San Jose soccer coaches explain how U.S. defender Girma grew into world’s best

SAN JOSE — The South Bay has a rich history of cultivating women’s soccer talent. Stars such as Brandi Chastain, Aly Wagner, Lorrie Fair and Danielle Slaton sharpened their skills in Santa Clara County before representing the United States on the national team.

Naomi Girma has put herself in that pantheon.

On the cusp of winning an Olympic gold medal in Paris, the 24-year-old San Jose native has wowed on the world stage, standing out among the globe’s elite talents.

The U.S. will play Brazil for the championship on Saturday (8 a.m. Pacific Time).

“It’s just such a joy to be able to watch her, and I can say — without hyperbole — that she is the best center back in the world,” Slaton told the Bay Area News Group on Thursday.

Those traits have been well known for a decade around Silicon Valley where Girma was an otherworldly force on the youth soccer scene at Pioneer High School from 2014-18.

Former Santa Teresa High coach Andrew Levers remembered briefly having the upper hand against Girma’s team during the star’s senior year. His underdog Saints led 2-0 at halftime and just needed to hold onto the lead.

“I said, ‘Let’s stick to what is working, because they’re not doing much, and not much is happening,’” Levers told the Bay Area News Group.

He recalled the 3-2 loss to Pioneer where Girma zipped past defenders at will and made jaw-dropping passes: “She took over the game in the second half. Absolutely dominated us.”

Before becoming a starter in a World Cup and NCAA champion, Girma, the daughter of Ethiopian immigrants, was just a kid having fun playing for San Jose’s Maleda Soccer Club.

The organization, partially founded by her father, Girma Aweke, was created to give kids in the South Bay’s Ethiopian community a way to enjoy soccer and gave Girma her first chance to play without pressure.

“Once I got introduced to (the higher levels), I had that background of just playing with joy and freedom, and I think that really helped me do that in the bigger moments,” Girma recently told USA Today.

As a preteen, she moved on to another club team. Longtime South Bay soccer guru Bob Boyle, a coach since 1975, bucked the traditional strategy of having his best player line up in the midfield.

Girma’s elite defensive skills emerged as a matter of necessity.

“We were on our heels a lot against superior teams, so we needed our best player in the back as a central defender,” Boyle told this news organization.

By the time Girma reached her teenage years, her sky-high potential was obvious. Some of her peers eschewed prep sports to focus on club competition.

Not Girma. She joined Pioneer’s soccer team and was named a league MVP as a freshman in 2015, staying on the public school roster all four years.

“There are clubs and coaches that don’t allow their players to play high school soccer, and I’m not saying that’s wrong or bad,” Boyle said. “But there is something nice about playing high school soccer on a social level.”

Longtime Pioneer athletic director Joe Berticevich has known Girma for years, having coached her older brother Nathaniel on the school’s basketball team. Berticevich’s daughter Jami was high school teammates with Girma for a few seasons, and the pair remain friends.

“She’s just so down to earth and someone who doesn’t think too much of what she does,” Joe Berticevich said in a phone interview. “We’re her biggest fans.”

After four years of balancing high school, club and national team commitments along with her schoolwork, Girma joined a powerhouse Stanford team and immediately started as a freshman on the 2019 national championship squad.

She became best friends with goalkeeper Katie Meyer, a fellow champion who died by suicide in 2022. Girma advocated for mental health initiatives since then and dedicated the 2023 World Cup to Meyer.

“When you lose a true friend, the hardest part isn’t the big moments,” Girma wrote in The Players Tribune in 2023. “It’s actually the small ones. It’s the everyday, boring moments in life that they made so fun, and so funny, and so meaningful.”

A few months before Meyer died, Girma had been selected No. 1 overall by the San Diego Wave FC in the National Women’s Soccer League draft.

She left Stanford as a three-time team captain, two-time Pac-12 defensive player of the year and the 2021 Pac-12 scholar-athlete of the year.

Girma has excelled at the club level for San Diego and become a face of the U.S. national team.

She was named U.S. Soccer’s 2023 female player of the year due in large part to her stellar work on the back line even as the Americans were knocked out in the round of 16.

That U.S. team was playing with a roster transitioning to a younger group. Now the young core is in place, with Girma as the key defender and fellow Cardinal Sophia Smith part of a three-pronged attack with Mallory Swanson and Trinity Rodman.

Girma’s skillset as a playmaking center back is breaking the mold of what is expected from a traditionally defensive position.

J.T. Hanley is the girls soccer coach at Archbishop Mitty High in San Jose and has been involved in the game for decades. He struggled to find a historical comparison for Girma, who completed 95 percent of her passes and created two scoring chances in the Americans’ 1-0 semifinal win over Germany on Tuesday.

“The way she plays is really unlike any of her predecessors,” Hanley told this news organization. “She wants the ball, and when she has it, you can see she flips a switch when she wins the ball back. She is looking to go forward and create opportunities.”

Girma is obviously no slouch while defending, either. The San Jose native is the lynchpin of a defense that has allowed just two goals in five Olympic matches.

“No one can get past her. She’s the glue to our team,” Smith told ESPN.

Girma will have to put in one more great shift during the Olympics to earn a gold medal.

She will likely match up with Brazilian legend Marta, perhaps the greatest women’s soccer player of all time, who is seeking her first Olympic gold before retiring from international play.

As the 38-year-old’s career is winding to a close, Girma’s is just beginning, and she may have a claim to a similar mantle when she’s done.

“She’s the best defender I’ve ever seen,” U.S. coach Emma Hayes said of Girma after the semifinal win.