The Craig Hall Chronicles :: Ally Henrikson

The Craig Hall Chronicles are now entering their second decade, so it was bound to happen: one of them finally opens in the dressing room of a Target.

It was June 2019, and there Ally Henrikson was, mostly minding her own business, maybe thinking back to the week prior, when she had traveled to Oceanside, Calif., with her Colorado Rush club team for the U.S. Soccer Development Academy Summer Showcase.

Some of her Rush teammates, those who were a little more dialed in on the recruiting process and had grand visions of the opportunities ahead, had this particular day circled on their calendars. It was the first day they could be contacted by college coaches. They knew it, and they were ready.

Henrikson, back home in Pueblo, just needed some new clothes. What she wasn't thinking about that day was what might be happening in Bowling Green, Ky.

Western Kentucky head coach Jason Neidell had seen Henrikson play in California, had discovered the player whose mom says "can head the ball like nobody I've ever seen and whose slide tackles are crazy," and now he wanted her to be a Lady Topper, or at least he wanted to open the conversation.

So he dialed Henrikson's number. It rang while she was in the dressing room. She knew college coaches could start reaching out, but she hadn't convinced herself they might be interested in her.

"Hello, this is Ally," she answered. Within seconds her palms started sweating, once she realized what was happening. A Division I soccer coach was calling her, trying to break the ice. She locked the door and says she started freaking out, all while holding it together over the phone.

After all, Neidell wanted her for her composure as a center back. If a phone call rattled her, if she let that show, what might he think? The entirety of their conversation took place in that tiny room. "They were probably like, what is she stealing?"

It wasn't the first time she'd been caught off guard when it comes to soccer. It's been a running trend, an endearing naivete that she's carried from the Pueblo Rangers to the Pikes Peak Rush in Colorado Springs to the Colorado Rush in Denver, a geographic moving up the ladder, south to north.

Mother and daughter both remember the moment. It was in Costa Rica, after she'd earned a spot on a Rush Select squad that would represent the club, which has more than 80 affiliates around the world, for some international friendlies.

She had just finished eighth grade, and now she was outside of her southern Colorado comfort zone, playing with teammates from around the U.S. and facing club teams from Costa Rica.

She returned to her hotel room and melted into her mom's arms. It was too much. They were all so good, and she was just Ally Henrikson, and why had she been selected and why was she here and how was she supposed to play at that level?

"I totally remember that moment," says her mom, Anne. "She just leaned in and said, 'Mom, they're really good.' I just said, 'It's okay, so are you.' It was really an eye-opening experience for her to realize the level that she'd been invited to step up to."

What got her through, outside of her talent that she underestimated, was that the team's coach was her coach from Pikes Peak Rush. If he believed in her, if he thought she was meant to be here, couldn't she do the same?

"I think that helped her, because she trusted him," says Anne. "It just took her a little bit of time. I'll never forget the moment she realized who she was with and what their skill level was and what she needed to do to step up and enjoy it. She did really well."

So well that an assistant coach on that team, who happened to work in the larger Colorado Rush club in Denver told her she should come up and train with them.

If the process of becoming a Division I soccer player, of believing you're a Division I soccer player, is a series of steps, this was another one. The newfound confidence she'd gained in Costa Rica, that she belonged? It vanished that night, her first time joining Rush.

It was called Friday Night Finishing, a series of shooting drills. But before they started, everyone huddled together. And all the doubts came flooding back in. There were players who had already committed to Division I programs standing next to her. She'd never been surrounded by so many players.

It was enough to nearly suffocate a girl. "I was so nervous, I was shaking. I was like, I'm not meant to be here," she recalls. The mind is amazing in that way. It can take a talented player and reduce her, at least in her own thinking, to nothing, to less than.

It convinces you every other player there has it all together, that no one else is doubting themselves, and look how tall she is and how athletic she looks and why is a girl from Pueblo even trying to fit in? "I just had a what-is-going-on kind of moment," she says.

As it did in Costa Rica, her body disconnected from her mind and performed as expected. Afterwards she was told she should come play for Colorado Rush on a permanent basis.

Those stories come to mind when Montana coach Chris Citowicki talks about Henrikson two weeks into her college career.

Even as a freshman, she had the third-highest score on the team in preseason fitness testing, a nod to her devotion to CrossFit since eighth grade. But Citowicki still had no idea what he'd be getting once practices started.

"How good is she going to be has been my question this whole time. Is she going to peak later in her career? Is she going to be ready to step in right away? How much time is it going to take?" he asks. "Is she a midfielder, an outside back, a center back?"

Henrikson has always been at her best, in Costa Rica, later joining Colorado Rush, when she maybe didn't think she measured up to the talent around her. If Citowicki could get that version of Henrikson the next four years, he'd be fine with it.

"She just has this amazing humility where I don't think she understands how good she's going to be yet, and that's completely fine by me," he says.

"I just know I need to get her minutes pretty quick, because she is torching her way through the team right now. She's very, very good. She's going to be a special player."

It might be best for the program if nobody tells Henrikson that, not yet. Or that when Citowicki sees Henrikson play, he can't get Taryn Miller, the Big Sky Conference Defensive Player of the Year in 2017, out of his mind, even though Miller was six-foot to Henrikson's 5-foot-6.

"It's glimpses I get every once in a while. That's Taryn, that's Taryn right there," he says. "They have different body types, but there is a size to her and a physical dominance. The way she hits is the way Taryn would hit you. The presence is there."

Even if she's had doubts about her own talents -- and she's in the majority among rising soccer players, not the minority, when it comes to that affliction -- she has an advanced education when it comes to soccer.

Soccer and its select travel teams have taken her to Costa Rica, to Sweden twice, to Germany, to France. She's trained with teams from Bayern Munich to Lyon.

It's taught her this: you don't have to look like Taryn Miller to play like her. In other words, it's the size of fight in the player that's more important than strictly the size of the player.

"In America there might be a center back who's seven feet tall and 200 pounds and people are like, she's so good," says Henrikson.

In other countries, size is just one way of measuring a player. "Over there, you get a girl who's four-nine and maybe 90 pounds, and she's the best player on the field. Obviously being big and strong will help you, but what matters is what you do with the ball."

Henrikson has been doing things with the ball since the age of four, just as her older sister, Molly, who is at Colorado State and playing club soccer, had been doing.

They tried other sports, but "there was something about soccer that just brought them in. They've had good teammates and have had really good coaches every step of the way, so they always enjoyed practices and competition," says Anne. "It's been soccer from the get-go

That this Craig Hall Chronicle is being written, that this family came to be, is because of a Halloween party.

Anne was raised in Louisiana and after graduating from college spent two years in Honduras in the Peace Corps. She spent two more years in South America before traveling to Pueblo to spend time with a friend.

She was hooked by Colorado and eventually landed a full-time job with a Head Start program for migrant farm workers.

It was one Halloween when she finally said yes to a co-worker's invitation to a party. And there was Pat Henrikson. And how can a girl not be swept off her feet by a pilot, someone who had planes hanging over his crib and decided right then and there that flying would be his life's passion?

It's an interesting experiment, to hear that Ally Henrikson has never lived anywhere but a second-story apartment in downtown Pueblo, a city of 120,000, and then let the mind fill in the blanks. What do you picture? Probably nothing Rockwellian.

But then you learn that the family owns the building, with stores and coffee shops on the lower level, 29 apartments above. And then discover that for nearly two decades, Pat needed to be ready to up and leave everything behind, another charter job beckoning.

And who would want to be a homeowner with all its attendant needs when he could be gone for weeks at a time?

"I tell doctors, you have no idea what it means to be on call, because for a good 20 years, my husband would be on call at a moment's notice," says Anne, who stepped away from Head Start when Molly was born and now handles the business side of the family's real estate holdings.

And when you own the building, you can give your girls the bedrooms of their dreams. "My sister and I used to share a bedroom when we were younger, then (our dad) realized it was time to get us our own space, so he built these amazing two-story rooms," Ally says.

They had a plane. They had a boat they would take to the Pueblo Reservoir. They had the family cabin that Pat and his dad built 25 years ago in the San Luis Valley where the family spends every Christmas.

Who cares if it was a somewhat non-traditional upbringing? "There was no reason to move. We had everything we needed," she says. "I feel like it really offers two perspectives of my life. That's how I've always looked at it."

And her grandparents, Pat's parents, lived two blocks away. That tight bond is why she connected with Montana.

"We're a close-knit family, and I felt this team was also very close-knit, from the coaches to the players and just the community as a whole," she says. And then there are the deep-down values of the program that she felt but still can't quite put into words. It's something that's just real.

"Kind of like honesty. I feel like my family's very true-hearted, like this is how it is. We're not going to jump around the truth, a little bit like, this is how it's going to be."

She took a lot of calls from coaches back in June 2019, and once they quit stressing her out, she was able to be a little more discerning, to really hear what the person on the other end of the call was revealing about themselves and their program.

"It wasn't just the same spiel. (Citowicki) wanted to have a good conversation in a way that makes sense," Henrikson says.

And then he got to her good. He wondered if her entire family could be on the call. Because if she was leaving one family to join another, shouldn't the former, all of them, know what she was potentially getting herself into?

Why would such important conversations be held in a vacuum, person to person? Citowicki had nothing to hide. In fact, he had -- and has in his program -- something he wants to share with everyone who might be touched by it.

"He said my whole family should sit in on our calls, and I'd never thought about the process like that. I really appreciated it."

Because she wouldn't be here without them. She wouldn't have developed in soccer like she did so early had she not played on his sister's teams, surrounded for so many years by older players who made her elevate her own skills or get left behind.

She wouldn't be here without the support of her parents, who were asked by their daughter if she could leave the hometown club for one in Colorado Springs, then one in Denver, then if she could go to Costa Rica, to Europe.

The answer was always the same: "If you want to do it and you want to put in the time, we'll support you in any way that we can. And for that I'm insanely lucky," she says. Her mom adds, "It was a priority because it was fun. I've loved every part of it. We all got something out of it."

That she's on the team at Montana, playing Division I soccer, is the return on all that investment.

Yet it wasn't just straightforward, her eyes only on the Grizzlies from the first time she first talked with Citowicki. Even when she had her choice narrowed down to the final two, to Montana and Texas-San Antonio, she was convinced she would end up at the latter.

It was warmer. And some of her teammates from Rush were talking to UTSA as well, and who wouldn't want to have some friends at your side when you're making that sort of life jump, from youth to young adult?

They were scheduled for back-to-back weekends, the visits were, Montana first, then Texas. "She kind of had these ideas of, yeah, I'm going to Texas," says her mom. "I could tell she thought San Antonio was going to be great.

"I'm from the South, so I knew what it was going to be like. And Louisianans don't like Texans, so there was that as well."

To Anne, Missoula felt right, like it was an extension of Colorado, something her daughter had grown up with. "I thought she would have been bowled over like I was. I think she was holding on to that idea that Texas would be better."

Keep in mind her visits came in August. Her interest in Texas lasted about as long as a half of soccer. "It was like 100 degrees and I was absolutely dying. I kept saying, the heat doesn't really bother me. Then I got to the Texas heat and I was like, no," she says.

But what about her friends and teammates that she could have joined, who could have made that transition from high school to college a little less stressful? "I realized easier is not better."

If it was, she never would have gone back for the second day of practice in Costa Rica, never would have survived Friday Night Finishing, never would have committed to Colorado Rush despite the sacrifices it required. Any doubts she's held along the way never defined her. If anything, they made her better.

Growing up she thought she might be lucky if she might, if everything came together, one day play at CSU Pueblo. Or maybe some other Division II school in her home state.

"I didn't prove myself wrong, but I guess in a way I did, in a good way. I've kind of underestimated my abilities over the years. I think I do that a lot," she says.

And somewhere her new coach thinks, keep doing it. Please. There is nothing better on the field than a version of Ally Henrikson who feels she has something to prove.

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