Halftime: Soccer's All-American Tordin Looks Back at First Two Years of Standout Career
1/24/2024
About 15 months before Pietra Tordin became just the second sophomore-or-younger in the past 40 years of Princeton women's soccer to earn All-American honors, she felt fortunate to play 36 minutes.
On August 26, 2022, in the season-opening game at the program's temporary home of Sherrerd Field at the Class of 1952 Stadium, Tordin, who would go on to win Ivy League Rookie of the Year honors, played those 36 minutes off the bench, entering in the 32nd minute for classmate and fellow forward Kelsee Wozniak, starting the second half, and then being relieved by Wozniak in the 68th minute, watching the final 22 minutes of Princeton's 4-2 win standing with teammates on the sideline. The 36 minutes are the only non-zero numbers in Tordin's line in the box score.
“I didn’t expect anything,” Tordin said of her outlook entering her first season with the program. “I hoped to get a few minutes of playing time, honestly. (That) season, I didn’t expect for me to get Rookie of the Year or any of that. I remember telling (head coach) Sean (Driscoll) our first game, I remember I had played, I want to say, maybe 20 minutes, (and) after the game I went up to him and I thanked him because honestly I didn’t even expect to step on the field for a good portion of the season.”
As the Rookie of the Year honor would suggest, she stepped on the field plenty in 2022. By the third game of the season, Tordin made her first start, scoring her first two goals in a 2-1 win over Rhode Island. After starting three of the season's first 10 games, a span that saw her score three more goals, Tordin started six of the last seven, with all of those starts coming in Ivy League games. While winning the Ivy rookie honor, Tordin was the lone freshman on either the first- or second-team All-Ivy, earning second-team honors, and the team-high eight goals made her the first rookie since Tyler Lussi ‘17 did so in 2013 to lead the team in scoring. It wasn't the last time Tordin's and Lussi's names were mentioned together, and if the past two years are any indication, it's far from the last time they'll be mentioned together going forward.
Neither Tordin's gratefulness to play those 36 minutes on that late-August night, nor that Tordin went on to win Ivy Rookie of the Year and become an All-American as a sophomore were a surprise to Sean Driscoll, not after what he saw on video during her recruitment, not after the interactions he had with Tordin and her family during the process.
“The highlight video was unbelievable. What you’re looking for in a highlight video is a lot of goals, consistency in goals, variety in goals, creativity. Her highlight video was just one goal after another and in a variety of ways and creative finishes and showed a lot of confidence on the ball. Then we got some more extended film showing her in games and we saw a lot of the same things. It really happened during the whole COVID time, so we weren’t able to see her a ton in person until after the pandemic. We had been watching her solely on video, which was very unusual for us,” Driscoll said. “She’s a humble superstar. Those are the kinds we prefer, those who have qualities but at the same time tries not to make it about them. She has a great confidence when she plays, but she doesn’t boast about herself. She’s confident, but she’s not arrogant, and there’s a big difference. To be good, and to be at the level that she is, you have to have some confidence.”
It's not that Pietra Tordin's path to soccer was preordained, but that the daughter of Brazilian parents, born and raised in the country that has won twice as many FIFA Women's World Cup titles as any other, who learned Portuguese from her family, Spanish from growing up in South Florida, and English from school, has taken to the sport makes a lot of sense.
“She’s the first player I’ve seen where if you leave a ball in different areas of the field, she has to go find it and just start juggling it,” Driscoll said. “She just loves the game. There are a lot of people that love the game in many different forms, and there’s those that have a real, true passion for it, that can’t live without it, and she would fall into that category, and that is a really unique category.”
The first seven games of Tordin's sophomore year saw her score nine goals and add three assists, getting a point on 12 of the 19 goals Princeton scored during a 5-1-1 start to the season.
After opening with a three-goal, eight-point weekend as Princeton rolled over Monmouth and La Salle a combined 8-0, Tordin became just the sixth player in program history to score four goals in a game and first since Lussi nine years earlier. Princeton needed all of them, defeating Army West Point 4-3.
The first of those four goals saw four Army players surround Tordin in the six-yard box, and Tordin still managed to break free of them, curl around and send a clanger off the far post and in. The second goal saw Tordin take a ball out of the air with her right foot to surprise her Army defender, and before the defender could get turned back around, Tordin used the newfound free space to send a liner in from about 25 yards out. The whole process took four touches: settling the pass from rookie teammate Kayla Wong with her chest, redirecting it with the right leg, settling it, and firing it, all in about four seconds. The third saw senior teammate Lexi Hiltunen find Tordin going forward into the 18 and set Tordin up with just an Army defender and the goalkeeper in between Tordin and a hat trick. The defender could only belatedly stick out her right leg and the goalkeeper dove for a shot that ended up tucked under the crossbar. The history-maker was a free kick from about 23 yards out that sailed untouched over the Army wall and under the crossbar.
Sure, there was the artistry of the goals from Tordin that day. Those speak to the playmaker Tordin is, and Driscoll is certainly among those wowed by that part of Tordin. But there's also the person behind the playmaker.
“When she scored her first goal against Army, she sprinted across the field to give my own daughter a hug on her ninth birthday. It's a moment I will never forget,” Driscoll said. “There’s so much adrenaline there, there’s so much joy there, and I think that the hardest thing to do in this sport is to score a goal. Yes, people celebrate, everyone celebrates differently, but it’s unmistakable how much it means to her.”
After that first goal, Tordin received a quick hug from junior teammate Kate Toomey but had her eyes on the sideline. While running in that direction, Tordin gave a subtle sign for her teammates on the sideline to clear out, and Wong sent Driscoll's daughter Beckett forward for the celebratory hug.
Tordin's second-to-last goal of that run came against then-No. 10-ranked Georgetown, the only goal scored off a Princeton foot in a game Princeton won 3-2 after the first two goals were scored off balls that Princeton crossed in front of the net and Georgetown legs redirected into the goal while trying to break up the pass. Tordin's goal came in the 77th minute after Georgetown scored twice in the first nine minutes of the second half to tie it at 2-2.
Classmate Drew Coomans lofted a ball from the opposite edge of the 18, finding Tordin for a header at the far post as Princeton re-took the lead. It became the third top-10 win for Princeton under Driscoll and the first since Tordin joined the program.
“That one was very fun. I remember running straight into Drew’s arms and just being so happy in that moment,” Tordin said. “At that point, we had basically won it.”
By season's end, Princeton had helped the Ivy League get four bids to the NCAA tournament for the first time in 22 years, and Tordin finished the season leading the Ivy League in shots (82), shots on goal (33), and game-winning goals (seven), while finishing second in the league in goals (12) and points (30) and tied for fifth in assists (six).
The accolades piled up. A unanimous first-team All-Ivy League selection. United Soccer Coaches second-team All-East Region. All-ECAC Division I second team. And, along with senior teammate Madison Curry, Tordin's selection gave Princeton two All-Americans in the same season, now also awarded by United Soccer Coaches, for the first time since 2004, when it was another underclassman-senior pairing in rookie Diana Matheson ‘08 and senior Esmeralda Negron ’05. Matheson is the only other Princeton sophomore-or-younger to earn All-American honors since Princeton had five such honorees from 1980-83.
After scoring those nine goals over the first seven games of the 2023 season, Tordin scored three the rest of the way, including both goals in a 2-0 win at Dartmouth. Mere hours after arriving back to Princeton following the bus ride from New Hampshire, Tordin hopped a plane for a week-and-a-half in the Brazilian city of Teresópolis, north of Rio de Janeiro, to train with Brazil's U-20 team. It would be the first of two call-ups with Brazil before 2023 flipped to 2024, the other being a late-November trip to Spain for games against the U-20 sides of Belgium and France.
The camp in Brazil caused Tordin to miss Princeton's regular-season finale, a 1-0 loss to Columbia, and Tordin arrived back just in time to hop a bus to Brown for the Ivy League Tournament semifinal against Harvard. Two days later, after Harvard rallied past Princeton for a 4-2 win, a span of less than two weeks that saw Tordin busing and planing up and down the east coast of the Americas for the sport of soccer was complete.
The season represented a new stage in Tordin's status within the game. How would she handle being at the top of every opponent's defensive game plan, and how would she balance the demands of a player worthy of simultaneous competition collegiately and internationally?
“What we’re looking for from her, and what we’ve just said to her as well (as we close the season), is the maturation and the continued evolution of someone who embraces the responsibilities that come with being a player who is closely marked and always on the scouting report because that carries a definite burden and a responsibility,” Driscoll said. “She’s received a ton of accolades in a very short period of time, and of course the (international) call-ups and the (U-20 Women’s) World Cup on the horizon, there’s just a lot there, so her ability to manage all that is going to be critical to her evolution and her maturation process.”
The 2024 U-20 Women's World Cup is set to be held in Colombia from August 31 through Sept. 22, a span of time that directly overlaps with Princeton's pre-conference schedule. Whether Tordin competes in that is yet to be seen, and, as Driscoll described, Tordin's own assessment of her chances of playing in the tournament are a mix of humility and honest realization that she is, at the least, worthy of consideration.
“I thought I did pretty well, but I honestly didn’t know if I was going to get called up again or not (for the games in Spain). The day of the broadcast (of the roster for the Spain trip) was the day I found out as well. I was very happy to be called up again,” Tordin said. “Being only my second call-up, most of the girls that were there, they have been called up since U-17, U-15 even.”
It was, of course, a learning experience for Tordin, even at this stage of her soccer career.
“The style was very different. I think the biggest difference was the technical ability that everybody had,” Tordin said. “Everybody was just so technical and they just played the game a different way than over here because of their technical ability. They were able to get out of pressure, tighter spaces, they were just able to get out of the pressure easier, quicker.”
Tordin soon had another nation interested in her talents, with U.S. Soccer extending her an invite to be one of 24 players to attend a U-20 training camp in California in January as Team USA continues its own preparations for the U-20 Women's World Cup.
Two seasons into her time with Princeton, the halfway point gives the occasion to look at what Tordin has already accomplished and what might be ahead, statistically and otherwise.
Tordin's 20 goals through two seasons makes her just the fifth player in program history to reach 20 by the end of her sophomore season. Of the other four, three are among the only four players in program history with 40 career goals, and two of those played for Driscoll, in record-holder Lussi (28 after two years, 53 total) and Mimi Asom ‘19 (21 after two years, 43 total). Negron, who finished with 47 goals, saw her totals take off in the second half of her career after scoring 14 goals by the end of her sophomore season. The other two to score 20 by the end of sophomore year were Linda DeBoer ’86 (24 after two years, 41 total), whose career record Negron broke in 2004, and Sue Mooney '85 (23 after two years), whose career was cut short after just two seasons due to injury.
Only five players in program history have won multiple All-American honors, in Lussi, Negron, DeBoer and Kelly O'Dell ‘84, who each won two, and Lynette Prescott ’85, the lone player in program history to win three. Tordin has the chance to join both the two-time winner group and tie Prescott.
The individual records and honors are fair to assess for a player like Tordin, but the team success, and the intangibles that help lead to it, also come with the expectations for a player at that level.
“I think the next phase for her is to become a leader and help our underclassmen through their first phases. I think any first-year student goes through some ups and downs, sophomores as well,” Driscoll said. “I think she welcomes that responsibility. I’m looking forward to seeing how grows in the next year. She leads by example, and with passion. When she scores goals, you can see what it means. I don’t think people celebrate goals enough, and when she scores, she just erupts. It’s a visual depiction of just how difficult this sport can be. I love to see her celebrate in the manner she does.”
Despite the talent and how visible her passion for the game is when watching her play, Tordin is far from the loudest voice on the team. There are different ways to lead, and when Tordin assesses her adaptability to the role of upperclassman and leader, the thoughtfulness is apparent.
“I’m honestly very shy and quiet when it comes to leadership roles, but I can see myself coming out of my shell with this team in specific just because I’ve gotten to know them so well and they’re my best friends,” Tordin said. “I feel like if I have a word of advice that I could give to my friends, I would, and I should apply that to soccer as well.”
One of the many firsts for Tordin in the fall of 2023 was a trip to the NCAA tournament. As the team ended up doing in 2023, the year before Tordin arrived, in 2021, Princeton hosted a first-round game, turning in a shutout in front of a crowd ready to see one, and then battled a Big 12 opponent from Texas to the finish in the second round. In 2021, it was a double-overtime heartbreak against TCU. In 2023, it was a dual shutout against Texas Tech that went the distance before penalty kicks decided it for the Red Raiders, 4-3.
Advancing beyond the first round wouldn't have been new for the program, which has made the national quarterfinals three times, most recently in 2017, and the national semis once, in 2004, but it would have been new for any of the current players. Tordin still has the chance to help lead Princeton there.
“I think we definitely have the opportunity to get back there next season. We are losing some big players, but I think if we keep the team spirit up and we keep fighting like we always do, next season we could get there,” Tordin said. “I think being so close to passing into the next round is really going to drive us forward next season, because we don’t want to feel that again, especially in a PK shootout, which is just honestly sometimes up to luck at that point.”
Then, there is what is beyond Princeton. Tordin, who is planning to major in economics, could join a line of Tiger alumnae to play professionally, with Lussi among the most recent of that group, having just wrapped her seventh season in the NWSL and first with the North Carolina Courage. Curry was selected by Angel City FC in January's 2024 NWSL Draft.
“There are so many great players who have played that I’ve had a chance to coach, so many players who played at Princeton and had qualities to go play at that level, but then maybe not the drive, maybe not the incredible desire to continue that and wanting to get into different aspects of the business world,” Driscoll said. “With Pietra, it’s much like we’ve seen with Tyler (Lussi), they have this unabated passion to play the sport, and I see it with Madi (Curry) as well. You can sense it. When you see it, you know it, it’s just part of their DNA.”
