Capital’s Caroline Penner is All-Area girls soccer player of the year

Caroline Penner gets rave reviews.

In any “GOAT” debate as to the best-ever scorer in Thurston County high school soccer, the Capital senior is at the center of the conversation.

“She’s the best player I’ve seen in a long time,” said Yelm coach Jay Dorhauer. “She has the ability to take a game over single-handedly.”

Black Hills’ coach Ty Johnson seconds Dorhauer’s assessment.

“She’s the most dominating player in the area in years,” he said.

Penner’s own coach, Adriana Montes, just finished her tenth season at Capital and hasn’t seen a player like Penner, who is both The News Tribune and The Olympian’s fall 2021 All-Area girls soccer player of the year.

“She’s a beast,” said Montes. “She inserts herself into dangerous situations and puts goals in the back of the net. Her vision of the game is beyond her years.”

Yet there will always be a touch of “if only” surrounding Penner’s career with the Cougars. Though she tallied 101 goals over her four years, the total might have been a ridiculously high video-game number if not for a series of injuries.

Penner brought a hip flexor suffered during camp at Seattle University, where she has since signed, into her freshman year. She missed the season’s first half, then promptly scored 21 goals the rest of the way to become the second-leading scorer in the 3A SSC.

“That’s crazy,” said Montes. “You don’t see players come in and do that.”

Penner remembers being eager to get going.

“Soccer has always been kind of my identity,” she said. “I wanted to come into high school, play with my friends, enjoy the experience and show people I loved the sport and was pretty decent at it, but I was injured.”

When she finally ran onto the pitch, she was more than decent.

“I was so excited to play and have an impact. I wanted to give our school the best chance to win so it was really fun.”

Montes says a team focus has always been a part of Penner’s mentality.

“Caroline’s so humble. She’s not doing it all for herself,” Montes said. “She’ll do anything to make sure the team progresses and moves up. That’s rare, especially for the caliber of athlete she is.”

Injuries continued to test Penner’s typically upbeat personality. During the coronavirus pandemic-shortened spring 2021 season, she played in just four games before she hyperextended a knee. This season, as she scored 34 goals to help propel the Cougars into their first state tournament since the 2010 team reached the quarterfinals, favoring the knee may have caused a nagging hamstring injury. She switched positions to avoid needing to sprint.

“It was difficult to deal with,” Penner said. “My coach was great about just getting me into the game and keeping me as healthy as possible.”

Montes believes Penner’s eagerness to throw herself into the fray at any cost made her an impatient patient during the recovery process.

“She’s definitely learned,” Montes said. “When a player loves the game as much as Caroline does, it’s hard to wait to step on the field again. As the years have gone by, she’s understood how important it is for her to be healthy.”

When the Cougars’ season ended with a first round 3A state loss at Bellevue, Penner turned her focus to preparing to play for Seattle U, with “injury prevention” one of her points of emphasis.

The Redhawks will be thrilled to have her on the field and not in the trainer’s room.

“Caroline is a very special player,” said Seattle U coach Julie Woodward. “She’s extremely technical, smart, very athletic and one of the most competitive young women I have met.

“I have a very strong feeling she will impact our program and contribute immediately.”

Penner, who is good friends with the Redhawks’ Hallie Bergford, the former Tumwater star who added the Western Athletic Conference freshman of the year award to the Olympian All-Area player of the year honor she snagged in 2019, is working to make an early starting role possible.

“I’m working on my shots from outside the box, bending the ball, using both the inside and outside of my foot, so any chance I get in a game I can put it away with any surface of my foot,” she said. “I think I’ll have an attacking role, either from the center mid or up top. I want to work well with the top players.”

Penner’s attention to technical detail adds to intangibles Montes says she hasn’t seen below the professional level, a gift she compares to Paris St. Germain and former Barcelona star Lionel Messi.

“They say Messi can go out and walk around the field for five minutes and figure out everything the other team is trying to do,” Montes said earlier this season. “Caroline’s like that. She knows exactly where the danger is going to come from and where to place herself to put balls into the back of the net.”

As a team-oriented player with rare individual gifts, Penner will take away some results-oriented memories from her years at Capital, such as a two-goal performance against a famously stingy Gig Harbor defense.

But she’s also the daughter of two former University of Washington players, the little sister of two college athletes and the cousin of several athletes at rival Olympia. It’s no surprise one of her most memorable moments involved a family connection.

Penner’s older brother Chris, now a basketball player at Seattle Pacific University, wore jersey No. 3. He would sometimes hear a chant of “CP3! CP3! CP3!” during games. One night her sophomore season, Caroline, who also wears No. 3, heard the chant directed her way.

“I always thought about that being for my brother. When my fellow classmates did that for me, it was amazing,” she said.