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Forward Thinking
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Geoffrey Hauschild|The VIndicator.YSU's Allison Ludwig and Howard's Brittany Peebles (24) during the first half a game between YSU and Howard on Friday afternoon.
By JOE SCALZO
YOUNGSTOWN
After leading Centerville High in scoring the past three years, Allison Ludwig heard the same message over and over from her high school and club coaches before she got to college.
“They said, ‘You’re not gonna have the same success scoring-wise in college because you won’t get as many opportunities,’” Ludwig said. “And if you look at the statistics for high school players compared to college players, they were right.”
But there are exceptions.
Ludwig, a true freshman forward for the Youngstown State soccer team, scored three goals in her college debut, a 3-1 win over Robert Morris. She’s added three more over the last four games for the Penguins (2-4), including a game-winner against the University of Missouri-Kansas City on Sunday that snapped a four-game losing streak.
Her 12 points are five more than the rest of the Penguins combined.
When asked if she expected to be this successful in her first season, she laughed and said, “Not at all.”
“I really didn’t think I was even going to start,” she said. “I just went in with a mindset that I needed to work hard and this wasn’t something that was just going to be given to me, that I had to actually work for it.
“I worked really hard in preseason to get my starting spot but I definitely didn’t expect the goals.”
Ludwig grew up in an athletic family — her father, Scott, played football and wrestled in high school — and started out playing soccer, basketball and T-ball.
“I just kind of broke out in soccer,” she said. “It was the only one I was halfway decent at.”
She was a three-year letterwinner and team captain at Centerville, leading the team in scoring all three seasons. She helped lead the Elks to the Division I state semifinals last fall, earning second team all-conference honors.
Meanwhile, she narrowed her college choices to YSU, Eastern Michigan and Central Michigan. The Penguins were coming off a 4-10-3 season in the lesser-known Horizon League, while CMU had won the Mid-American Conference last fall and Eastern Michigan had gone 6-1-4 in the MAC.
Ludwig hit it off well with YSU’s team and was willing to trade a few wins for the chance to play earlier in her career.
“I knew I was gonna have a lot more opportunities here than anywhere else,” she said. “I have a lot of friends that are playing Division I soccer and they haven’t seen the field yet. Either they’re not on the travel team as freshmen or they’re on it but they’re playing five minutes a game.
“Here, I’m playing 90 minutes as a freshman, which I think is really cool and I wouldn’t be able to do anywhere else.”
Part of the reason for that is youth. The Penguins have just one senior and 17 underclassmen out of 23 players on second-year coach Will Lemke’s roster.
“I thought I was gonna be really nervous, because it is a huge step up from high school and what I had been playing,” Ludwig said. “But I really wasn’t that nervous because my team, we’re all pretty comfortable with each other and I wasn’t afraid to make mistakes.”
An education major, Ludwig wants to teach elementary school and coach at either the high school or club level. She spent last spring coaching 9-year-olds — “It was challenging, definitely,” she said, “but a lot of fun” — and already has two of the five licenses she needs to coach high school players.
“I’m excited about the future,” she said. “It’s already been a lot of fun.”