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.