The Craig Hall Chronicles :: Lydia Robertson

This is a soccer story, one told best through the lens of Horace Greeley, that industrious dreamer, and John Steinbeck, that lover of Montana.

The Greeley angle would explain why she's here, Lydia Robertson, the Grizzlies' 5-foot-2 freshman midfielder from Georgia, who learned early on in life that the vision of her future she held should have no blinders, no limitations.

Go. Do. Live. Work hard and success will follow.

Garrett, her older brother, took that mentality to The College of Wooster in Ohio and never looked back. Ella is doing the same thing at Lawrence University in Wisconsin.

"One of the things we wanted to instill in our kids was taking risks, getting out of your comfort zone, especially when you're young and taking on some challenges and experiencing new things," says their father, Scott. "Now is the time to go do all of that."

That Scott and Alisha are here, in Missoula, well, that's all Steinbeck, a Montana love story. They were geology students at Georgia State all those years ago, sent to Dillon for six weeks of field work and, well, you know how these things go. Montana is for lovers, after all. They've been together ever since.

"I've been trying to move to Montana for 30 years," Scott says. And while he hasn't technically moved full-time, the nature of his job allowed him and Alisha to move to Missoula and rent for the duration of the Grizzly soccer season, Georgia their return destination come November.

"Lydia did not know that story" when she began communicating with the Griz soccer program, Alisha says. "Scott and I were like, Montana? We were excited. It was kind of full circle."

We should probably bring Riley Jackson into the story now as well and start to tell this tale with her in mind, that precocious midfielder who signed with the North Carolina Courage of the NWSL at the age of 17, who made a dozen appearances on the U.S. U17 national team, six more with the U20 squad.

Both Jackson and Robertson grew up in the expansive suburbs north of Atlanta that seem to extend for hours, became classmates as first graders, buds by middle school.

While Robertson was getting what she needed in the Roswell Soccer Club, just down the road from the family home in Milton, Jackson moved on from Roswell to an ECNL club in Atlanta, the Concorde Fire. She was named the ECNL Player of the Year and national Gatorade Player of the Year in 2022.

And COVID. We should probably introduce COVID into the story, because it was shortly before its arrival on the national stage that Lydia convinced her mom to take her to one of Jackson's club matches.

If seeing Jackson on the field that day lit the fire, quarantining because of COVID gave it the oxygen in the form of time. She had all of it she wanted and nowhere to go but out the door to the driveway or to a nearby park, just her and her ball and a dream inspired by Jackson.

"After that, something changed," says Alisha. "Something just flipped in her. She spent hours upon hours in the driveway doing drills."

Jackson, the girl she'd known for so long who had gone and made it big, was the stimulus, the time alone the space she needed to dream. Big, then bigger, then even bigger. "I just realized, I love this and want to play at the next level and push myself and see how far I can go."

It wouldn't have come as a total surprise to anyone in the family. It's only rumor that Lydia sized up the other babies in the nursery after she was born and asked them how long it had taken them to go from start to finish. Okay, who in here had the fastest time? Anyone beat mine?

"She came out of the womb competitive. She was a different toddler than our other two," says Alisha. "Her first sentence was, I do it myself. She was independent and competitive and our only athlete."

They tried her in gymnastics, ballet, dance, but where was the scoreboard in those activities? How could you tell who had won and who had lost, because that's what matters, right? Isn't that why we do these things, Mom?

A family friend suggested soccer. Uh oh. "She's out there at the age of six, boys and girls running around and she scored like four goals. She came off the field and said, 'I think we won.' I had to tell her that nobody was keeping score, that everyone is out here to have fun."

Yeah, but we won, she said again. "That was it. She never took her eyes off of soccer again. We knew that was her thing."

When quarantine was lifted and soccer teams reconvened, everyone stopped, watched and asked the same thing. "Everyone was like, whoa, what happened to Lydia?" says Alisha. "Her game had gone up a notch. She saw that that hard work had paid off.

"That was such a big life lesson for her. You don't walk out in first grade and you're a superstar. You work and you get better. Yes, there is innate talent but working hard is what takes you to the next level."

Like Jackson, she wanted to head south, into the extremely competitive world of Atlanta soccer, home of not one or two or three or four but of five ECNL clubs. The scope of her dreams had changed and she needed the right vehicle to deliver her to them.

"She had been on this wonderful community team her whole life. I was the manager, we loved the coach. You want to leave? Why? She said, 'I want to play in college and I want to play Division I.' It kind of came out of the blue," Alisha says.

At the same time that she was in the early stages of looking for an ECNL home, a coach for United Futbol Academy saw her at a high school game and knew he wanted this player with the sweet footwork, the quick trigger on her shot at UFA.

"It was really good timing," she says. "I was thinking about going and trying out for an ECNL team and I got this message from somebody on my high school team that they were interested. It was crazy. It was like fate."

If COVID and the time she put in working on her skillset and the results that followed taught her anything, it's that hard work almost always leads to something good. So why not apply that to recruiting? Why not start digging in and doing some research instead of leaving it to chance?

At what part of the country did she want to look? What programs out there used their midfielders as an integral part of their team's attacking and defending and didn't treat it like flyover country, kicking the ball forward time after time on the chance one in 20 boots leads to something good?

Who out there preached family over person, team over individual? And, since we've already had some Steinbeck, can we throw in some Rudyard Kipling just for fun? For the strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack. That's all she wanted from a team. Was that asking too much?

"With all that work she did on her own, she learned that if you put in the hard work, you see results," says Scott. "I don't know that we could have taught her that. We saw that in how she approached recruiting. She knew she had to put work in to get the results she wanted."

UFA was everything she wanted, girls, all of them, who had the same goal she did, to play in college. That was the focus, from coaches on down.

And it was different, scary different, at least at the start. On that first day, the car rolled right past the comfort of Roswell and toward Atlanta. And was she good enough? Most of these girls had been playing together for years, now she was trying to break into a well-established U15 team? Who does that?

"I never really doubted her skill and ability," says Scott. "But if you're one of the best players on your city team, when you move up a level you're like, whoa, everybody here is really good. There can be that imposter syndrome. It took her a minute to get her head around the situation."

Even so, this was a new world. "We were aware of it but I don't think we really understood the difference between the leagues. We were shocked by the difference in the level of play."

On the backside, while other girls had their eyes only on the SEC! SEC! SEC! or were casting their nets far and wide, hoping to land anything, anything at all, Robertson had narrowed her focus to a select few schools who she knew had exactly what she was looking for.

Montana was on the list, her heart pulled west like her grandfather's had been decades before, Scott's father a telephone lineman in eastern Canada who maybe had two pennies to rub together from time to time but always had the dream of living in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies.

So when a job opened in Lethbridge, in Alberta, he jumped at it, picturing Banff but getting wide-open Canadian prairie. The family later lived north of Edmonton – more prairie! – before relocating to Georgia when Scott was 15. And no Canadian is ready for that climate shock.

"I was literally on the jetway in August, getting off the plane. I turned to my mother and asked her, what is that? Oh, that's the humidity. I had never experienced humidity like that in my life," Scott says.

He enrolled at Georgia State, eventually getting both his master's degree in geology and Alisha's hand in marriage. She made it one year as an environmental geologist before putting an end to that, moving into personal training until the kids began arriving.

Scott was teaching some classes at Georgia State and running some of the labs in the geology department, which had him learning some basic programming skills. When he asked one of the professors some advice on a career path, that professor said: computers, computers, computers.

Alisha had a personal training client who was looking for someone in that field. Scott's worked for him for 25 years now through several companies, as chief technology officer, a couple they've sold off. He now works for a startup as chief operating officer.

In other words, you never know where the road is going to take you if you're open to anything, but when it came to collegiate soccer, Lydia Robertson didn't want to be THAT open and THAT adventurous.

"We have to give some credit to her. She did not take it lightly," says Alisha. "She liked the idea of a state school, something bigger but not too big. She wanted a cooler climate and a team that plays the way she likes to play, through the midfield. Every box checked off for Montana."

Of course, she could wish and hope all she wanted, but would Montana notice her? Many have interest in the Grizzlies. Few are chosen.

"As she got to learn more about the program, it became like anything you start to want," Scott says. "You become nervous about it."

Her very first ECNL showcase with UFA was in Nashville. Montana coaches J. Landham and Ashley Herndon were there. They saw her, then saw her play again. Landham bumped into her club coach, said how much he liked her game and that Montana was interested.

Her coach texted her the news. OMG x 10. "I remember it very well," she says. "Felt very much like a dream come true. It was very exciting." Her decision to find an ECNL team had paid off in a big way.

"We had developed a relationship with a coach in UFA. That team is very, very good and plays a beautiful style of soccer that is also very hard-hitting and energetic and exciting," says Montana head coach Chris Citowicki. "Everything I want us to be.

"We're always looking for clubs and that one fits us perfectly, so let's get the pipeline rolling." And bring in more Lydia-types. "Her feet are great, her trigger pull when shooting is quicker than most people on our team."

One thing about being an ECNL parent: you hear all the recruiting stories, most of which fall in the horror category. All Scott and Alisha could add to the discourse was, not sure what the big deal is. Seemed pretty simple to us. Shoulder shrug. But they know how lucky they got.

Montana was the one and only visit their daughter had to take.

"Just about every one of her UFA teammates were placed in Division I programs," says Scott. "From following other experiences, the experience with the Montana staff is pretty unique."

"Lydia is a very coachable, humble soccer player," adds Alisha. "She wants her coaches to believe in her and she wants to feel valued. We felt right from the beginning that Chris and J. and Ashley gave her that."

"The draw was the coaching staff. It felt like they create a family," says Lydia. "And obviously they are very successful. It felt like it would be a good fit for me and I'd be taken care of and I'd be able to compete at the highest level."

Scott concludes, "It was almost a too-good-to-be-true type of thing. Why does this seem to feel so easy? Why does this seem to be such a good fit?"

Once she committed and signed her National Letter of Intent, "it was all we could do to not shop for houses every time we would visit," Scott adds. "I've been trying to get back to Montana for 30 years."

You won't see Robertson play this season unless you attend a practice. She's redshirting, caught up in the talent and depth ahead of her. She's got the game to play right now but she can save it, get comfortable, then next fall make her official Grizzly debut with four seasons still to play. Everyone wins.

"I look at it as a very positive thing. You get a chance to get used to the school load and the level of play," she says. "You can adapt to the speed of play without the pressure of, am I going to make the travel squad, am I going to get minutes this game?

"You can just practice without that stress. I think that will be a good thing."

They hardly see her these days, even though they live not just in Missoula but not that far from campus. She might stop by to do laundry or have dinner. Otherwise she is making this experience her own.

"I went to (the University of Georgia) my freshman year. I was home every weekend. I told my kids, that was the biggest mistake I made," says Alisha. "I did not put myself in the environment to really become part of it. I really wanted them to dive into that community of their college environments."

They've done the same. With Scott operating on East Coast time, his work days wrap up at 3 or 3:30. When all is done, he'll grab the dogs and he and Alisha will walk downtown, maybe stop somewhere for dinner, all of it a true Montana love story any way you look at it.

University of Montana Athletics

Players Mentioned

Lydia Robertson

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