The Taylor Hansen experience

Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up ... and you know the rest, about the lion and the nature of survival, how one goes on the hunt and how the other can't allow itself to be caught.

You've seen Taylor Hansen play. You think you have her figured out. Classic lion, right? The one doing the pursuing, a predator coming for its prey, an alpha on the prowl.

She takes the field with her sleeves rolled up, no matter the weather, exposing nothing but muscle and taut skin, the result of hundreds of hours competing on the soccer field and just as many hours competing just as hard in the weight room, all of which she tops off with a dedication to CrossFit.

She's incredibly fit, an elite athlete, a high-level soccer player whose engine has no governor, who can play end line to end line and go all out for 90 minutes if that's what's asked of her. Or more. Go ahead, give her overtime. She can take it. "That kid will run until her heart explodes," says a former coach.

That's what you see, and you can't take your eyes off her, the 5-foot-4 dynamo with all the boxes checked: endurance, speed, quickness, strength and the feet of a wizard, who controls the ball like it's merely an extension of her body, even when she's rushing up the field, initiating another attack.

"When I took my visit and I watched her play, my mom actually said to me, 'Look at 12, look at 12!' When you watch her, you can't stop watching her. She just stands out," says freshman teammate Ava Samuelson.

You've seen Taylor Hansen play, and you've become a fan yourself. And you think you have her figured out, don't you? You assume what you see on the field is simply an extension of her life in general, that she has it all together, everything on lockdown. That it's come easily for her, naturally.

And that would be something to celebrate on Sunday when the Montana soccer team has its Senior Day and the player who has competed for more minutes than any other Grizzly in program history steps off the field at South Campus Stadium for the final time.

But it wouldn't be the truth. "On the outside, she looks perfect, but on the inside she's a kid who's worked on herself probably harder than anyone else I know," says her coach, Chris Citowicki. "She has come so far as a person since 2018 when I first met her to the person she is now."

She is Taylor Hansen, the enigma.

She is, on one hand, "one of the best athletes I've ever come across," says Citowicki. "I don't know of many people who have her mindset. She can keep going and going and going. She lives at a frequency up here," a point Citowicki punctuates by lifting his hand high overhead.

"People think it's unhealthy how hard she pushes herself and how much work she does, but that's Taylor's way of living. They're judging her as an average human being, and you can't look at her as an average human being. She's not average. She's very, very different. She's special that way."

It might be easier if we call her the Vince Carter of women's college soccer, half woman, half amazing.

The latter is easy to chronicle. Two times voted first-team All-Big Sky Conference, two times named United Soccer Coaches All-West Region. Eight-seven matches played, 76 starts, more than 7,111 minutes played, which is more than 118 hours, which is nearly five days.

Three goals scored, 15 assists, a total that ranks sixth in program history.

But it's the former, the woman half, that's the reason Citowicki has Hansen tell the rapt audience at Montana's summer camps about herself, her true self, the human side of the equation, with all its revelations that make people go, wait, what?

That's why he has Hansen open up to the impressionable campers. If her play is inspiring, what she has learned to reveal about herself, and it's taken time to first accept it, then acknowledge it, then speak about it, is the most important lesson she can impart, the best piece of wisdom she can pass down.

"Tay is the ultimate story," says Citowicki. "Look at me, everyone thinks I'm great. Let me tell you what it's really like. Let me show you the human side of me."

She steps on the field and people like to call her a machine, spoken with a bit of awe. She goes, goes, goes nonstop. She doesn't seem to tire or wear out. Her touches look like they've been programed in, her crosses like her leg is a metronome set to a pleasing, perfect cadence.

That's what you see, what the campers see and want to be like. Then she tells them more about herself, and they likely swoon all the more. "I'm not perfect," she says. "I want them to enjoy what they're doing and not lose that. Because I feel like I lose sight of things pretty easily with how hard I am on myself."

It's said you should never meet your heroes. But what fun is that? That's where the lessons are learned, that's where the value is hidden, waiting to be discovered.

Maybe she's not the lion. Maybe she's the gazelle, always checking behind her, worried who or what might be out there, lurking, ready to overtake her if she lets her guard down, if she stops working, if she takes a moment to relax. She has an insatiable need to stay one step ahead.

"Her mindset has always been to look over her shoulder to see who's chasing her down," says Citowicki. "Josie Windauer comes in and you see Taylor's fitness scores hit a whole new level. I need to stay ahead.

"When you tell her, you're doing really well, that's when she starts falling off. She needs to be in a position of, I'm running away. These people are chasing me down."

It's not easy being Taylor Hansen, even as easy as she makes it appear on the field. "If I don't work out in the day, the guilt side of things really gets me, which is a positive and a negative. The guilt would eat me alive.

"I've struggled in the past with relationships or relating to people because I don't know how to relax. Trying to relax makes me very uncomfortable."

So she's got that killer instinct and a need to win that's been wired in her since birth. Maybe she's both, lion and gazelle, which is why she's so intriguing.

She's both blessed and cursed by being a perfectionist and possessing an uncommon work ethic, the latter feeding the former, never to be fulfilled, and on and on it goes on an endless loop. The perfectionist in her can never be satisfied, and it's almost impossible for her to wear out.

It's an endless dance within a circle that never closes.

"One of the great traits about Taylor is that she's incredibly driven. She's very much a perfectionist and doesn't like being mediocre," says her mom, Diane. "She really pushes herself harder than anybody else could. That's what's so great about her, but it is also what causes her some anxiety."

Instead of starting back at the beginning, maybe it's best to start at the end, or where she is right now, to see how far she's come, the 2021 fall edition of Taylor Hansen totally unrecognizable to the 2017 freshman edition.

She would never have guessed this is what she would become. "Absolutely not. I still have a hard time believing it myself," she says.

This Taylor Hansen, the captain who puts the needs of the team ahead of herself, would have no patience with that Taylor Hansen, the one who was so talented but could fall off a cliff in the middle of a match for something as simple as missing a teammate with a pass and having the ball roll out of bounds.

She might as well have been taken out that very minute. She was done, deep down the rabbit hole, wondering how she could have played such a bad ball, then replaying it over and over in her head while play on the field continued.

"That's been a massive issue. I would go into downward spirals and need to be taken out of the game because mentally I couldn't get it together," she says. "I'd have really big ups and downs and couldn't snap out of it."

She uses the word grace with regularity when talking about herself, how she's allowed herself to apply it to herself over the years in greater and greater quantities. "It's been a huge, huge learning lesson for me, performance-wise," she says.

"I think it's a level of maturity that you reach," her mom says. "She's gotten to a different level of confidence that one mistake or one play isn't what dictates her entire game. She's learned to appreciate the overall of what's transpired throughout the 90 minutes of the game."

She says it started to click last year. And she talked with Citowicki about joining Alexa Coyle and Rita Lang and pursuing a professional opportunity somewhere. Her coach convinced her to tap the brakes on that idea. There was more work to be done, one more giant step to take.

"I sat her down and told her she isn't done with her personal development yet," Citowicki says. "She'd been in Alexa's and (Claire Howard's) shadow forever. I didn't know her leadership potential yet. She didn't know her leadership potential yet.

"I told her I'd only let her go when she'd learned to lead others. That means fully coming to terms with who you are as a person."

For four years she was able to worry about one person above everything else: Taylor. She was priority No. 1 in her life, and her game flourished. Last spring her teammates voted upon her a request: we want you to lead us, all of us, take us with you.

No one knew quite how it would go, even Hansen herself.

"Before I was just solely focused on myself and I could just show up every day," she says. "I still want to be the best, that part's still there, but I've found what actually means the most to me are the people around me."

(That plate of dishes you hear crashing to the floor in the background is the 2017 Taylor Hansen fainting in disbelief.)

"I'm grateful because it's given me the opportunity to build more relationships than I maybe would have before. It's something I wouldn't have known until I got in this role as leader."

And if the freshman Taylor Hansen could have looked ahead to this fall and seen this all taking place, the transformation of someone so individual-focused into someone so team-centric? "I don't know that she'd believe it.

"I think the connections with the team and the relationships I've built are the things that mean the most. I'm grateful to lead the girls on the team. I feel like I've learned a lot more from all of them than they've learned from me."

It's a heavier lift to take the entire team on your shoulders but it can also be incredibly liberating to leave yourself behind. Is it any wonder that Hansen is playing the best soccer of her life?

"At the start it was all about her," says Citowicki. "She needed this year to be a great leader and great teammate. She's turned into an amazing leader. That was the final piece of the puzzle.

"She's stepped into the role and really changed a lot. She cares more about other people, and that's making her play better. It's not just about her. She has to care about everybody else, and it's making her a better player."

There is any number of touch points you can look to if you want to paint the full picture of Taylor Hansen, pre-Montana edition.

She was born in Florida, her dad in the U.S. Coast Guard, her mom on her way to achieving things that have left her daughter, as much as Diane Hansen has tried to make it not so, burdened with an additional set of baggage.

Her only sibling, her brother Rory, was nine years older than she was, on his way to playing collegiate hockey. And ... begin.

"When she was 2, he used to dress her up in his hockey gear. He'd put the pads on, the shoulder pads, the pants with the pads, and of course they went to her ankles," says Diane.

"He'd put a helmet on her and stand her in front of goal and he would shoot these little sponge pucks at her, and she loved it. She already had that competitive spirit in her. It wouldn't have mattered what sport she chose. She would have pushed herself as hard as she could."

They moved to California, then to Indiana, for second grade through seventh. Tap and ballet, ice skating, basketball "until everyone outgrew me, but soccer was always kind of it. That's the thing that I stuck with," she says.

Finally, as an eighth grader, the move to Southern California, where her love of soccer met an environment designed to foster it, to whatever degree of time and finances a family was willing to invest.

They went all in, which meant the San Diego Surf. And a coach, Chris Lemay, who would change her life. "He was one of the best coaches Taylor has ever had," says Diane. "Amazing guy, amazing coach. He was able to bring something out in Taylor that I don't think she even knew about herself."

Have we mentioned that Hansen is 5-foot-4? Does that matter? Should it? Her dad made the mistake, with Lemay within hearing distance, of one day wondering how much better his daughter could be if she was just a few inches taller.

"He said, 'Size doesn't matter,' and that's something that's always stuck with me," she says. It's not a chip she carries around on her shoulder. She just sees herself as physical equals with teammates and opponents, no matter their size, and there shouldn't be any lesser expectations that come from it.

"Even though I'm the smallest, I don't see that as an excuse for being pushed off the ball. I want to lift the most in the weight room. I'm not sure if that's competitiveness or just not being able to see those differences.

"It's helpful but mentally that can be kind of tough at times, too, just because I don't give myself enough grace" -- there's that word again -- "which is what Chris and I have been working on a lot more."

Have we mentioned that Hansen, who has changed the Montana soccer program for the better, almost quit the sport all together when she was a junior at Del Norte High?

She was on an ECNL team at Surf with players committed to Michigan, Stanford, Georgetown. It was as good as it could get until the day Lemay, now doing great things as the head coach at Utah Valley, left to become an assistant at Cal.

Two new coaches rolled in, and they didn't see Hansen the way her previous coach had.

"She had a couple of coaches who didn't really like her, and that's unfortunate. Taylor is one of those players, if she feels the coach has confidence in her, she will walk through fire, she'll run through walls," says Diane. "She is that kind of person."

She would sit on the bench and maybe get a few minutes toward the end here and there in matches that had already been decided. They didn't have a reason why she wasn't playing. They didn't need one.

"It affected her in such a negative way that she was ready to walk away," says Diane. "Every game was heartbreaking. We went from watching this player who was so great, so driven, so loved the game, so competitive, to someone who really got to dislike soccer.

"Every game was painful to take her to. She was upset before the game, in tears after the game."

Her mom had just one directive: control what you can control. Okay, two: please don't quit, then control what you can control.

She took matters into her own hands by placing her fortunes in the hands of Chase Chapman, who, as a strength and conditioning coach, did what Lemay had done as a coach: made her believe in herself again.

"He was phenomenal. He was amazing for her," says Diane. "He pushed her to limits I don't think she understood she could reach. He made her stronger, he made her faster. He rebuilt that confidence in her in the gym."

Six months later, when she returned for a new season under a new coach, she left the parents of other players, who knew Hansen and what kind of athlete she had been before, looking at each other in stunned disbelief.

"They were saying, holy cow, what has Taylor been doing in the offseason? She is so fast, so much stronger, kicking the ball farther down the field, beating everyone on the field," recalls Diane.

"She went from not having any confidence to knowing how good I can be, how strong I am, that I can play with every one of these girls, that I can outplay, outrun and beat these girls. All of a sudden her entire outlook on the game changed because she had rebuilt something in herself."

Now you're starting to see it, how she can be both the lion and the gazelle, how her experiences gave her the blood of both, how remaking herself gave her the heart of the former, but the memories of how it can be taken away gave her the mindset of the former.

That's why she won't relax, can't relax. She's earned it but goes forward with the fear that it can just as quickly be taken away. So she drives forward.

"She does it all on her own, whether she's training or running or lifting," says her mom. "She doesn't do well sitting around doing nothing. She sees that as falling behind. She feels like she's not doing enough or that maybe someone else is getting ahead of her. She's pretty amazing in that regard."

And that's high praise coming from Diane Hansen, CEO of Palomar Health, the largest public healthcare district in California and one of the seven largest in the United States.

She grew up in a middle-class family in Michigan and saw what hard work was when her dad suffered a heart attack, leaving him jobless, and her mom stepped up and figured out a way to support everyone.

"I didn't grow up with a lot, but I had a wonderful family, probably the best family anyone could ask for," she says. "Always there for each other. It wasn't fancy, but my mom made sure that we as kids, my brother, my sister and I had everything we could possibly need."

She went out and took on the world, graduating from UMass Dartmouth with a degree in accounting, with a drive that you can see vividly through the lens of her daughter.

"My pathway because of my competitive nature led me to continue to push myself forward. Taylor saw that and knows what I've been fortunate enough to achieve," says Diane.

"Part of it was within her and I think part of it was the environment that she grew up in. We're all very competitive. The crazy part is I still like to win."

She still does. Earlier this month she was named the CEO of the Year by the Association of the California Healthcare Districts. And that can be quite a burden, for that mother's only daughter to carry.

"She has said that to me. 'Mom, you've set the bar so high, I don't know if I can ever achieve that level of success.' I've told her that her happiness and what she experiences in life is more important than just feeling like you've achieved a certain level of success," Diane says.

"You don't have to be somebody else. Enjoy what you're doing and enjoy the work that you choose. I do think just because she's highly competitive, that will always be something that will push her forward."

She packed up all those experiences, all those life lessons, and headed to Missoula in the summer of 2017. She had seen how extra time, extra work, extra effort could make a difference. She saw no reason to change just because she was now at the collegiate level.

And the expectation was that it should pay off.

"When I got here, I wanted to play. I wanted to be a freshman that started, whether that was a realistic goal or not. Over time, I had seen work lead to results, so that's when I got really obsessed with it," she says.

"I'd always been over-competitive and super driven, which comes with its own challenges. It started to elevate once I was here and in this environment and seeing what was possible."

She played in 20 of 21 matches in the fall of 2017, getting 10 starts at outside back for a team that would finish second in the Big Sky Conference. It would be the only one of her first four years in the program that she didn't win a championship.

It was after her freshman season that Citowicki arrived and started taking stock of the players he'd inherited.

"I instantly recognized her personality," says Citowicki. "I thought, I'm going to be able to work with this kid. Very, very coachable, but also exceptionally hard on herself, someone who will get into her head in a split second when she takes a bad touch and we'll lose her for the rest of the game.

"You've got this insanely good athlete, this insanely good soccer player who beneath the surface needs a lot of reinforcement and help to reinforce her own potential. She has done very well with that."

It's what the best coaches do. They treat everyone fairly but not everyone equally. That would be to dismiss the individuality that each player brings to the program and their unique needs.

"As you understand it and feed her the right way, Taylor's fine. She'll perform well and do great. The frustration will happen when you try to shackle her down and tell her she has to be like everyone else," says Citowicki.

"You've got to treat her uniquely, just like everyone needs to be treated in their own different way. If you don't understand Tay, you can have a lot of friction with her. You've got to let her be herself."

Montana won a Big Sky tournament championship in Citowicki and Hansen's first season together, in 2018, then a regular-season title in 2019.

In last spring's COVID-affected season, Montana won both the Northwest Division title and the postseason championship, with Hansen getting voted to the all-tournament team.

Each season was successful, but nothing's been like this fall. It's just different, better, more fulfilling when you finally have the sense you're doing it collectively instead of just for yourself and that you're part of making it so.

Taylor Hansen has learned plenty over the years, mostly about herself. Whether it was intentional or not, she took a seat right next to Samuelson, the freshman, in this year's team photo.

They've since become like siblings, the older one having gone through the battles and seeing in the younger one some of the same inclinations toward self-destruction that can be at odds with the team's success.

Beyond what Taylor Hansen has done on the field on her own, Ava Samuelson will be one of her lasting legacies.

"I see tendencies in her that I had myself. She expects so much from herself. She's capable of a lot of it, but again it's the grace piece I learned," says Hansen. "Hopefully I can stop her from having it go in the wrong direction.

"I want her to be better than I was just because I struggled so much because of my expectations for myself. If I had eased off a little bit, I think I would have been better a little bit sooner and enjoyed it a little bit more. It's hard to enjoy it when you're beating yourself up all the time."

Samuelson isn't going to be good at some far-off point in the future. She's already there, with her change of pace, her subtle hesitations that give her the space needed to play balls into the box that already rival Hansen's.

She's had two assists this year, in Montana's home win over Texas Southern and its road win at Southern Utah.

She thinks she should be doing more, even though she's done great as a freshman. More goals, more assists. She wants it all. It's getting to her, even as she plays on a team that is competing this weekend for a Big Sky title and in two weeks will be going for its second straight trip to the NCAA tournament.

Montana needs her at her best, which she's giving, but she wants to be contributing more and it's bothering her. Sound like someone you know?

"Taylor's best advice so far would be to let it go," says Samuelson. "Let go of the mistakes and the frustration and just focus on what you can do, because what you can do is pretty powerful when you're on the field. And don't think about it too much.

"It's easier said than done, to not put such high expectations on myself, which I do. I just need to remember to do the best that I can and everything will work out from there."

Just one lion (or gazelle, for they are both) leading another to a better, more fruitful, more enjoyable place.

University of Montana Athletics

Players Mentioned

Alexa Coyle

Taylor Hansen

Claire Howard

Rita Lang

Ava Samuelson

Josie Windauer

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