On the tail end of her Wednesday lunch break, Emma Edgley was driving back to Century. In the trunk of her car, as always, was her big bag of soccer balls. The Century senior keeps that bundle nearby like it’s her wallet, trekking them around to Bannock County fields or Century’s grass whenever she needs to relieve stress or get an extra practice session in.
It’s a sure bet those balls will follow her on the nine-hour pilgrimage to Yakima Valley College, the NWAC school where Edgley signed to play soccer last Tuesday.
“It was really crazy. I never truly thought that I would be in that position and it would be official,” Edgley said. “It was relieving and exciting all at the same time.”
There was a time after she committed to Yakima that Edgley reconsidered her future and soccer’s place in it. She toggled between going to a two-year school to play her favorite sport or just diving head first into her career and trying for her nursing degree at Idaho State.
She allowed herself a month of reflection to make a decision, which meant a month away from soccer. It felt like too long for the senior.
“I just missed my team, the love I had for it — soccer was always kind of my out in the world,” Edgley said. “It was my way to get away from everything and I really missed having that getaway, that release from the world.”
She missed having the bag of assorted soccer balls stashed in her trunk, always at the ready to be dropped on some field and booted for hours.
“She was one of the hardest-working kids we had last year, so it’s good to see those girls get an opportunity to go on and keep playing if that’s what they want to do — and that’s been her goal since she started in high school,” said Century coach Matt Shutes. “She’s relentless. She wants the ball, she wants to go forward and she wants to score.”
And Edgley rarely had issues poking balls into the back of the net. She was the area’s top scorer as a sophomore, collecting 37 goals with 11 assists. The next season she scored 24 times in 17 games while dishing out a half-dozen assists.
Then came 2020.
Edgley’s high school career, though no fault of her own, looks a bit like an inverted pyramid.. Scoring records and accolades seemed a certain destiny after scoring more than three dozen times as a sophomore. Yet her goals dwindled year-by-year, culminating with a senior season in which she had just a pair of the Diamondbacks’ 14 goals on the season.
There’s a reason for the drop off, though.
“Last year was tough for her because we asked her to spend some in goal,” Shutes said. “I don’t know if that was necessarily what she wanted, but she did it and there were games she played in goal that she did really well, even though she’d rather be scoring goals. She stepped up as a senior and did what we needed her to do.”
Being relentless isn’t always about running through brick walls. Sometimes it’s being willing to hide all your individual talent and scoring capabilities to plug a hole. Or, as Edgley put it, “recognizing the overall good for the team.”
And now her attention reverts back to mastering the art of scoring. The goalie gloves were shed, likely for the final time, in the fall, which allows Edgley to now break out her bag of balls and work on all the intricacies of the striker position in preparation for her arrival in Yakima. She spent the winter in the weight room and indoors fields, working on her composure through the shot process, aiming at small targets to blast.
Shutes has seen that work for years, overseeing the transformation of a raw athlete to a skilled craftsman who can produce an exquisite first touch and dart up the field so swiftly that it’s easy to forget the ball is at her feet.
It’s why last Tuesday’s signing seemed like the checkpoint he knew was always on the horizon for Edgley.
“You watch her sophomore year when she started scoring goals the way she did and you know if she continued to develop, she was going to get opportunities to go play,” Shutes said.