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Katie Brawley, Much More Than CSUEB’s Midfielder

By Kathleen Devine
Contributor

Photographer: Kevin Hill

The powerful midfielder moving the ball
durng a game against Cal Poly Pomona
last season.

This past season CSU East Bay junior Katie Brawley started 14 of the 14 games she played for the Pioneer women’s soccer team.

The midfielder tied for seventh on the team in shot attempts with 10 and even scored a game winning goal for the Pioneers in her second season and was one of seven women on the team last season to start every game she played for the team.

The 19-year-old Brawley born and raised in La Mesa, Calif., 10 miles away from San Diego, adds to an eclectic and interesting group of student-athletes at CSUEB, each with different stories and pasts that contribute to a growing and diverse student body.

“I absolutely loved being raised there,” she explained. “Everything was so close to me.”

Growing up, Brawley was the younger of two children, her older sister, Virginia, was three years her senior.

It is Virginia to whom Brawley credits as a large influence in her life as well as in her soccer career.

“We used to fight constantly, but as I started to grow up she always made me push myself to do better,” Brawley said when commenting on the relationship she has with her sister. “To this day our relationship has really grown and I look up to her.”

Aside from her sister, Brawley enjoyed life with her family who she described as “too crazy for me to handle sometimes.”

Brawley’s soccer career started when she was five, and once she played she simply “fell in love with it.”

She didn’t start playing soccer competitively until she was 12 years old and from there her career truly began to take off.

Brawley attended Helix Charter High School where she was a three-year letter winner.

During her senior season she was an all-league player and helped lead her team to the California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) quarterfinals as the captain.

Aside from being a good player, Brawley also excelled in the classroom where she was an all-academic student and even won Helix Scholar-Athlete of the Year her senior year.

Brawley considers herself a person with a very outgoing personality and even wears a purple stripe in her hair.

She has love for all genres of music though she says her favorite song to listen to before a game is a track by Don Omar titled “Dutty Love.”

She decided to attend CSUEB because she instantly fell in love with the Bay Area and always wanted to play soccer in Northern California.

She has declared her major as criminal justice with an emphasis in law enforcement and administration. Although she is not sure what she is going to do with it, she has some ideas.

“I think something that would be really interesting though is undercover work or investigation,” she said. “I just want something that will be thrilling and challenge me.”

Once she uses up her eligibility as a Pioneer, Brawley plans to just move back home.

“My goals for the future are to move back to San Diego and continue my schooling at San Diego State University in their masters program,” she stated when mentioning her future plans. “I will probably join indoor and outdoor adult soccer leagues when I go home, but I don’t plan on going anywhere far with soccer.”

This entry was published in The Pioneer Online on Thursday, August 30th, 2012 at 11:48 am.