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Woodside High senior Elise Evans and Mountain View’s Allie Montoya have been good friends for many years and there’s one thing they’d like to do before becoming soccer teammates at Stanford University in the fall.
They want their high school teams to play each other and the only way that will happen is if they get matched up in the Central Coast Section Open Division playoffs.
“I hope we get to play each other,” Evans said after a recent match. “It would be fun.”
They’ve played against each other on the club level and were teammates on USA Soccer’s youth national team but getting a chance to represent their schools against each other is at the top of their wish lists.
“We talk about it a lot,” said Montoya, who added the players have known each other since they were about 10 years old.
Montoya and Evans will be joined by Palo Alto resident Jasmine Aikey (home-schooled), Burlingame’s Amalie Pianim and Redwood City resident Freya Spiekerkoetter, all of whom have played together or against each other with the MVLA soccer club.
Montoya, Evans and Aikey all played for the U.S. junior national team. Montoya, Spiekerkoetter, Aikey and Pianim all played on the same club team, coached by Erin Montoya, Allie’s mom.
“It’s pretty crazy that club teams here have been so strong,” Montoya said.
It’s even better when the nationally ranked Cardinal can successfully recruit locally. Head coach Paul Ratcliffe, who is also affiliated with MVLA (but did not coach any of the players he helped recruit), is certainly familiar with the territory. He successfully recruited Sacred Heart Prep grad Tierna Davidson but lost SHP alum Abby Dahlkemper to UCLA.
“I wanted to go to UCLA at first,” Montoya said. “But as I got to know the staff and team at Stanford, it felt like a perfect fit.”
Evans, whose parents both graduated from Stanford (her mom played on Stanford’s 1993 Final Four team with M-A grad Emily Burt, Palo Alto alum Anna Patitucci and St. Francis grad Amanda Tyler), kept her options open despite having grown up around Stanford.
“My parents supported me exploring other places,” said Evans, considered the No. 1 recruit.
Elise’s older sister, Adrienne Evans, who helped Woodside win a CCS Open title in 2016, went to Penn, where she was teammates with SHP grad Mia Shenk and Menlo-Atherton alum JoJo Cotto this past fall.
Stanford has a rich history of recruiting locally and already have St. Francis grads (and twins) Catherine and Sarah Paulson on the roster along with San Mateo grad Andrea Kitahata.
Both Mountain View and Woodside are likely headed for the Open Division, so there’s a chance they could meet along the way.
Montoya and Evans agreed the championship match would be just fine.
