Brookline High's Katherine McElroy: Truly An All-Time Keeper

BROOKLINE, MA — Katherine McElroy said she was overcome with an emotion unlike anything she had ever felt before as the final whistle blew in the Brookline High School girls soccer team’s victory against Westford. The Warriors had just rallied to beat the team that ended their season a year earlier. Her teammates were racing toward her in goal. They were headed to the Division 1 North Sectional championship match for the first time.

"It was a totally different feeling of accomplishment," she said. “I felt like we were blazing a trail. We were making our way through history together. We all started hugging and tackling each other. It was an incredible moment.”

As an All-American keeper who has committed to play for the University of Michigan, McElroy built a career full of incredible moments making impossible stops, drilling powerful free kicks and punts and even racking up goals and points for the Warriors. But what made this moment so special to her was that she was able to share it with her teammates.

"I look back at my time in Brookline schools," said the recent graduate. "I was there 13 years — from kindergarten to 12th grade — and there were so many of my friends I was there with the whole time from when we started, to third grade when we first started playing soccer together on the town teams, to eighth-grade travel team, all the way through high school. It makes you feel like it is a family experience."

While the Brookline program has been on the rise in recent years, this past fall McElroy helped take it to unprecedented heights as the Warriors went 15-2-5 and won the sectional title behind her shutout of Lexington before a loss to Natick in the state semifinals.

Her efforts earned her the Brookline High Coaches’ Award as the school’s top senior female athlete.

"She did so well for us," Brookline coach Robert Sprague said. "Not only on the field in goal, but as a captain for us this year. She is as good of a leader as you can get. Katherine is the perfect teammate.

"She’s tall, strong and agile. She plays really hard and her technique is super clean. As a shot stopper, I don’t think there’s anyone better in the state. Shots everyone thinks are going in — shots that 99 out of 100 times go in in high school soccer — she comes out of nowhere and makes the stop. That’s what makes her so intimidating."

McElroy said it was FC Stars club coach Matt Davison who told her that goalkeeper is the most important position on the field — but only if that goalkeeper has the respect of everyone on the field. Ahieving that was her biggest goal at Brookline High.

"They learned to trust me, and I learned to trust them, and it was fantastic," she said. "That made us so much stronger and emotionally close as a team."

McElroy said it was in seventh grade that she began playing goalkeeper full-time. What began as an impulse due to her idolization of U.S. Women’s keeper Hope Solo became her path to a Division I college soccer career.

"What really sets Katherine apart more than anything else is her ability to play the ball with her feet," Sprague said of the player who moved up out of the box to take free kicks for the Warriors and finished her career with four goals and seven assists. "She will get out and join the defenders. Plus, she has an extremely strong leg. She is hitting the ball 20, 30 yards farther than most goalkeepers. Over the course of the game, that adds to a lot of field position and puts the opponent under so much pressure.

"Her kicks almost defy physics. They explode off her foot and seem to get faster the farther away from her they get. She’ll put it on net from 40, 45 yards and really catch a goalie off guard. It’s the strangest thing."