The Killer B’s are going to ruin your day
11/1/2023 5:12:00 PM | Soccer
Indeed, they are, but do they have to do it with a smile on their faces?
The task was simple enough: Get a photo of Montana's center backs, Charley Boone and Reeve Borseth standing back-to-back, the fiercest looks they could muster, you know, something that says, yeah, we've only given up eight goals this year. We're bad and we know it. Just look at us.
It had no chance of succeeding. Try as they might, neither could pull it off. So, they convince you to capture them in their default mode: smiling, even though it is less than 60 minutes before the Grizzlies are going to take the field at South Campus Stadium against Sacramento State.
Montana is about to play for the Big Sky Conference championship, needing a win against the Hornets to clinch it outright, and the Killer B's are all smiles. Game face? This is it.
The Grizzlies go on to shut out the Hornets, winning 2-0 while allowing six shots, just two on Ashlyn Dvorak in goal, then blank Portland State three days later to complete an unbeaten run through league.
The Big Sky record for goals allowed in a season is 12, giving Montana a four-goal buffer entering the postseason. Leading the charge are two players who fit the mold of a center back, as long as the other half is 6-foot and mean as heck.
Certainly, the pairing of Boone and Borseth isn't going to work, is it? Where is the knock-you-down physicality and nastiness? These two can't even come up with a pretend scowl, much less one that's legitimate and heartfelt.
"I've never seen anything like it," says sixth-year coach Chris Citowicki, who has been blessed with all sorts of on-field orneriness from his center backs over the years, starting with Taryn Miller and continuing with Caitlin Rogers, that edge on the back line getting passed down from team to team.
Then it skipped a generation of Griz center backs. "You go back to what you've seen your whole life at that position, which is someone who is intense with someone who is composed. I have two composed, nice people and it just works."
Which must make it doubly frustrating to face the Grizzlies and come up empty on the scoreboard.
Boone? She kills your hopes with calmness and the ability to make the right play over and over and over again. She has no weakness to her game. That's why she was voted first-team All-Big Sky. The coaches know.
Forwards have a margin of error to play with. They need to take occasional risks to get the big reward, a ball in the back of the net. If it doesn't work out? Oh, well, we'll get 'em next time.
A back line has no such thing. "(Associate head coach J. Landham) always talks about the back line and defensive unit, how we train and perform in a near zero-percent-error environment," says Dvorak, who ranks among the national leaders in just about every goalkeeper statistic there is.
"They are not big, strong, intimidating players, but they are so technical out of the air and with their feet. They put themselves in the right spot at the right time. They are brick wells in front of me. They make my job a lot easier. It's so nice playing with them."
If you want flashy, you've come to the wrong place, because flashy on the back line means one of two things: You've gotten out of position and now you're scrambling to recover or you're trying to make the highlight play instead of the easy one.
Boone prefers Occam's razor as her on-field philosophy. The simplest solution is almost always the right one. "I'm there to support people and I've known that for a while," she says about gravitating toward a defensive position at a young age.
Almost without fail she makes the right read, the right pass, the right decision of when to play the ball forward, when to keep it at her feet and move up the field herself. There is a sense of relief when the ball makes its way to Boone, even amongst her teammates. Whew! Crisis averted.
"Charley has the ball? Oh, we're good. Charley's got it. We're fine. I trust her," says Borseth, maybe the more surprising of this duo, mostly because she went from playing 94 minutes last season as a true freshman to starting every match this year and rarely leaving the field.
"I think she was still the same Reeve last year that we've been seeing this year," says Boone. "She's just been given the opportunity to play minutes, play a bigger role. She's really making the most of it and proven herself in that position.
"The person who might have the most ball security on the team might be Reeve. I've never seen her lose it, she connects every pass. She gets out of those tricky situations unfazed. It's crazy how she can maneuver the ball and get out of stuff. She is such an underrated player."
Borseth started the season opener at North Dakota, played every minute as the Grizzlies won 1-0, the first of what would be 11 shutouts during the regular season, leaving Montana one off the program record as it enters this week's Big Sky tournament as the No. 1 seed.
Three days later, Borseth pulled off her signature play in a 3-1 win at North Dakota State, the one where she has no business coming away with the ball and does so anyway, leaving everyone, including her coaches, looking at one another, shaking their heads and asking, how did she do that?
Boone's tricks are all above board, easy to see with the naked eye. Borseth is a magician with her feet, getting you to expect one thing, looking for it, then going all abracadabra. Gotcha!
"Her peripheral vision and knowing where you're coming from allows her to just vanish all of a sudden," says Citowicki.
"(North Dakota State) had a kid breaking down the sideline and Reeve somehow gets there first. The kid is pressing and just flies right by her and Reeve is going the other way, gone. It was over. She's special."
The pair's magnum opus, at least during nonconference, may have been their 45-minute body of work in Spokane on Sunday, Aug. 27.
After Kathleen Aitchison gave Montana a 1-0 lead late in the first half, Oklahoma, WHICH WASN'T GOING TO LOSE TO MONTANA, went all-hands-on-deck, pushing so many players forward that it looked like they were playing with more than 11.
Eight corner kicks for the desperate Sooners in the second half, 11 shots, a bulk of the possession. Would you believe only three of those shots were put on goal, as Boone, Borseth and Associates stymied Oklahoma at every turn?
Quite literally. Every time a Sooner spun with the ball, thinking she was going to find space to get off a clean shot, Montana was there with a block or to force a shot off target. Clinical. Textbook.
"People think defending is big tackles and doing special things, that you have to have this giant presence," says Citowicki. "With Reeve and Charley, it's just different.
"It goes against what you'd expect out of two center backs. Are they the fastest kids on the team? No. Do they have the highest vertical or are they the most athletic? No. But can they read the game better than a majority of people? Yes.
"I don't know how it's working, but it is. It's one of the coolest things I've ever seen. My job is to stay out of the way and let them be them."
That's what makes Boone, Borseth and Dvorak such a triangle of terror. They outthink you, playing one step ahead, anticipating your move before it's gone from your mind to your feet. It's how they make it look so easy, why they are consistently in the right place at the right time.
"It can be tense at moments, but we've played enough that those are moments we've just gotten used to," says Boone. "We work pretty well together to mitigate the risk.
"You read what's happening around you to better assess what to do. It helps having people around you that trust you and are there to support you if something goes wrong." Like Dvorak? "Ashlyn, you good back there?"
What sets Montana apart is that Boone and Borseth don't just stop the other team, then mindlessly boot the ball forward, their job done, good luck everyone tracking down the bouncing ball.
While they may not be the spear of Montana's attack, someone has to get the thing moving forward, give it thrust.
"It's good to have the midfield and outside backs and outside forwards that we trust to play the ball to, knowing it's not going to come right back," says Borseth.
"We know we can play a hard, driven ball at them and they are going to be able to win it, even with pressure on them. We're a good possession team. We don't want to be the team that's giving the ball right back to (the opponent)."
Through the middle, you've got Maddie Ditta and Kathleen Aitchison, both second-team All-Big Sky, then Sydney Haustein, All-Big Sky in everyone's mind but the voters. And that doesn't include outside backs like the phenomenal Ava Samuelson, first-team All-Big Sky.
Go ahead, find the weak link. Because up ahead you've got Skyleigh Thompson and Delaney Lou Schorr, both first-teamers themselves. That's how you go 13-2-3 on the season.
"The three of them (Boone, Borseth and Dvorak), what they do as that little triangle, then you stick Maddie Ditta or Kat in front of them or Sydney and you've got control of the game," says Citowicki.
"If it's just the midfield, you don't run the game. You've got to have control of it back here. We've shifted the emphasis on the build phase back. That's why those players are here. We've recruited that."
Montana's 33 goals this season? The most for the Grizzlies since the 2000 team. Lost amidst another goal celebration is how the play likely started, with Boone or Borseth calmly assessing the situation, then passing or dribbling the ball forward with damage as the ultimate outcome.
"Charley's organization, Reeve's organization, watch a majority of the goals we've scored and it's touched one of the center backs before it's gone up the field and gone in the goal," says Citowicki.
"Unless it's a set-piece goal, it's touched Reeve or Charley. They are the ones who are creating these things. It begins with them. We've never had that from both center backs before. The reason we play as well as we do is because of Reeve and Charley. Flat out."
If they get 1/ and 2/11ths credit for goals being scored, the dynamic duo insists we mention their teammates who do their 11ths of the lifting when it comes to Montana allowing only eight goals over 18 matches.
That kind of historic feat doesn't happen just 30 yards in front of goal. It begins in front of the goal at the other end of the field, because who among us who has watched the Grizzlies this season can't easily picture Thompson, the red-headed menace, tormenting the opposing goalkeeper or back line?
You collect the pass that against most teams means you have time and space to operate. Against Montana? That's all condensed in a hurry when the 5-foot-11 Schorr starts running at you. Or Thompson, playing like her hair's on fire.
If the ball is not kicked directly out of bounds to alleviate the threat, Thompson or Schorr or someone else who subs on is forcing the opponent to rush, to play the ball into the wrong space. All of sudden everything is disrupted, and there is Montana, ready to collect the loose ball.
If soccer kept turnovers, Montana's forwards would be responsible for a bunch, and that's the better play than having Boone and Borseth be the ones stopping the other team every time. The farther up the field the defense starts, the better it is for the Grizzlies.
"As much as the offense starts with the back line, it's the same thing with defense. It starts from the front line," says Boone. "Everyone is so unified when we defend that it makes it easier for Reeve and me to do our job and play the roles we're asked to play.
"If they don't win the ball up top, (the opponent has to) rush the play, then they become more frantic."
And when a team is organized enough on a possession to go through the layers of Montana's end-line-to-end-line defense? Well, the Grizzlies have one final surprise waiting for you. "Then Ashlyn is just a wall," says Boone. "She's so athletic and can make those big-time saves."
Here is a fun fact: Of Montana's eight goals allowed this season, only two have come in the second half. That's two goals in 810 second-half minutes. That's how you close a game out.
The Grizzlies allowed just three goals in league while going 7-0-1, never conceding a goal in consecutive matches. That's how you become champions. That's how you become the team everyone in Flagstaff this week is trying to knock off. The target they carry is a big one.
"Chris is spot-on when he talks about the professionalism of this team," says Dvorak. "The pressure of the tournament and us being unbeaten isn't going to trigger any panic within the team. We'll stay true to our values and style of play. It's why we've been successful this season. No reason to change that.
"The pressure is on, but it has been this entire season, especially after our nonconference success. The pressure we had going into the conference season, we handled that well. We've proved we can handle it. Now it's a matter of taking that same mentality to the conference tournament."
Citowicki knows these matches almost always come down to a moment, you taking advantage of yours or minimizing the threat created by the other team. Handle those moments and you get to go home with a trophy.
Montana's strength is from Dvorak in the back to Thompson and Schorr up top, with the dominant duo doing their destructive best at center back, as incongruous as it seems.
"We're very happy people, but when it comes to game time, we're in the zone," says Borseth. "We're not going to let anyone get past us, we're not going to let a turn happen. We have two sides to us."
They prefer the other one, when they're smiling. Just two wins to go and they'll be able to do it as much as they want, two players in their natural state.
The task was simple enough: Get a photo of Montana's center backs, Charley Boone and Reeve Borseth standing back-to-back, the fiercest looks they could muster, you know, something that says, yeah, we've only given up eight goals this year. We're bad and we know it. Just look at us.
It had no chance of succeeding. Try as they might, neither could pull it off. So, they convince you to capture them in their default mode: smiling, even though it is less than 60 minutes before the Grizzlies are going to take the field at South Campus Stadium against Sacramento State.
Montana is about to play for the Big Sky Conference championship, needing a win against the Hornets to clinch it outright, and the Killer B's are all smiles. Game face? This is it.
The Grizzlies go on to shut out the Hornets, winning 2-0 while allowing six shots, just two on Ashlyn Dvorak in goal, then blank Portland State three days later to complete an unbeaten run through league.
The Big Sky record for goals allowed in a season is 12, giving Montana a four-goal buffer entering the postseason. Leading the charge are two players who fit the mold of a center back, as long as the other half is 6-foot and mean as heck.
Certainly, the pairing of Boone and Borseth isn't going to work, is it? Where is the knock-you-down physicality and nastiness? These two can't even come up with a pretend scowl, much less one that's legitimate and heartfelt.
"I've never seen anything like it," says sixth-year coach Chris Citowicki, who has been blessed with all sorts of on-field orneriness from his center backs over the years, starting with Taryn Miller and continuing with Caitlin Rogers, that edge on the back line getting passed down from team to team.
Then it skipped a generation of Griz center backs. "You go back to what you've seen your whole life at that position, which is someone who is intense with someone who is composed. I have two composed, nice people and it just works."
Which must make it doubly frustrating to face the Grizzlies and come up empty on the scoreboard.
Boone? She kills your hopes with calmness and the ability to make the right play over and over and over again. She has no weakness to her game. That's why she was voted first-team All-Big Sky. The coaches know.
Forwards have a margin of error to play with. They need to take occasional risks to get the big reward, a ball in the back of the net. If it doesn't work out? Oh, well, we'll get 'em next time.
A back line has no such thing. "(Associate head coach J. Landham) always talks about the back line and defensive unit, how we train and perform in a near zero-percent-error environment," says Dvorak, who ranks among the national leaders in just about every goalkeeper statistic there is.
"They are not big, strong, intimidating players, but they are so technical out of the air and with their feet. They put themselves in the right spot at the right time. They are brick wells in front of me. They make my job a lot easier. It's so nice playing with them."
If you want flashy, you've come to the wrong place, because flashy on the back line means one of two things: You've gotten out of position and now you're scrambling to recover or you're trying to make the highlight play instead of the easy one.
Boone prefers Occam's razor as her on-field philosophy. The simplest solution is almost always the right one. "I'm there to support people and I've known that for a while," she says about gravitating toward a defensive position at a young age.
Almost without fail she makes the right read, the right pass, the right decision of when to play the ball forward, when to keep it at her feet and move up the field herself. There is a sense of relief when the ball makes its way to Boone, even amongst her teammates. Whew! Crisis averted.
"Charley has the ball? Oh, we're good. Charley's got it. We're fine. I trust her," says Borseth, maybe the more surprising of this duo, mostly because she went from playing 94 minutes last season as a true freshman to starting every match this year and rarely leaving the field.
"I think she was still the same Reeve last year that we've been seeing this year," says Boone. "She's just been given the opportunity to play minutes, play a bigger role. She's really making the most of it and proven herself in that position.
"The person who might have the most ball security on the team might be Reeve. I've never seen her lose it, she connects every pass. She gets out of those tricky situations unfazed. It's crazy how she can maneuver the ball and get out of stuff. She is such an underrated player."
Borseth started the season opener at North Dakota, played every minute as the Grizzlies won 1-0, the first of what would be 11 shutouts during the regular season, leaving Montana one off the program record as it enters this week's Big Sky tournament as the No. 1 seed.
Three days later, Borseth pulled off her signature play in a 3-1 win at North Dakota State, the one where she has no business coming away with the ball and does so anyway, leaving everyone, including her coaches, looking at one another, shaking their heads and asking, how did she do that?
Boone's tricks are all above board, easy to see with the naked eye. Borseth is a magician with her feet, getting you to expect one thing, looking for it, then going all abracadabra. Gotcha!
"Her peripheral vision and knowing where you're coming from allows her to just vanish all of a sudden," says Citowicki.
"(North Dakota State) had a kid breaking down the sideline and Reeve somehow gets there first. The kid is pressing and just flies right by her and Reeve is going the other way, gone. It was over. She's special."
The pair's magnum opus, at least during nonconference, may have been their 45-minute body of work in Spokane on Sunday, Aug. 27.
After Kathleen Aitchison gave Montana a 1-0 lead late in the first half, Oklahoma, WHICH WASN'T GOING TO LOSE TO MONTANA, went all-hands-on-deck, pushing so many players forward that it looked like they were playing with more than 11.
Eight corner kicks for the desperate Sooners in the second half, 11 shots, a bulk of the possession. Would you believe only three of those shots were put on goal, as Boone, Borseth and Associates stymied Oklahoma at every turn?
Quite literally. Every time a Sooner spun with the ball, thinking she was going to find space to get off a clean shot, Montana was there with a block or to force a shot off target. Clinical. Textbook.
"People think defending is big tackles and doing special things, that you have to have this giant presence," says Citowicki. "With Reeve and Charley, it's just different.
"It goes against what you'd expect out of two center backs. Are they the fastest kids on the team? No. Do they have the highest vertical or are they the most athletic? No. But can they read the game better than a majority of people? Yes.
"I don't know how it's working, but it is. It's one of the coolest things I've ever seen. My job is to stay out of the way and let them be them."
That's what makes Boone, Borseth and Dvorak such a triangle of terror. They outthink you, playing one step ahead, anticipating your move before it's gone from your mind to your feet. It's how they make it look so easy, why they are consistently in the right place at the right time.
"It can be tense at moments, but we've played enough that those are moments we've just gotten used to," says Boone. "We work pretty well together to mitigate the risk.
"You read what's happening around you to better assess what to do. It helps having people around you that trust you and are there to support you if something goes wrong." Like Dvorak? "Ashlyn, you good back there?"
What sets Montana apart is that Boone and Borseth don't just stop the other team, then mindlessly boot the ball forward, their job done, good luck everyone tracking down the bouncing ball.
While they may not be the spear of Montana's attack, someone has to get the thing moving forward, give it thrust.
"It's good to have the midfield and outside backs and outside forwards that we trust to play the ball to, knowing it's not going to come right back," says Borseth.
"We know we can play a hard, driven ball at them and they are going to be able to win it, even with pressure on them. We're a good possession team. We don't want to be the team that's giving the ball right back to (the opponent)."
Through the middle, you've got Maddie Ditta and Kathleen Aitchison, both second-team All-Big Sky, then Sydney Haustein, All-Big Sky in everyone's mind but the voters. And that doesn't include outside backs like the phenomenal Ava Samuelson, first-team All-Big Sky.
Go ahead, find the weak link. Because up ahead you've got Skyleigh Thompson and Delaney Lou Schorr, both first-teamers themselves. That's how you go 13-2-3 on the season.
"The three of them (Boone, Borseth and Dvorak), what they do as that little triangle, then you stick Maddie Ditta or Kat in front of them or Sydney and you've got control of the game," says Citowicki.
"If it's just the midfield, you don't run the game. You've got to have control of it back here. We've shifted the emphasis on the build phase back. That's why those players are here. We've recruited that."
Montana's 33 goals this season? The most for the Grizzlies since the 2000 team. Lost amidst another goal celebration is how the play likely started, with Boone or Borseth calmly assessing the situation, then passing or dribbling the ball forward with damage as the ultimate outcome.
"Charley's organization, Reeve's organization, watch a majority of the goals we've scored and it's touched one of the center backs before it's gone up the field and gone in the goal," says Citowicki.
"Unless it's a set-piece goal, it's touched Reeve or Charley. They are the ones who are creating these things. It begins with them. We've never had that from both center backs before. The reason we play as well as we do is because of Reeve and Charley. Flat out."
If they get 1/ and 2/11ths credit for goals being scored, the dynamic duo insists we mention their teammates who do their 11ths of the lifting when it comes to Montana allowing only eight goals over 18 matches.
That kind of historic feat doesn't happen just 30 yards in front of goal. It begins in front of the goal at the other end of the field, because who among us who has watched the Grizzlies this season can't easily picture Thompson, the red-headed menace, tormenting the opposing goalkeeper or back line?
You collect the pass that against most teams means you have time and space to operate. Against Montana? That's all condensed in a hurry when the 5-foot-11 Schorr starts running at you. Or Thompson, playing like her hair's on fire.
If the ball is not kicked directly out of bounds to alleviate the threat, Thompson or Schorr or someone else who subs on is forcing the opponent to rush, to play the ball into the wrong space. All of sudden everything is disrupted, and there is Montana, ready to collect the loose ball.
If soccer kept turnovers, Montana's forwards would be responsible for a bunch, and that's the better play than having Boone and Borseth be the ones stopping the other team every time. The farther up the field the defense starts, the better it is for the Grizzlies.
"As much as the offense starts with the back line, it's the same thing with defense. It starts from the front line," says Boone. "Everyone is so unified when we defend that it makes it easier for Reeve and me to do our job and play the roles we're asked to play.
"If they don't win the ball up top, (the opponent has to) rush the play, then they become more frantic."
And when a team is organized enough on a possession to go through the layers of Montana's end-line-to-end-line defense? Well, the Grizzlies have one final surprise waiting for you. "Then Ashlyn is just a wall," says Boone. "She's so athletic and can make those big-time saves."
Here is a fun fact: Of Montana's eight goals allowed this season, only two have come in the second half. That's two goals in 810 second-half minutes. That's how you close a game out.
The Grizzlies allowed just three goals in league while going 7-0-1, never conceding a goal in consecutive matches. That's how you become champions. That's how you become the team everyone in Flagstaff this week is trying to knock off. The target they carry is a big one.
"Chris is spot-on when he talks about the professionalism of this team," says Dvorak. "The pressure of the tournament and us being unbeaten isn't going to trigger any panic within the team. We'll stay true to our values and style of play. It's why we've been successful this season. No reason to change that.
"The pressure is on, but it has been this entire season, especially after our nonconference success. The pressure we had going into the conference season, we handled that well. We've proved we can handle it. Now it's a matter of taking that same mentality to the conference tournament."
Citowicki knows these matches almost always come down to a moment, you taking advantage of yours or minimizing the threat created by the other team. Handle those moments and you get to go home with a trophy.
Montana's strength is from Dvorak in the back to Thompson and Schorr up top, with the dominant duo doing their destructive best at center back, as incongruous as it seems.
"We're very happy people, but when it comes to game time, we're in the zone," says Borseth. "We're not going to let anyone get past us, we're not going to let a turn happen. We have two sides to us."
They prefer the other one, when they're smiling. Just two wins to go and they'll be able to do it as much as they want, two players in their natural state.
Players Mentioned
M
/ Soccer
D
/ Soccer
D
/ Soccer
M
/ Soccer
G
/ Soccer
M
/ Soccer
D
/ Soccer
F
/ Soccer
F
/ SoccerGriz football weekly press conference 12.8.25
Monday, December 08
UM vs SDSU Highlights
Monday, December 08
Griz Football Press Conference 12-1-25
Monday, December 01
2025 Brawl of the Wild Trailer
Friday, November 21
