The Craig Hall Chronicles :: Ava Samuelson

She has a cherubic face that looks younger than its 18 years and feet that can make a soccer ball do devilish things. Veteran things. No-way-she-is-18-years-old things. Allow her to get out wide, in space, and you've invited potential disaster to rain upon your front-of-goal defense. Trouble is brewing.

"What first caught my attention was her ability to cross the ball," says Montana coach Chris Citowicki of
Ava Samuelson, the final entry in this year's Craig Hall Chronicles. "She has this ability of crossing in ways that a lot of other players don't. It's got that perfect bend, the perfect weight into the perfect spot."

In the run of play, in the stretches between set pieces, it's one of the most exciting moments in soccer. A Taylor Hansen, a Samuelson, has the ball at her feet, and she's just toying with a defender, who is mostly helpless, alone on an island with no aid coming from her teammates. It's borderline unfair.

In the buildup, everyone knows what's coming. All a Hansen or a Samuelson needs is a fraction of space, the tiniest window. If it's not there, they know how to create it for themselves, no matter how skilled the defender standing between them and their teammates who are waiting to crash the goal.

Samuelson is left-footed, but you wouldn't know it by watching her play. It's probably the best compliment you can give a player, a nod to her overall skill and her years of training, and to her former coaches, the people who got her to this level.

And now she is out wide, on either side of the field, it doesn't matter, and there is a sudden realization within the stadium: something is happening right now. People move to the edge of their seats. She plays it in, serves it up to her teammates on a platter. She's done her job.

The ball rockets toward the goal but at the same time seems to be gently floating through the air, a wizard's trick of deception. Her teammates have seen this before, and they position themselves accordingly.

The defenders? This is mostly new to them. They flounder as they try to track the ball while also marking the opponent's threats. It all happens so fast that something has to give. They'll lose track of one or the other. It's what the cross, the best of them, banks on, that momentary confusion.

It's an almost violent play, at the receiving end, in its execution, a player rising up and using her head to both road-block the ball's path and send it on a 90-degree turn toward the net. If it occurs close enough to the end line, the keeper has zero chance. The redirect happens too quickly, the goal is too large.

Delaney Lou Schorr, a freshman like Samuelson, can attest to the above. She is a first-hand (or head) witness. In Sunday's 9-0 victory over Rocky Mountain, in the 59th minute, Samuelson played a ball from the left wing. Schorr used her height advantage to head it in, making it 5-0.

It came after Samuelson made it 4-0. Playing from the middle of the field, she passed a ball ahead to Josie Windauer, who was running toward the goal along with the only defender in sight. A Division I quarterback couldn't have landed it in a more perfect spot than Samuelson did with her foot.

Those feet? They are weapons of mass destruction covered in leather and branded by a Nike Swoosh.

It was so dangerous that it created a brief moment of pandemonium. The defender knew she'd been bested, so she kicked at the ball while it was still in the air, knowing if it landed and bounced, Windauer, bigger and stronger, would win that battle nine out of 10 times. Samuelson had, again, done her job.

The defender kicked it right past her own keeper and into the goal. Had it been a regular-season match, it would have been credited as an own goal. But the official scorer gave Samuelson the benefit of the doubt. In less than 30 minutes into her Grizzly debut, Samuelson had a goal and an assist.

She scored again on Monday in Montana's 7-0 victory over Carroll.

"She did well on her fitness test, had one of the highest scores on the team, and was doing well in practice, so I was wondering, what is the next level for her?" said Citowicki. "It came out in the games. It's just assists and goals.

"It's crazy out of that (outside back) position. You'd expect that out of Taylor Hansen. Now you've got Ava Samuelson coming along and doing the same thing."

It makes sense if you know the story, if you're able to look backwards and fit all the pieces together until you get Ava Samuelson, 2021 edition. (That there will be new and improved editions coming your way in 2022, '23 and '24 is almost overwhelmingly exciting.)

Citowicki says, "If we wanted to play her for a full 90, we could play her for a full 90 quite comfortably," meaning he wouldn't be in jeopardy of wearing Samuelson out. Indeed, she is indefatigable.

For that, you can look to her dad, Andy, who ran collegiately at Colorado, which is the equivalent of playing football at Alabama, basketball at North Carolina, volleyball at Nebraska, softball at Oklahoma. A place where only the best get an invitation. He had the gift. The Buffaloes wanted it in their uniform.

He passed it down to his three children, though none of them followed him to a career on the track. All fell for soccer, where a big motor still goes a long, long way. Pair it with a wide range of soccer skills -- "I've played every position except goalie," she says -- and you have Ava Samuelson.

"She can just run and run and run," says Citowicki. And she does, near her home in Louisville, Colo., preferably on the Davidson Mesa Loop Trail, in the shadow of the Flatirons. It's a three-mile loop not far from the family home. She likes to do it twice. Maybe needs to.

"She's got the same mindset of Taylor (Hansen), of Molly Quarry. There is just something about them. They are team players, but they are very individually driven as well. They are focused on how good they want to be."

Driven? Oh boy, here we go. Let's start with Lisa, her mom, who attended Nebraska Wesleyan, then remained in her home state to attend medical school at Nebraska.

Wanting to shake things up, which she did amongst her family when she traded Big Red for Ralphie, natural enemies whose enmity dates back decades, she moved to Colorado for her residency in pediatrics. Been there ever since. "I was a Colorado girl from that point on," she says.

She'll still wear red on football Saturdays, but the family can see the campus of Colorado in Boulder from their home in Louisville. And if Hannibal Lecter taught us anything, it's that we begin by coveting what we see every day. And Andy didn't help things by wearing the black and gold around.

Speaking of Andy, his route wasn't quite so simple as moving to a neighboring state. He started in Turkey, not the city in Texas but the country, courtesy of the Air Force. Then it was on to England, finally to Colorado Springs, where his dad started teaching at the Academy.

It's where his running career flourished, the elevation giving him eight cylinders, which he used to star at Rampart High. He was international at this point but simple in nature. Give him a mountain trail and a bike or a pair of shoes, and there was nowhere else in the world he'd rather be.

The speed may be leaving his legs by the year -- he's a doctor, just like his wife, so he won't argue it from a physiological perspective. That's just life -- but his love of the Colorado lifestyle will never fade. His youngest has it. They shared it together, until she just took off one day, down the trail.

"I can't remember the first time she could keep up with me, but Ava is definitely faster than me now," he says.

Lisa knew what she wanted from the start: to be a pediatrician. She got there on a direct line, A to B to C, done. Andy came to the realization later, after graduating from Colorado. He was working but he wasn't making a difference. "I wanted to do something more serious, more meaningful," he says.

It was a yeoman's effort, working software support to pay the bills while taking the chemistry, biology and organic chemistry classes, two per semester, he needed just to get into medical school.

And he needed a place to live in Boulder, just a room, maybe in a house shared by others, maybe graduate students in the basement, maybe a newly appointed pediatrician who had rented the upstairs and could use someone else to help share the bills.

He moved in, and here we are. "I think God just thought we wouldn't meet each other any other way," says Lisa.

Imagine that household as time moved forward. Aubrey was four, John was two, Lisa was working, Andy was hustling, and in the summer of 2003, along comes Ava. Two weeks after she was born, Andy started medical school at Colorado.

What choice did she have in how she'd be wired today? There was no sitting on the sideline, not in that home. "I think it's in her blood," says Lisa. "She certainly saw it, the constant work ethic and organization. We were always busy, always on the go, so that became her life."

Had it just been her and two parents, it would have been a whirlwind. But give her two older siblings to try to keep up with, close enough in age that whatever they were doing, she thought she should be doing? And ... go.

"Since she was little, she was very, very driven to do what her older siblings were doing and doing it early, crazy stuff, like climbing out of her crib when she was 15 months old and riding a bike when she was three. It was nuts," says Lisa.

"She's definitely driven. She's had that personality since she was little. If she wanted to do something, she just did it over and over and over until she mastered it. She's a force."

What other option did she have?

"My parents are some of the hardest-working people I've ever met," she says. "They've taught me and my siblings to work hard and make sure every moment, every chance you get, to do your best."

They left Colorado, though never in spirit, when Ava was three, bound for Palo Alto and a house near Stanford, where Andy had his internal residency. Through a friend of a friend, Lisa got a part-time pediatrics job at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation. Andy continued his path toward gastroenterologist.

Ava? She didn't know what bounties the family had acquired, just outside their front door. They went to soccer matches. There was Kelley O'Hara starring for the Cardinal. She joined a little-kids track club. They had their practices at Cobb Track, on the Stanford campus, where national champions have sweat.

"I just thought it was like a high school," Ava says of Stanford. Her mom adds, "She thought that was all pretty normal, but it was pretty fun."

Finally: back to Colorado, Andy one step closer to completion, now doing fellowship training at the University of Colorado in Denver. For Ava, track came and went. So did the pool after one year. "She was definitely not a swimmer," says her mom. Soon horseback riding had to be shelved.

Big-time soccer was here, in the form of Real Colorado.

She'd been around club soccer, taking a ball and playing on the sidelines while Aubrey and John moved up the youth ladder. By the time Andy was done doing a year of specialized training in advanced endoscopy at the University of Texas Southwestern in Dallas, Ava was about to go all in on soccer.

If life at home had become a little more settled, she was on the go more than ever, traveling an hour both ways for soccer practice four, sometimes five, days a week.

It was on those fields where everything came together, the drive to keep up with her siblings, the need not just to practice but to work hard at it, the physical gifts passed down from her parents. And then to put all of that in the middle of dozens of other girls wired much the same way?

She started with the club when she was 13. She might look up from her own practice and see on another field Mallory Pugh, who in 2016 became the youngest female player to be selected to play for the U.S. national team during an Olympic qualifying tournament. She was 17.

Or look another direction and see Jaelin Howell, who would go on to be voted college soccer's top player last season at Florida State. For some, that would be too much, too intimidating. For Samuelson? She just wanted more of it.

"It was way more exciting for me than nervous because I just wanted to be like all of them," she says. "It just motivated me even more to play soccer."

She would become middle-school friends with a girl named Emme Larsen, whose older sister, Allie, now an All-Big Sky center back for the Grizzlies, still recalls watching Samuelson years ago.

"I remember sitting on the sidelines of my sister's games when I was in high school and Ava was maybe 13 and thinking how good of a player she was going to be," says Larsen, who played alongside Samuelson on Thursday night as Montana opened the season at Creighton.

"Now it's almost full circle. That player who I knew was going to be good is now my teammate."

Wyoming knew it. They reached out to Samuelson when she was a freshman, asked her what she wanted to do for school, asked her if she might consider being a Cowgirl. "I didn't even want to think about it. I was just so into playing," she says.

She had the perfect guy in the house for balance, for perspective: her dad, who had been through the recruiting process himself but in a more sensible time period. He was mostly recruited as a junior and senior, as his talents revealed themselves on the track as he matured and got stronger.

His No. 1 piece of advice: Be patient. No. 2: Figure out what you want.

"See what your different opportunities are," he said. And really dive in. "The most important thing is the school. Do they have what you want to study? A close second is your relationship with the coach and the staff.

"That was my experience in college. You spend a lot of time with the other people on the team, so it's important. You spend so much time with them, it really needs to be a good fit or it's not going to work."

It's just part of the Real Colorado experience, the pressure. Of who you're competing against. And the people who are watching, not just the games but the practices. College coaches, there constantly, buzzing around, watching, noting, projecting. Everything is high level, including the stress.

"By my junior year I was just used to it. Everyone was competing at everything, just in case. It definitely brought up the competitiveness in all of us," Samuelson says, environment as gift for those who can handle it, who are willing to embrace it.

"She's very athletic, very good on the ball, extremely good soccer brain." That's how Citowicki describes Samuelson today, so he knew he had to have her on his team.

He reached out, and if the receiver gives him her ear, he very rarely swings and misses. He might not get everyone he's ever wanted, but he always leaves them wondering, Why not Montana?

"Values was a big thing for me," says Samuelson, of her reason for signing with the Grizzlies. "Chris is so motivated to make people into better players and better people. He's so invested in everyone. He wants to push everyone to be better."

She took her visit, with her mom as dad stayed home to work, but he was given nightly updates on how things were playing out up north.

"I think she knew," Andy says. "They called me every night to give me the details. I said, pull the trigger. (Commit) while you're there. I think she wanted to, but she waited a week to think it through some more, which is probably a pretty smart thing to do."

She thought about it, but she had already been won over.

"She just loved the coaching staff and the girls on the team. She just thought it was a great fit, and Lisa was excited about it too. That doesn't happen every time you visit a place."

She's an outside-back type, in the mold of Hansen, who can play end line to end line, loves to play end line to end line and can go for the full 90 minutes, more if necessary. After playing all over the field, it's her preferred position, where she can see everything in front of her, evaluate, then strike.

She's 5-foot-4, which is why some schools certainly passed on her, but that's Hansen's listed height as well, and she's made an outsized difference over the years. Samuelson will as well. Because it's not like she's out of her element.

"I've played against bigger, faster, better players, so it makes me comfortable. The girls here are really good, but I can keep up," she says. "I know I can keep up because I've done it before."

With Montana trailing Creighton 1-0 on Thursday night in Omaha and the match going into the 80th minute, Samuelson took a corner kick for the Grizzlies. It was an in-swinger for the left-footer, meaning she bent it toward the goal. It's where Samuelson is so good, so dangerous.

Creighton's keeper made a late break on the ball. She got her hands on it but couldn't punch it out of harm's way. The ball ping-ponged around until it found Windauer, who blasted it inside the left post to tie the match.

Samuelson didn't get an assist on the play -- there were too many touches between the corner and Windauer -- but she set it in motion, placing the ball where it could do maximum damage, create the most havoc, lead to a goal. It's her gift. Now it's ours to enjoy.

Ask her what she wants to get into academically and she says integrative physiology, which is the new name for the former health and human performance. She'd like to get into sports medicine, something that would combine her parents' professions with the active lifestyle she loves.

But what about more schooling? Could she one day become a doctor? Because even her dad, at her age, didn't have it in mind. "That's not going to happen," she says, pretty emphatically. "Not 14 years like my dad. I'd like to get out there and make an impact as soon as possible."

She means in her post-collegiate professional life. Or maybe as a Griz soccer player. It fits either way.

University of Montana Athletics

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Players Mentioned

Taylor Hansen

Molly Quarry

Ava Samuelson

Delaney Lou Schorr

Josie Windauer

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