The Craig Hall Chronicles :: Caylee Kerr

What can a fitness test, that August scourge of soccer players everywhere, tell us about the girl, the one going into her freshman year at Gonzaga Prep, the one who decided four-year varsity player on one of Washington's top high school programs wasn't good enough, that she would be a four-year starter?

Really? At 5-foot-3 and no longer growing? And going up against players one year, two years, three years older than she was, all of them chasing the same coveted spots on the varsity team? Really?

Turns out it can tell us everything we need to know if we're willing to connect the dots, to go deep enough into her story to realize that she's no outlier, not in this family, the one that takes your definition of hard work and makes it seven days a week, sun-up to sun-down.

That's how often Italian Kitchen in Spokane is open for business, every day of the week that ends in y, and that does not include the frequent catering jobs that fill the daylight hours while the restaurant owns the evening, their days, Bryce and Lyndsay Kerr's, focused and dedicated. And exhausting.

They don't employ a bevy of shift supervisors or managers. They fill those roles. They don't hire out to keep the restaurant clean. They do that, going in every morning for more than two decades, grease applied to elbows, knowing it's being done the way they want it done. In other words, the right way.

Did we mention it's been listed as one of the top 15 Italian restaurants in the entire nation, this spot of theirs in downtown Spokane?

"When you own a restaurant, it's part of your life," says Brian Holsinger, who knows something about a profession doubling as a life's calling, coaching women's basketball at the Division I level for nearly two decades, now entering his fourth season at Montana.

Lyndsay? That's his sister-in-law, so he knows intimately what the Kerrs have invested, what they're still investing, remaining hands-on all these years later to be the best of the best. "That's the kind of people they are. That's why they're successful. Caylee has seen that," he adds.

Ah, Caylee, that's why we're here, this freshman, now at Montana, who did, indeed, become a four-year varsity starter at Gonzaga Prep. She was born with it, too, that same drive and work ethic but she also absorbed it on a daily basis, just from seeing it up close, living in the household she did.

Her takeaway? "Great things don't come easily. Not only did I watch that, they also told me that," she says.

So, what can we learn from a fitness test?

We know Caylee reached out to Holsinger's wife, Stacey, when he was coaching at Oregon State, and what better resource than someone who played the sport at Gonzaga, then later became a National Christian College Athletic Association All-American as a senior at The Master's College?

Who took on the Cooper test – that medieval challenge, 12 minutes on the clock, run as far as you can – and became the only player on her Gonzaga team to race past the two-mile mark? Who passed on to her niece a workout plan that someone on the Beaver strength training staff created specifically for her?

She'd been working at the restaurant since the age of 7, Caylee had, bringing more bread upon request, filling glasses of water, winning over the clientele like you can imagine until her pockets were stuffed full of tips, but this was something completely different. That was work. This was passion and purpose.

This was her Kerr-ness coming to fruition in the way she would attack her preparation for the fitness test. Establish a goal, create a plan, go get it.

Sports had always come so easily to her, as a soccer player, as a point guard on the basketball court, throwing a football better than the boys, the benefit of following her dad around the field as he coached Cayden's teams, Caylee toting her dad's whistle around her neck at her brother's practices.

Her other brother, Connor, was a wrestler. "She was always trying to keep up with her brothers," Lyndsay says. "She was determined. It went all the way to wearing their hand-me-down clothes. She wanted to be just like them."

It wasn't always like that for this natural athlete, soccer going over with her early on about as well as a fly on the food at an upscale restaurant.

"When she was little, she hated new things," says her dad. "She hated the first day of school when she didn't know everybody. When she doesn't know exactly what is going on or have control of the situation, that really stresses her out."

And what's more unpredictable than a bunch of 5-year-olds playing soccer? "Putting her out there for the first time, she became very unsure and tentative. We thought, okay, this is not for her. We have to figure out what else we can do with her."

But Lyndsay had been a soccer player, a Division I talent, and she wasn't ready to give up so quickly. She decided to become Caylee's coach, to see if that would help. It did. "Things just turned," says Bryce. "And once she starts to like something, she is all in. She became a machine when it came to training."

That fitness test came after the arrival of COVID, that scourge of restaurant owners everywhere, especially in Washington, where the draconian measures were handed down swiftly. And what, you thought the Kerrs were going to sit back and twiddle their thumbs? This is a family of action.

Lyndsay's mom? She's in her 70s and still working as a dental hygienist. Bryce? He set out on his own at an early age, putting his future in his own hands and his hands only, working from the age of 14, putting himself through college, driven to work, driven to succeed.

He was working as the manager at Spencer's, a steakhouse in Spokane and housed in the same building as Italian Kitchen when he and Lyndsay took it over 21 years ago. They kept the name, changed the menu and made it their own, made it great, made it award-winning.

"We put everything we had into it. It was do or die and I was not going to let my family down," Bryce says. "We just refused to fail."

Hard work won the day, every day, year after year, until mid-March 2020 arrived and forced them to pivot. When the state shut restaurants down, the Kerrs, now five generations deep in Spokane on her side, four on his, adapted that very day. "We made our own luck, and our kids saw that," says Bryce.

They did everything they could to survive – the base goal in this case – taking what they were allowed to do and coming up with a plan, then executing it. They kept every light off but those that were absolutely essential, kept the heat off when they could to cut every cost.

If only a few people could work, it would be Bryce and Lyndsay, 18 hours a day, seven days a week, turning an upscale restaurant into curbside pickup, meeting people where they were in their own lives, offering family pans of pasta at a great value. Just stop by.

And Spokane, their home, responded, helped them come out the other side intact. "We joke that our kids were raising themselves for those couple of years when we were just hanging on by our fingernails," says Lyndsay. "But COVID was not going to take us down."

And Caylee was going to be intimidated by a fitness test, the thing she needed to pass as a first step before she could even think about making varsity as a freshman? Establish a goal (varsity!). Make a plan (thanks Stacey!). Execute it.

The Kerr way. She just had to internalize if for the first time, make it her own, separate from her parents, and see the result, what they'd learned long ago.

"If I had to pinpoint something (for my drive), training for that fitness test was it," she says. "Once I made varsity, I realized you get what you work for. That was the first time I had to fight for a starting spot. I think that was very good for me. It pushed me."

Spokane is not Seattle when it comes to a girl now holding dreams of playing collegiate soccer, with its ECNL clubs and high-level coaching and high-level competition, players improving just by showing up to the requisite practices.

She had to be more intentional, like practicing with the boys on the Spokane Sounders, her home club for as far back as she can remember. "I think that was equal if not more competitive than ECNL girls," she says.

She would go to the field five minutes from the family home, by herself, with one parent, with two parents, one hour, two hours, whatever she felt it took that day.

"I had to find extra ways to train at a high level and keep getting better," she says.

"I had to make do with what I had and take advantage of the times we'd travel for showcases and tournaments, when there would be (college) coaches there. I knew ID camps were going to be huge as well, anything to stand out and get as many looks as the girls from the west side (of the state)."

And there was Gonzaga Prep, with which she won four Greater Spokane League titles and placed fourth at the Class 4A state tournament as a senior after making the quarterfinals as a junior. She was first-team all-state as a senior after leading the state in assists and finishing fourth in points.

"I enjoyed high school soccer almost better than club," she says, putting her in the tiny minority of Montana soccer players, many of whom did not even play for their schools, instead going all in on the club experience.

"I think the level was higher, which is rare, and more competitive and more intense and more serious. I loved it."

All of it was enough, all of it brought out her best. Bryce adds, "Same story as all the girls (at Montana), she was excelling where she was. She never felt like she was behind or the need to do more. We were already doing a lot, all over the country for eight years."

They had the restaurant, "but we were always there for everything. My wife would drive to Oregon, eight hours, Caylee would play a soccer game, then she'd turn around and drive back. She's the real rock star here."

Holsinger was hired by Montana in April 2021, at the back end of Kerr's freshman year at Gonzaga Prep. While that would one day play a small role in her becoming a Grizzly, it hardly registered at the time.

"Montana wasn't even on my radar when he was hired. Nothing in my mind changed, because he's always been a college coach," she says. "That was just how I grew up. My uncle coaches these girls."

Nah, she had bigger things in mind. Well, different things. And this Spokane girl had her eyes set on two outcomes, call them 1A and 1B: the sun and the ocean. The school and the soccer program? Mostly secondary to the location. Southern Cal, here I come!

"She was young and that sounds fun, but then we had a lot of serious conversations. It's not necessarily the environment, the ocean and the sun, it's more about the quality of the people you're around," says Bryce.

Did we mention that Bryce's cousins, Scott and Shawn Poole, were offensive linemen at Montana who protected quarterback Marty Mornhinweg back in the early 80s and that Bryce was able to make the trip from Spokane on occasion, to experience what a college town felt like in the fall?

Hey, Caylee, what would you think about going to an ID camp in Missoula? "My dad brought up the idea, said Missoula is awesome," says Caylee. "Okay, I'll check it out. When I came, I had no idea Missoula was like this. I loved it."

It had sun but not the beach, not the ocean. Didn't matter. Her dad's counsel had done its job. Focus on substance, not the superficial.

"When she went to Montana and the ID camp and her recruiting visit, everything changed," says Bryce. "She saw an incredible coaching staff that cares about its players. It's so much more than soccer.

"Yes, she is super competitive. She wants to get to the NCAA tournament, she wants to do everything they have in mind. They are such quality people that that was more important."

Holsinger, knowing well how these things go, kept his distance, not from the family but from the process. Unless he was asked.

"I obviously think Chris does a great job and I really like his staff," says Holsinger. "It's a really good team, they have proven to be a championship-worthy team in our league, he has a bunch of coaches who have a similar philosophy to what I have in a lot of ways. I could give her that perspective."

Then it got deeper. What was she looking for? A really good team? The type of team where she was going to get major minutes from her first game as a freshman? Something close to home, far away? What did she want out of her college experience?

"She's really smart and worked through the process in a good way," adds Holsinger. "I just tried to give her good perspective. College athletics is hard no matter where you're from or where you go. I tried to give her a realistic view. She made all these decisions on her own. I think she made a good one."

When she talks about recruiting, Kerr describes it first as a ticking clock that is slowly counting down to zero. A player has to weigh time against opportunities and if you allow the former to pass too long, what happens to the latter?

And then she compares it to dating. "It has to be so mutual. You have to have a strong connection with the coach and the university, have continuous conversations. You have to both be pursuing it 50-50," she says.

She was told that she couldn't predict what would happen, what place would be the right landing spot, but she'd know it 100 percent when she found it. And she'd found it.

"I had been in contact with Chris on the phone. Right off the bat from that first phone call, I knew this was a very genuine human being," says Kerr.

"When I met all the coaches in person, it was obvious they are great people who genuinely care about their players. On my list of priorities, the type of coaches a program had was so important. That was what set Montana apart."

If this was dating, she was head over heels. Her mind was made up, but she had yet to receive an offer. If the Griz soccer program was The Bachelor, she was left wondering if she'd be presented with a rose. "If I didn't get offered, it wasn't meant to be, and that's okay," she says.

She was offered and she committed. You wonder if the phone had even been set down before she began working things through in her mind. This wasn't a fitness test to prepare for. This was Division I soccer. Her response proved her Kerr-ness once again.

"It was incredible how possessed she became with getting ready and getting in shape," says Bryce, who, given his own penchant for hard work, knows a high standard when he sees one.

"She took it to a whole new level. She'd get up at 5 a.m. and work out, go to school, then soccer practice, then to club soccer practice. She did that every single day without fail. When you say she's a hard worker, that's an understatement."

She was so in, so onboard, that she didn't even take her last two recruiting trips, to Lipscomb and to Boise State. "That program with that coaching staff with that community, there is nothing like it," says Bryce. "What a great opportunity."

It's been an adjustment. Her varsity team at Gonzaga Prep had 17 players, meaning nearly twice as many were on the field as on the sideline. At Montana, there are 11 playing while 20 are on the sideline.

But almost all of them love soccer as much as she does and some of them even share her need for more, more training time, more shots, more touches of the ball, more time on the field.

"The shift of the players I'm surrounded by," she answers when asked about the most pleasant surprise since arriving at Montana in July. "Everyone loves the game of soccer and is excited to be here.

"If I want to do extra work after practice and say, hey, anyone want to go shoot? It's not silence. That's what I was used to at my club team. There wasn't a lot of desire to do anything extra." And that's a mindset that's anathema to a Kerr.

So is not playing, which she is not doing this season, redshirting with an eye on the future. She remembers thinking when she was a senior at Gonzaga Prep, how fun would it be to have one more year? And that she would have traded one year on the front end for one on the back.

Now she'll get it.

"Her issue is she has players ahead of her who are extremely talented, so it would be hard for her to get in the mix right now," says Montana coach Chris Citowicki. "The game IQ is there, the weight of distribution, her willingness to want to shoot at the right times. Her future is bright."

Still, it took her a while to come to the decision that redshirting was the right path forward. It's a tough decision to make for any competitor. She talked to her parents, to Holsinger, mulled it over, decided it was the right move.

"It's easy to have that conversation with her because her mindset is so professional," says Citowicki. "You can coach her the way you want to coach her because you trust she is going to take the feedback as what it is."

She told Citowicki, yes, she'd redshirt, then followed that up with exactly what you'd expect. "She flat-out tells me, I'll redshirt, but I want to train as if I want to be a starter every single day," says Citowicki, who probably still has the goosebumps from that moment.

Like father like daughter. You can change the situation but you aren't going to change the person. "I'm my dad's little girl," Caylee says.

She's got the tattoo to prove it, inside her left forearm. Love Him. He has one as well. Love Her. It's what they've been saying to each other for as long as either of them can remember, their own language that reveals the depth and strength of their relationship.

She brought up the idea first. Yeah, not happening. "When your 17-year-old daughter comes to you and wants to get some ink, that's a hard no," says Bryce.

Then she explained what she had in mind, the matching tattoos. Yep, you guessed it, he melted. "I was all in. You kidding me? It's the coolest thing ever. I would never say no to that. That's the biggest compliment I've ever had and really special."

What can a fitness test tell us about a girl? Just about everything. And what can a pair of tattoos tell us about a father and daughter? The same.

University of Montana Athletics

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