St. Louis: Modesty Tempers Success

If you could find a person who had an amazing knack for being in just the right place at just the right time, you'd probably want to have her playing center forward for your soccer team--that is, of course, if you had a soccer team.

Well, Bob Scalise has a team; and much to his delight, he also has a center forward who knows where to be when there's scoring to be done. But if you asked the sophomore from Groton, Conn. why she's such a talented spearhead to the Harvard women's soccer attack, she'd be the last person to give you a good reason.

Sue St. Louis, with a disarming amount of modesty, consistently rationalizes her success with the Harvard team. But her record speaks clearly for her abilities: 17 goals in 1977, the team's leading scorer in her rookie season; 16 goals, so far this year, plus a handful of assists--the component her previous years' record lacked.

"I'm in THE scoring position," St. Louis says, explaining her spot at the head of the diamond-shaped attack leaves her in front of the goal just waiting for loose balls she can sweep up and kick into the net.

But acknowledging her scoring totals with a somewhat timid smile, St. Louis is quick to point out her weakness-- or what she perceives as her weakness.

"I've worked more this year on setting up the plays," she says. "Last year I couldn't do anything more than dribble. I was not a team player. I just couldn't understand how plays moved on the field."

Her teammates, acknowledging that St. Louis keeps the ball and shoots much of the time during the game, are quick to defend their squad's offensive sparkplug. As one player said, "Sue really enjoys taking someone one-on-one. She doesn't look for the easy pass-off."

And with the amount of success St. Louis has promoted on the Ivy League Champion, 12-1, newly powerful women's team, anyone would have a tough time criticizing the speedy attacker's play--especially coach Bob Scalise.

"She amazes me. She's such an exceptional athlete," he says. "She's very gifted and fast. She's determined. She does what is very difficult for a coach to get a player to do. She finishes plays; she scores the goals."

Modesty

But the talented Latin American history major lets the compliments come her way; she is reluctant to praise herself, even a little. She quickly passes over her three-sport high school career at St. Bernard's in Uncasville, Conn., brushing aside the details of a tennis-basketball-track triple that included some fine performances throwing the javelin.

But there is ultimately no escaping the sheer talent that lies behind the Quincy House resident's rise to the top of the women's soccer ranks here.

St. Louis picked up soccer during the spring and summer of her senior year in high school. Her older brother Mike, a 1976 Harvard graduate, needed someone else to play soccer with, so he gave his younger sister the call.

"I'd go down to the park with him and play for an hour every night," she remembers. "If I told him I didn't want to play, he'd call me a 'wuss' or a 'wimp' and drag me out anyway."

But St. Louis knows the value of that work with her brother. Playing one-on-one with him developed the ball-handling skills that have made her Harvard's most reliable and tricky dribbler. But the oldest of three sisters in a family of nine children says that summer, more than anything, made her "fall in love" with soccer.

"I just think it's a beautiful game," she says, then adding the requisite amount of humility, she adds, "You don't have to be very good to play soccer. It's a game that's more suited to my capabilities."

"I like team sports because I like the feeling of being supported. I have the tendency to choke when I feel all the pressure's on me," she says.

Charm and Power

But such modesty merely adds charm to the center of an offensive powerhouse that includes co-captain Julie Brynteson, speedster Ellen Hart and explosive Cat Ferrante. Her humility disarms any jealousy you could have for the player whose scoring potency has made her a media attraction, the Ivy woman athlete of the week in mid-October, and the lucky attacker who'll go down in the record books as having scored both goals in Harvard's historic 2-0 shutout of Brown in the fourth game of the 1978 season.

Yet Sue St. Louis, like any of us, lives not by humility alone. She delights in discussing her little-used but favorite stunt--a hot-dogging, over-the-head bicycle kick that almost gave her a wild goal against Princeton. She also likes the recognition she gets because of her accomplishments.

Status for Sport

"Sometimes I kind of wish I wasn't known as 'Sue St. Louis the soccer player.' It would be nice to be so multi-faceted that I might be called 'Sue St. Louis the great thinker' once in a while--or something like that," she says. "But it's nice to at least have some kind of status."

"I've gotten a great deal of attention, and I do enjoy it. It's a new experience for me," she adds.

The small-town girl who spends summers as a free-lance professional cake decorator ("It's my own private art form") and takes time away from soccer by playing house basketball and then varsity lacrosse, appears to be obsessed with making herself a complete athlete.

Democracy in Action

While marveling at the beauty of soccer, which she labels "THE democratic sport," she simultaneously keeps that gutsy edge which prompts her coach to praise her as a "fierce competitor."

Consistently, she looks to round out her abilities. Haunted by a fear of being labeled a selfish player, she emphasizes her diligent attempts to learn how to master the team concept she seems to regard so highly.

"In the position I play, if I don't score I feel I've failed," she says.

Learning to Pass

But then she adds, "This summer I played with a men's team where most of the men were much better than I was." And that training, she says, was the most helpful, because, "I had to learn to pass."

There's just no way to argue with such a desire to improve.