just pure athletes, insanely athletic, insanely good at soccer. It pushed me to a new level. It was a really good environment for not having played for a year before that."

She remained until March, when everyone departed campus, just like college soccer players did around the country.

Now she's in Missoula, a few practices into her first year as a Grizzly. The expectation is that she will one day continue a recent trend of dominant center backs who have patrolled the back line for Montana.

There was Lauren Costa, the Big Sky Conference Defensive MVP in 2012. Brooke Moody won it in 2014, Taryn Miller in 2017, Caitlin Rogers last season.

Of that distinguished group, she's more Miller than the others, skilled but also not afraid to get physical when the need arises.

"You need someone who can draw the line in the sand and say, If you're going to give my teammates trouble, you're going to have to deal with me," says Citowicki.

"She has that enforcer edge to her, and it's necessary at that position. You don't want forwards bullying your back line."

Will she play this year? "She has to. She needs to get her feet wet. She needs to make mistakes and learn from them," says Citowicki, who is returning both of his center backs, Rogers and sophomore Allie Larsen, who started every match as a freshman and earned honorable mention All-Big Sky honors.

Citowicki, as do a lot of coaches, likes to play his center backs the full 90 minutes, especially when they are as solid as Rogers and Larsen, who were part of a unit that allowed 15 goals in 19 matches last season, with nine shutouts on a Big Sky championship team.

So it wasn't a position of need for 2020, but the addition of Elliott ups the pressure on the entire positional structure. She is used to playing, not watching. She is a good teammate but won't use that as a reason to hold back as she battles for minutes and opportunities.

Larsen is versatile enough to play outside back, which would open a spot for Elliott alongside Rogers, but those spots are manned by Taylor Hansen, an all-region player last season, and McKenzie Kilpatrick, an All-Big Sky player in the making.

The group is fronted by holding midfielder Avery Adams, a first-team All-Big Sky player. "It becomes very, very competitive," says Citowicki, which is just the way he wants it.

It's a team that was picked atop the Big Sky preseason poll, which means Montana should be competing for a championship when and if a season is played, which is just the way Elliott wants it.

"My background has been competing for championships and I never want to stop that," she says. "I wanted to make sure I was going to a program that every single year was competing for a championship and to go to the NCAA.

"That creates such a more fun environment. The energy is unmatched when you're competing for championships."

And when the championships do come, Rex Elliott will have something new to talk about at dinner parties. It may lessen his standing as the most interesting man in Columbus, but he's fine with that. That was never his goal anyway. It was always about his girls. And it always will be.

University of Montana Athletics

Players Mentioned

Avery Adams

Reese Elliott

Taylor Hansen

McKenzie Kilpatrick

Allie Larsen

Taryn Miller

Caitlin Rogers

Related Videos