Two seasons of soccer in college. Three seasons of soccer, two of tennis and one of basketball in high school. That doesn’t sound like a bad athletic career. But those are just the years Katie Hodel has been the captain of her teams.

When Hodel, a senior in her second year as co-captain of the women’s soccer team, leads the Crimson onto the field for the final time tomorrow at Columbia, she will do so in every sense of the word.

Breaking Out

Perhaps not surprisingly, Hodel has always stood out as a model for her teammates—even in high school, when word of her talent preceded her arrival at preseason.

“She handled herself with amazing grace and poise and interacted well with all of the upperclassmen,” says Leslie Anderson, who was the varsity coach at Pattonville High School in Maryland Heights, Mo. for each of Hodel’s four seasons there. “In a way, [Hodel] became an inspiration and a leader even as a freshman.

“I wouldn’t have put the pressure on her to be captain as a freshman because that just would have been a little too much, but as a sophomore, it was just a no-brainer because Katie leads by example and she did that from the very minute she set foot on the field.”

Among the Pattonville players, too, it was a forgone conclusion that Hodel would captain the team as a sophomore, according to Katie Sowers, who was a senior and Pattonville’s starting goalkeeper during Hodel’s sophomore year.

Despite the presence of such older players, Hodel excelled as captain.

“One of the things that is particularly difficult at the high school level is it’s very difficult for young women who are just a little past puberty to be leaders without being perceived as being unpleasant,” Anderson says. “On the high school level, because a lot of times these kids aren’t very sophisticated, it’s even harder, but Katie was so unwavering in her attitude.

“No matter what would happen on or off the field, she was always very positive and very hard-working.”

That dedication earned Hodel—whom Anderson calls the best player ever to play at Pattonville—the starting sweeper position for all four years of high school as well as numerous state and conference honors. But things would be different once she got to Cambridge—at least temporarily.

Starting From the Bottom

As a college freshman, Hodel saw limited time, appearing in just nine of Harvard’s games.

Yet by the end of the following year, Hodel had played in every game, earned a starting role, scored her first collegiate goal and been voted captain by her teammates. In the process, she had grown especially close to the class of 2002. Following her election, she sat down to talk with outgoing co-captains Caitlin Costello and Colleen Moore. The conversation still affects Hodel’s approach to leadership today.

“The thing they stressed the most was to just to be yourself because your teammates look at who they want as the captain and elect the person as they are, not the person that they want someone to be,” Hodel says.