The girls who played soccer growing up with Crystal Dunn always thought it was a matter of when, not if.
They would start sentences with clauses like, “Crystal, when you make the national team,” leaving her to brush off the praise. They’d ask who could make it over her, knowing there wasn’t an answer. They could see she was different, and knew she would go places.“She didn’t even play middle school soccer because she didn’t want her non-soccer friends to know,” Mersina Onesto, Dunn’s teammate from a young age through high school, said in a phone interview. “She didn’t want the attention.
As a junior, when Dunn’s national team obligations picked up and she had to travel back and forth from New Zealand throughout the year, it ended up being the only time South Side failed to win the state title during her tenure as she missed the decisive match against Rye. Dorrance spotted Dunn playing forward during a club tournament at Disney World and knew immediately he had to recruit her.
“Day in and day out, she was there,” Croutier said. “She was always the one that when the girls needed a lift up — they have their traditions and their songs and their dancing — she led that as well.”
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