The Craig Hall Chronicles :: Reagan Brisendine

Imagine. You're sitting there, minding your own business, watching your fourth-grade daughter do what she's been doing since the age of 4, floating around a soccer field like she was born to wear cleats and have a ball at her feet.

She makes it look effortless, even at that age, her skills somehow doing the impossible and advancing faster than her time in the sport, her return on investment coming back to her like compound interest, one practice session put in, two worth of improvement coming out.

You think she's pretty good, but every parent lining the field at Flathead Soccer Camp, that most unique thing ever, held on the property of Mike Stebbins, an orthodontist who turned a patch of his land into a pair of pristine oases and gave it over to Kalispell and to the sport, is thinking the same thing.

You watch her, the smile never leaving her face, not when it comes to soccer, and you can't help but see your mom, the teacher who gave 42 years of her life to the profession, to more than 1,200 students in her career, bringing the energy day after day to make sure every kid who entered her classroom felt welcomed, felt loved and cared for, felt like they were the most important person in the world to her.

It's like you brought it into existence, made the connection between generations before fate could do it for you, when you named her Reagan Elaine, all that spirit passing from grandmother to granddaughter through pen to birth certificate.

Imagine. Camp is over and as you're waiting for your daughter to pack up her things, this coach comes running over to meet you, and you don't know him from Adam, just like you have no idea what ECNL means, or GA, or DA. You're just there because your daughter loves soccer. And you love her. And that's what a parent does.

"I don't think you believe it in that moment. You're looking at your little girl and she's in the fourth grade. We were so humbled he sought us out, to tell us there is something special here," says Rob Brisendine, the girl's father.

The coach, then at Montana, had spent his professional career on soccer fields, a little here, a little there, everywhere the sport called him. And he knew that "something special" when he saw it in a girl. And when she's this young and brimming with this much potential, well, sometimes a coach just needs to seek out the parents and let them know.

"She was just different," the coach says all these years later, like he just worked with Reagan Brisendine last week, the things he noticed back then that memorable. "It looked effortless for her at that age. And she always played with a smile on her face. It was so fun to watch her."

The coach told Rob and Tricia: she'll play at the University of Montana one day.

"All she wanted to do was get better," the coach adds. "It was fun to work with her but more fun just to watch her and the joy she played with and the desire to be good and the competitiveness to score goals and to just get after it. You could see she was going to be special. She was just different at that age."

The parents hardly knew what to say. One day you wake up, four kids under your roof, you check the calendar to see who is doing what, who is going where, who needs a ride, who needs to be picked up, another day in the life, and then everything changes.

"Right at that moment, we started to understand what this could mean for her in the future. Pretty special moment for us," says Rob. "From that point on, we did everything we could to help her be successful. She did the rest."

Imagine. You're born in California, raised in Wyoming, land in Las Vegas for high school and spot the girl you'll be with forever, the gymnast, the track and field star at Basic High, the one who high jumps like gravity is something you can strike a bargain with, the one who will pass those genes down to your four children, three girls, lastly a boy.

You played everything you could, football, basketball, baseball, the first on the list getting you to Dixie State for a spell, but soon you becomes them on the list of priorities. Sure, you're the driver of the bus but really you're just along for the ride, their hopes and dreams becoming yours, you just playing the role of chauffeur and guide.

Imagine what it becomes, another soccer sideline, this time in 2020, Reagan, a freshman, scoring the game-winner as Glacier High defeats Bozeman 2-1 in the state semifinals, Taylor, a senior, scoring the game-winner as the Wolfpack defeat Helena High 1-0 in the championship match, giving the school its first state title. Is a heart even designed to be that full?

Or a few years later, when Taylor is jumping for Montana State and Reagan is committed to Montana, the flag in the garage declaring to all that this is a house divided, the Bobcat wiping her feet on the Grizzly half of the floormat when she enters the house, the Grizzly doing the opposite.

Forget the rivalry. All a dad can do is bask in all the joy it brings, acrimony between schools getting no foothold in this household. "What a blessing for us, where you can root for both teams. One gets upset when I'm wearing Griz gear, one gets upset when I'm wearing Cats gear. We have a lot of fun with that," he says. Who knows what Addison and Jackson will one day bring into the picture?

They had no idea what it would lead to, then one weekend when she was a senior, Taylor insinuates herself into the Stayner-McElmurry stratosphere and goes 17 feet, 11 inches in the long jump and 39 feet, 4 inches in the triple jump at the state meet, and suddenly the phone starts ringing off the hook. Every school around with a respectable track and field program wants her.

She becomes a Bobcat, now one year to go until graduation, six times scoring points for Montana State at Big Sky Conference indoor and outdoor championships, her fourth-place finish in the triple jump in May hinting at big things to come in her final year before putting her marketing degree to good use.

But that was track, when college recruiting may not begin in earnest until a girl shows her best stuff right before graduation. We're in the soccer world here, where prospects are identified before they even step foot in high school for the first time.

Had Rob and Tricia remained in Las Vegas, their soccer prodigy would have had access to the type of clubs that would have gotten Reagan in the pipeline, the one all college coaches tap into to fill their rosters each year, their recruiting net getting spread across the usual regional and national championships, the system putting kids without access at a disadvantage.

But how could they say no to decamping in 2011 for either Casper, Wyoming, or Kalispell, extended family in both locations, to give their four kids a better life than the parents thought they'd get in the desert?

After all, she could be a realtor anywhere, this tireless people person, the one who was born first to be an athlete, then to be a fulfiller of dreams, and what better place than northwest Montana, to put people not in houses but homes, to give them a bit of what she had, so much love under one roof in one of the most beautiful spots in the world?

His resume traveled as well, trained as he was in Las Vegas as an event manager. What better place to learn about putting on concerts and rodeos, for learning about facility and operational management? Of course he was the guy when the Kalispell Convention and Visitor Bureau was just an idea and they needed someone to bring it to fruition.

"We knew a lot of people and the sense of community that existed in Kalispell. We wanted to find an environment to raise our family in a smaller place," says Rob.

For every 99 things that were for the better in their new home, one wasn't. In this case, the lack of access to high-level soccer. Not coaching. She got that at Flathead Valley United, at the annual Flathead Soccer Camp, at Glacier High. This was more about a girl getting on the radar, of putting herself in a position to test herself, challenge herself in the soccer world beyond her home base.

She played in the Montana ODP program, got invited to the West Regional, made the team and played at a national event in Florida. She was seen by coaches at Eastside FC in Seattle and was asked to join their ECNL team for a tournament as a discovery player, then for a GA team out of Spokane.

The takeaway? Exactly what that coach at Montana had seen. This girl could play. "If they can't see you play, you're not getting recruited, so we were all in," says Rob. "She contributed right away to their success. It was neat for her to see what that next level of play was like. I think it gave her some additional confidence that she could contribute at that level."

Chris Citowicki, hired as Montana's soccer coach in 2018, is as much a sporting romantic as he is a realist. He gets goosebumps at the idea of small-towners making it on a bigger stage but also knows that the talent Brisendine used to score 33 goals as a junior at Glacier High needed some context.

"Scoring 33 goals in a season here isn't the same as scoring 33 goals in California, where that goalkeeper is playing for Legends and is going to play at Cal," says Citowicki, who likes to see those players under the brighter spotlight of regional and ECNL play but loves nothing more than to get them to a Montana camp, where he can best evaluate both player and person in equal measure, close up and personal.

It's the Skyleigh Thompson story, the Eliza Bentler story, players from Montana who convinced the coach in person that he needed them on his roster. Brisendine, too, showed up and showed out. She came, she saw, she conquered, not her doubts but any Citowicki may have been harboring.

"She came to this setting and just performed extremely well. Kudos to the coaching community in the state," said Citowicki. "There seem to be more and more Montana kids coming through now who are just smarter soccer players tactically, who know where they are supposed to be and are confident in their abilities. That's exactly what Reagan is."

Family has been the heart of this story since the opening paragraph, when Rob and Tricia were on the sideline when Reagan was in fourth grade. How could she break that bond now? She had interest from all over, but playing two hours down the road from her home, in the state where her sister competes, nothing was going to top that.

"I've always had my heart set on Montana. I've always wanted to be close to home. I love my family and want them to be able to come to my games and support me," she says. "I thought that was really important. When I visited, it felt like a family. That's what I was looking for, a family away from my actual family."

The offer came over a Zoom call, coaches in their online picture window, family in theirs, screens separated by 115 miles but everyone feeling like one. Reagan, we'd like you to be a Grizzly. And all those years, from fourth grade to that moment, condensed into emotion, a journey reaching a destination that had been foretold so many years before.

"What an incredible moment for us and for our family," Rob says, "and for her siblings to be able to watch her in an environment at the University of Montana that's so special and that we always wanted to be a part of. We're so thankful and feel so blessed she has this opportunity to be there. She wanted to play at the University of Montana since fourth grade."

If that feels like the fulfillment of the story, Citowicki suggests Brisendine's tale is just getting started, much like Skyleigh Thompson's was back in 2021, when she arrived from Kalispell with much the same background, a player who worked her way onto Citowicki's team, an unheralded recruit with only empty pages in front of her to be filled in, not a full backstory with Montana simply the next chapter.

What was to come would be the real story.

For two years, Thompson was known for her speed but her soccer didn't earn her any recognition from the Big Sky. Last year, as a junior, it all came together, her pace of play, her relentlessness and her game combining to earn first-team All-Big Sky and Offensive MVP honors, not to mention first-team All-West Region honors by the United Soccer Coaches.

It's why Citowicki calls Thompson's journey a miracle. "Out-of-nowhere stories don't happen much anymore," he says. "But for Montana kids, their stories are written on the back end, not like players who come in with well-developed soccer stories."

Brisendine's, too, is just in its early stages, transitioning from what she's done to where she's going. All we can do is sit back and watch and enjoy it as it unfolds, as it gets written down, the words of her own story already underway, the freshman seeing time in all three of Montana's early matches.

"There was a point in one game when she slowed down, hit the brakes, turned around, changed the point. It was just beautiful. She feels the game in a way that it should be felt," says Citowicki. "She can swim at this level. She definitely can athletically and definitely can as a soccer player."

One Montana coach now seeing what another did years ago, family at the core of it then, family at the heart of it forever.

University of Montana Athletics

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