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.
Her friends who didn’t play soccer had no way of knowing. And she didn’t tell them.
“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. Her friends outside the team had no idea that she played.”
Everyone knows now.
Since her days at South Side High School in Rockville Centre, L.I., Dunn has ascended, becoming one of the best club midfielders in the world and a stalwart defender for the U.S. Women’s National Team. She was controversially left off the 2015 World Cup squad, but since then she has been a mainstay, helping the U.S. win a second straight World Cup four years later and getting named to the squad again this year.
This time around, Dunn figures to be the starting left back for coach Vlatko Andonovski’s squad. She again has been asked to shift from her natural position and again has done so dutifully. It’s a versatility that was evident from a young age.
“I know she loves her midfield and up top more, but she could play defense as well for us,” said Judi Croutier, Dunn’s high school coach. “She was typically [playing] midfield the most, but she definitely played everywhere.”
South Side’s history of success in girl’s soccer meant that Dunn could not avoid playing high school ball the same way she had in middle school. Recruiting in the sport is mostly done via club teams — that’s how her college coach, North Carolina’s Anson Dorrance, first saw her — and Dunn soon had obligations for the junior national team to juggle. It didn’t stop her from leaving an imprint on her high school program.
As a freshman, Dunn scored a hat trick in the county finals. As a senior, she scored a hat trick in 20 minutes in the state final. The signs of her ultimate potential were everywhere.
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.
“Looking back on it, I have no idea how she did it, but she just made it seem so easy,” Onesto said. “She would still come out with us as a team and go out and do what typical high school kids would do on the weekends. We’d go out on the weekends, she’d be in New Zealand, it’s like, all right, Crystal’s in New Zealand. All right, she’s back.
“When we’re that young, I guess you don’t realize with the time difference and the jet lag and staying on top of schoolwork and everything, and she was just like, ‘All right, yeah I’m here.’ … She made it seem so easy that we were never like, oh my god, she’s so stressed.”
Dorrance spotted Dunn playing forward during a club tournament at Disney World and knew immediately he had to recruit her.
“I just couldn’t believe her ability to beat people off the dribble,” Dorrance said. “She was low to the ground, she had strong thighs and she went through people like they were dead.”
She carried herself unpretentiously every day, never betraying that she was the best player on the field through how she acted.
“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.”
Added Onesto: “She was never a ball hog on the field. You could’ve been the worst player on our roster and if you were open, she was still gonna pass it to you.”
Away from the field, Dunn involved herself in the team’s culture, helping toilet-paper boys’ houses after tryouts and earning a reputation as a voracious dancer that carried into her college career.
“My most consistent image of Crystal is before practice, during practice, after practice, she’s dancing to something,” Dorrance said. “And what she shows me is this extraordinary joy of life.”
Things are more serious now. Dunn comes into the World Cup far removed from those days, having given birth in May 2022 and weathered a November controversy when she told GQ that when she plays at outside back for the USWNT, “I feel like I lose a part of myself.” The consequences of winning or losing at this World Cup will be the chance at history.
Around Long Island, though, the stories still echo, coming back to the fore whenever Dunn gets called up to play at the Olympics or World Cup.
“It’s wild,” Croutier said. “I’m so proud of her. … Her determination and her commitment and I think that she’s still true to herself today. She puts it all in when it’s game time and practice time and then she has some fun when it’s not.”
