The Craig Hall Chronicles :: Maddie Ditta

Had you happened to be at the Montana soccer team's first practice of its spring-semester training block in February, you would have witnessed an odd interaction.

Once the final drill had been completed, the final whistle blown, the final huddle broken, a player, in her first workout as a Grizzly after joining the program as an early enrollee a month earlier, approached coach Chris Citowicki.

Thank you for coaching me today. That's all Maddie Ditta wanted to say, to shake her coach's hand, look him in the eye and let him know she appreciated the work that had gone into making those two hours a reality.

Beyond the recruitment of the players who were there that day and the overarching culture that underlies everything, the venue had been scheduled and set up, the practice plan had been scripted out in exacting detail, all part of the coaching staff's big-picture plan for the weeks ahead.

As usual, Citowicki had brought the energy to his practice, a balance of intensity and playfulness.

And Maddie Ditta wanted her new coach to know she was thankful for the work he had put in. And she never stopped doing it, beelining to him after every practice, every single one, during the spring.

Thank you for coaching me today. And she meant it. Because she's lived it.

"She means it because she's seen her dad go through it. She can empathize with the job we have as coaches," said Citowicki. "She has an understanding of what we go through. She's seen the other side of it, and that makes her unique. She's immensely respectful."

Mike Ditta is currently the associate head coach for the men's soccer team at Pomona-Pitzer, a Division III school of academic renown in Southern California, but that's only the latest stop for the guy who's been a high school coach, a club director and near the highest peak possible in college soccer.

He joined the men's soccer staff at UC Irvine prior to the 2009 season and helped bring them to the NCAA tournament that November as the overall No. 16 seed out of 48 teams. The Anteaters returned in 2011 as the No. 8 overall seed.

In 2013, it was a trip to the Sweet 16, the result of a victory over North Carolina.

On Sept. 23, 2014, the players and coaches at UC Irvine arrived at practice shortly after learning they'd risen to the No. 3 team in the nation after their 8-0-1 start. The made it to No. 3 again a few weeks later after improving to 11-1-2.

That team would smoke UNLV 3-0 in the opening round of the NCAA tournament, then travel up the coast and defeat No. 6 overall seed Stanford 1-0 on an overtime goal on the Cardinal's home field to make it back to the Sweet 16, where the Anteaters fell 1-0 to No. 11 Providence.

And someone was watching.

Maddie saw the time spent on recruiting, on road trips, at the office in pursuit of the holy grail, of getting better, of taking the next step, how the process would consume all 1,440 available minutes of a coach's day if he let it.

"Over the years I've seen how much my dad works and how much he's put in for his teams," she said. "He's always said, thank your coaches after every practice. He instilled that in me at a young age, so I've continued doing it."

But it's not quite what you think. This isn't Mike Ditta looking out for his fellow coaches and making sure they are getting the appreciation they deserve. It's just Mike Ditta, along with his wife Alana, trying to raise the best daughter they can.

"Through all this as a dad, regardless of the sport, you hope you're teaching them character and value more than anything," he said. "You have to understand it's about relationships. That goes to our values as Christians."

Not only did Mike and Alana meet at Vanguard University in Costa Mesa, Calif., he on the soccer team, she on the basketball team at the Christian school, they more precisely met as students in the same class, Old Testament Survey.

"We try to express those values as best we can. I'm playing, I'm not, you liked me in training or you didn't, the coach is your leader. Go show your gratitude every time and appreciate everything he's trying to do," Mike said.

"That just gives you a good sense as a coach. You're working for me and I'm going to work for you because we care about each other as people. We tried to help her be a good person more than just a good player."

As much as it would seem to be preordained, given her dad's history within the sport, Maddie didn't have to become a soccer player, even through she grew up around it. And that was intentional.

"I never, never tried to push it," says her dad. "It was always about the experience. She enjoyed the sport. I left it at that."

But that didn't mean he was hands-off with the soccer development for his and Alana's only child.
Early on he asked her coaches to work her in at goalkeeper, a position no young girl wants to play.

"I figured it was a good chance for her to get on the field no matter what. She was a pretty good goalkeeper early on as well as a field player," he says.

Once she started playing the midfield, she was a natural. That's where you'll see her this fall, in an attacking midfield position.

"Box to box, switching the point of attack and moving the ball. That's my main thing. That's what I love doing. I love being a part of every play. I like being the playmaker and always part of it," she says.

Her first club coaches saw it, that talent for the midfield, where a player has to have a 360-degree awareness. That's why they asked her dad if she could give up the goalkeeper gloves and just play the field, where she brought the most value.

"She still carried her goalkeeper jersey and gloves to every training and every match, just in case, until she was probably 16," Mike says.

He played semiprofessionally after graduating from Azusa Pacific, where he spent his final collegiate season, then became a club director. Everything changed the day a former player asked him to help coach his junior college team.

"I fell in love with coaching college. I've been chasing that dream ever since," he says.

Which all means that no one, given his varied soccer background, was more uniquely qualified to help his daughter through the challenges of playing high-level club soccer in Southern California than her own dad.

She started with the Pateadores, where her dad was the director. Then she moved up to Slammers as a middle schooler. As a high schooler, she competed for Legends, one of the top clubs in the nation. It was year after year a trip to regionals, either Development Academy or ECNL, the best of the best.

"I was blessed to live where it's so competitive and you get to play on teams and against teams that are fostering Division I athletes and people who want to play in college. It's good to be surrounded by that," she says.

Put Maddie Ditta somewhere else in the U.S. and she might have been the star player. In Southern Cal, just getting minutes was sometimes the challenge.

It pained her dad, as it would any father, soccer coach or not, but he never stepped in, never said anything. Just as she knows the time her dad puts in, he knows the challenges all coaches face, those that come with playing time and opportunities and expectant parents and driven athletes.

There is very rarely enough to go around, to satisfy everyone.

"When she got to the highest levels, sometimes she wasn't playing. It's a team sport. As long as the coaches respected her and treated her right, I didn't jump in," he says.

"You're not guaranteed to play at any level. It's about learning how to be a team player and working to earn your role within the team, so I never got involved with that. I cheered on her team when she was on the pitch and when she wasn't. I never tried to coach, just tried to be Dad."

Of course, she had a resource few of her teammates had when she walked off the field and got the post-match embrace. Sometimes she wanted his feedback, sometimes she didn't.

"The one tradition we had was, she'd ask me, what do you think, how did I do?" Mike says. "And we'd just grade it. Then we'd drive home. If she didn't ask, we didn't talk about it.

"It was all about helping her manage the highs and lows and the mentality she'd need to be a competitive player on an elite team, keep her mindset and her perspective on the journey, the process, not so much the production. If you focus on the process, you usually end up in a pretty good spot."

As a tidy way of encapsulating everything they've been through over the years: "He's been my go-to with anything with soccer," Maddie says.

Lest we forget, it was a two-sport household, Mike tied to soccer, Alana (so she doesn't have to correct someone for the 7,000th time in her life, please say ah-LAWN-ah when you see her) to basketball, "but it didn't take," says their daughter about her mom's sport of choice.

That doesn't mean she didn't play, as she did most sports growing up. Her mom will forever cherish that eighth-grade season, when she was the coach and her daughter was the defender she put on the other team's best player and knew her team would be just fine.

"She was a defensive beast. She loved doing the dirty work. I would put her on the best player and she would steal the ball and then she'd give it up to someone else with better ball-handling skills. Then they'd give it back to her and she'd make a layup. It was great.

"That was all Mom needed, to get to have her play for me once and be a basketball mom for a year," says Alana, a fourth- and fifth-grade teacher at Terrace Elementary School in Riverside, Calif.

If dad helped daughter navigate the ups and downs and unexpected twists and turns of competitive soccer in Southern Cal, imagine how much of a resource he was when it came to being recruited.

"It was still stressful, but he was able to navigate us on the course very well, because that's what he does," says Alana.

Citowicki, who is entering his fifth season as Montana's head coach (can that be right?), saw Ditta years ago, thought she'd be a nice addition. Then he saw her last summer and had to do a double-take.

Ditta's dad introduced her to the world of strength and conditioning when she was a freshman, knowing that would be a key part of her development. He was right. She attacked it and Citowicki saw the results that day.

"Okay, that's going to be a great addition. Whatever she did, however she changed from when I previously saw her, she was completely different," he says. "Her physique, her athleticism. She definitely took it seriously and to a whole new level."

She's a freshman who could pass as an upperclassman.

Citowicki says Ditta is on the Taylor Hansen Path, and that can only be a good thing. As Hansen remade herself over the years, her confidence skyrocketed and she became the type of player who believed she should be playing at the highest level of professional soccer. And she is.

"It's increased her confidence, which is now increasing her level of play," says Citowicki of Ditta. "It's a Taylor Hansen-like progression, saying she felt more confident in her play when she started to realize she is extremely fit and very strong. Maddie seems to be trending in that direction."

She's a Southern Cal girl and could have stayed there to play collegiately, but neither she nor her parents wanted that. "She wanted to go far enough away and we wanted that too, just to get the college experience," her mom says.

She had an offer to play in the ACC, but nobody wanted that kind of separation. Then one day, Citowicki entered the picture. "He was at an ID camp she was at, and she loved his station and how he coached. She just felt a connection with him right away," Alana says.

Citowicki does not lack for confidence, not in himself or the program he's built or in his recruiting pitch. But you wonder if he had some hesitation meeting Mike Ditta, the parent, for the first time. After all, this was a guy who operates in the same world, who knows how this all works.

This would be the same presentation – Dream, Work, Achieve – but to a different type of audience than most of the parents he interacts with. In the end, he just did his thing, the thing that keeps bringing in the type of talent that has other coaches saying, Wait, he got who?

"The one thing I wanted (Maddie) to understand was that you want to have a coach who is in line with and matches your goals," Mike said. "I thought Chris and his staff did a great job of communicating with Maddie and showing her their interest and where they saw her on the pitch.

"She could have gone to an ACC school, a couple other schools, but to Montana's credit, they did a great job of recruiting her." High praise from someone who knows of which he speaks.

She was another player whose recruitment was affected by COVID. She didn't make her visit to Missoula until November 2020, the fall when the Grizzlies did not play any matches. There were no football weekends to align the visit with. It was just straight soccer and a quiet campus.

The family went to practice and "(Chris) is hustling, he's energetic, he's charismatic, he's involved," said Mike. "He's carrying his camera around to each part of the pitch. All the girls were welcoming. We thought, wow, this is a really great place to be from our end."

But Missoula wasn't just down the road from Riverside, the only way it would have been easy for a mom.

"Anything more than 10 minutes is too far for me," Alana says. "My girl and I are pretty tight. This has been a stretch. It's stretched my heart, but I know it's where God wants her to be, so I have peace about that, but it's been hard."

The countdown was then officially on, until their only child would leave the nest and become a Grizzly, in July 2022. They had to relish each month, each day they had left together, each moment. There was only so much sand left in the top half of the hourglass.

Then last August, a teammate of Ditta's, a UCLA recruit, told her that she was going to enroll early, in January 2022 in order to get a jump on her college development and career.

What she would give up by missing her final months as a carefree high school senior would more than be made up for by the gains she would make being a Bruin for that time before the start of her freshman season.

Ditta was intrigued. She reached out to her counselor at school. "That's what got the ball rolling," she says.

Imagine the emotional conundrum it left Mike Ditta facing. As a coach, he had to admit there was a huge upside to getting on campus for an entire semester of training with your new teammates, new coaches, and a chance to dip your toes into college academics before the busyness of the fall semester.

But as a dad? "It was hard, hard for both my wife and me," he says. "It was hard, but God had a bigger plan. We just wanted to do what was best for her. We did everything we could for her to take advantage of the opportunity.

"All in all, it's been a blessing and a positive for her experience and preparation for the season and the transition from being under our roof to being out on her own."

That she was at practice that February day, the one when she shook Citowicki's hand for the first time, and not back at Ramona High, opened Citowicki's eyes to the possibilities of the future. It won't work for every incoming player, but it has for Ditta. And it will for future Grizzlies.

"She was able to acclimatize to the team and the culture, get used to the fitness and the workouts, get used to me and the coaching staff and what it is going to take to survive here," Citowicki says.

"She knows all that. Spring gave her a big leg up. In my eyes, she's a returner. She's not a freshman anymore."

Because of when Montana's spring semester ends, in early May, Ditta still got to go through graduation ceremonies and to all the senior parties back home. But for two and a half months, she began her indoctrination into being a Grizzly.

"Spring is the time to come in. Think about (fall) preseason. We go right into prepping the squad to start winning games. Spring is great because there is no pressure. We absorb you into the culture and off you go," says Citowicki.

She's joined Fellowship of Christian Athletes, found a home at Anchor Church. She's eyeing a path toward becoming a physical therapist, inspired to help athletes get back to doing what they want to do through her own experience of recovering from an MCL strain last fall.

When the first day of practice rolls around on Aug. 1, she'll be a new face to most but a familiar returner to those within the program, the benefits of enrolling early.

Still, her dad's lessons over the years – that it's a team sport, through the highs and lows – have stuck with her, giving her a healthy perspective of whatever may come her way.

"My goal is just to have an impact on the team, whether that's on the bench and doing my best to have an impact on the players on the field or on the field playing and making a noticeable difference, just in any way I can to get the wins," she says.

"My goal is to get on the field and earn those playing-time minutes during practice. If (Citowicki) sees me elsewhere, I'll do my best wherever that is."

And when the game is over, whether she assisted on the game-winner or never stepped on the field, whether Montana wins, loses or draws, she'll find her coach, look him in the eye, shake his hand and tell him thank you.

University of Montana Athletics

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