Resume envy is real, and Skyleigh Thompson might just have a mild case of it, though she prefers a different term.
“I wouldn’t say envy. I think it’s humbling,” she says, of hailing from Kalispell, Mont., and being surrounded in a freshman class by players who have had more extensive and higher-level experiences on the soccer field than she’s enjoyed.
It’s a Montana thing in the Montana program and always will be. There is no getting around it.
Maddie Seelhoff, of Snohomish, Wash., had six ECNL players on her high school team at Glacier Peak. As a junior, Seelhoff was on a Crossfire Premier team that was on a very short list of those that had a chance of advancing to the ECNL National Playoffs and winning the whole thing.
That can be tough on a girl from Montana, if she’s into comparisons, even one who scored 53 career goals and added 20 assists at Flathead High. All Skyleigh Thompson can do is do what she does best. “I just need to keep my head down and work harder, just control what I can control,” she says.
It’s what Alexa Coyle did when she arrived from Bozeman in the summer of 2017. Four years later she was a first-team All-Big Sky Conference forward and signing a professional contract to play in the Scottish Women’s Premier League.
The collegiate starting point for Montana-raised players may occasionally be lower than some of their teammates, but the ceiling is undefined for all of them. And that just means the rise is more meteoric, more spectacular. It’s happened again and again.
“I think it’s different growing up in Montana, but that can be an advantage too,” says Thompson’s dad, Jeff, who was a three-time state champion wrestler at Great Falls High and went on to compete at Minnesota before returning to his home state. He is the head wrestling coach at Flathead High.
He calls it the “potential gap.”
“With all these Montana kids, you have this potential, because they’re going to be late bloomers, and that’s exactly what’s happening with Skye,” Griz coach Chris Citowicki says. “I think she’s going to mirror Lex, which is just this constant, steady improvement year after year after year.
“It goes back to that classic blue-collar work ethic, and Skye has it and has it in abundance. It flows out of her. She just works, works and works.”
She says it comes from her dad. “That’s definitely his mindset. I’ve been told that I’m very similar to him in that way. My competitive edge, I think, comes from him and just my willingness to work hard.”
Her mom, Shannon, offers up another option: Skyleigh’s sister, Shayenn, who was two years older, just enough that she laid down footsteps that could be followed, but only if a younger sister was willing to put in the effort, to strive to reach something beyond her age and abilities. That will stick with a girl.
“The first time I remember is when Skyleigh was probably four years old and the soccer nets were set up in the backyard,” Shannon says. “She wanted to do what her big sister was doing, so she inserted herself into whatever Shayenn was doing. That could have been a part of her development and drive.”
But she didn’t just want to do what her sister was doing. She wanted to do it better. “I think that helped both of us, because you don’t want to be worse than your sister, right? You always want to be better,” says Skyleigh.
And to that charged chemistry a few years later was added twin boys, Gunnar and Anders. “We’re all super close, but there was definitely some competitiveness,” she says.
Mattel advertises its game Apples to Apples as one of “hilarious comparisons.” In the hands of the four Thompsons it was simply a starter kit, a match and the fuel, all self-contained in one powder keg of a small cardboard box.
Did it ever end badly? “Yes, but as we’ve gotten older, it’s gotten a little better.” Did the game and all the cards ever end up on the floor? “No, surprisingly, but there have definitely been some hurt feelings.” Has anyone ever stormed off? “100 percent.”
So … did Shannon ever try to, you know, step in and attempt to put all those competitive juices back in the bottle? Put the lid on just a little tighter?
“You let it take its course,” she says. “There is no taming it. In Skyleigh’s case, she wants to do the absolute best she can at whatever she’s doing. You can’t tame that. She is a very motivated person.”
That led to sports, and not just to the normal team sports that her Griz classmates likely tried before going all in on soccer. Volleyball, basketball. What Montana may lack in extensive soccer opportunities, it does offer up things few other places can.
“She raced mountain bikes, did triathlons, a lot of extreme sports that kids in Montana get addicted to,” Jeff says. “It’s just a lifestyle of growing up in an active house.
“It’s just something we involved every day, getting out and getting exercise and I think she really enjoyed that. I think that’s something that she needs every day now. Being active has given her an internal drive to be successful. She’s ultra-competitive.”
Jeff was. Had to be to accomplish what he did as a wrestler, first under the legendary Bob Zadick, who led the North Montana Wrestling Club, then under the equally legendary J Robinson at Minnesota, who guided the Gophers to three national titles and his charges to 14 individual championships.
He returned to Montana, led off with a pair of girls and then had to try to figure out a sport in which he had no training.
“I was good at taking them to practice and cheering them on,” he says. “It was probably best for them that I knew nothing about soccer.
“When (Skyleigh) was younger, especially, she wanted to do just a lot of different things. We just kind of opened the door and let her find her passion.”
Soccer was but one of them. But she was gifted enough that she could hold her own against her sister and Shayenn’s friends and teammates, even as a middle schooler playing with high schoolers.
“I was maybe a seventh or eighth grader and I went to this high school open field with her,” Skyleigh says. “You go from playing with girls who are your age, and the pace of the game was so much different, the physicality so much different. It was eye-opening.
“But it definitely helped my development as a player. I felt much more prepared to play with older girls.”
She fit in just fine as a freshman at Flathead High, earning all-state honors. Her sophomore year provided her the soccer memory that still stands out as the best of her life. To this point.
The Bravettes were coming off consecutive winless regular seasons. They’d gone 4-33-3 the previous three falls.
The 2018 season proved to be a turnaround, and on Oct. 18, Flathead was playing Helena High, the defending state champion, for a chance to advance to the state tournament.
Shayenn opened the scoring eight minutes in. Skyleigh made it 2-0 five minutes later. Skyleigh would add the final goal in the second half in a one-sided 4-0 victory.
“We just knocked them out of the water,” she says. “That game was so exciting, so fun, and that was such a super tightknit team. We proved to a lot of people that we were a good soccer team again.
“We ended up going to a player’s house after and having a sleepover and watching stupid, scary movies.”
It was that fall, Shayenn’s senior season, that she committed to play for the University of Providence in Great Falls. Of course that’s late, late, late in the recruiting cycle. Call it a lesson learned. Even as a sophomore, Skyleigh was maybe behind in the process.
Because it wasn’t anything like that in the sport of wrestling back in the late 80s and early 90s, when Jeff finished second at Junior Nationals as a senior at Great Falls High.
“Wrestling is just a different animal being an individual sport,” he says. “I was really fortunate growing up in Great Falls. We had tremendous opportunities. We wrestled at the national level all throughout high school.”
Now he had a really, really good soccer player on his hands. But hardly anybody knew about her outside of the state.
“We didn’t really know how that works,” he says. “We just tried to give her opportunities. If a coach said, hey, this might be a great opportunity, we did it,” whether that be as a guest player on a faraway club team or attending an ID camp.
“I didn’t even know what those were. I had no idea that that’s kind of how you get noticed.”
Her first time playing in a recruiting showcase as a guest player was in Oregon. The opponent: an ECNL team out of Portland. The sidelines: full of coaches from Pac-12 programs.
Of course they weren’t there to see her, or her team, but that didn’t matter. “I was like, oh, this is dope,” she says. “It was crazy.
“It was humbling. Yeah, you’re a good player in the state of Montana, but you need to take yourself out of that environment and see what’s surrounding you.
“That’s why I’m so stoked to be playing with these amazing athletes (at Montana). I think that will just bring up my game even more, challenge me a lot. It’s good for me to be back at the bottom again. I’m excited.”
But she isn’t at the bottom. And this is no let’s-give-the-local-girl-a-chance story. Skyleigh Thompson is good and deserves to be a Grizzly.
“What is she going to be like freshman year? I have no idea, because you never know until it’s game time, but the foundation is there,” says Citowicki. “Is this a kid who could potentially play right off the bat? I think so. She’s pretty impressive.”
And this is why: “I think the difference between athletes who are here and athletes who aren’t is their ability to take feedback and not being upset about it but being like, okay, I respect you and I need to take this and work on it.” That’s Skyleigh talking, not Citowicki. And it’s pretty advanced thinking.
Jeff’s imprint may or may not be all over that statement, which his daughter has taken to heart.
After scoring seven goals as a freshman, five as a sophomore, she erupted for 24 as a junior in 2019. A lot of those came because she was just faster and better than most of the opponents she was going up against. That will balance out at the collegiate level. She’ll need something more to her game.
“You get away with some things in high school that you definitely will not here, and I am aware of that,” she says. She was told she needed to work on the technical side of her game, so Skyleigh Thompson — surprise! — got to work.
“I kind of made it my goal to switch some things in my game and improve on some things that I know I’ll need coming here. Being calm and confident with the ball at your foot is huge in the college game.”
She immersed herself last winter in the version of the game called Panna, which is played in a tiny, enclosed area. You can’t use space to your advantage or your speed, only your ball-handling skills and your quickness and your craftiness. There is only one way to succeed: by mastering the details.
She may not have mastered them — but then, who does? — but she improved enough that when she returned to campus this month for Montana’s ID camp, she had Citowicki doing a double-take.
“Wow, I wasn’t expecting that,” he said. “I remember seeing her at an ID camp a few years ago, and she just had a way of scoring goals. Then she came to this last ID camp, and she’s improved technically.”
Valuable feedback arrived at Citowicki’s desk from junior defender Allie Larsen, who is a lockdown center back and was voted second-team All-Big Sky last season. She takes pride in shutting down forwards like Thompson.
“She came in the other day and said, ‘I really love Skye because she is so technical.’ Coming from a defender who purposely analyzes people and tries to pick apart all their strengths and weaknesses, that was great,” said Citowicki.
When Thompson committed to Montana, it meant different things to her parents. For Shannon, who ran collegiately at Pacific Lutheran but got her master’s degree at UM, it was seeing her daughter go to the same school and the pride and joy that brought.
For Jeff, it was the same thing, with a dash of different emotions sprinkled in. “I was kind of jealous,” he says.
He never had the opportunity to wrestle collegiately in the state at the Division I level, not after Montana and Montana State ended their programs when he was about to enter high school.
“A lot of us guys back in that day and probably even now would have stayed in state,” he says. “It’s such a cool opportunity to be able to represent Montana as a Montanan. It’s a pride thing.
“You have the whole community, the whole state behind you, and they want to see you be successful. That’s something I missed out on, so I think it’s really cool that she gets to experience that.”
But he did wrestle collegiately and at a high level, so he learned plenty that he has passed down to his daughter over the years.
“I just kind of preached that if you want to be successful, you’ve got to enjoy the grind, and she does,” he says. “You can’t fake it.
“It’s not all exciting, and it’s a lot of work. It’s like a job for four years. But it’s going to be fun and it’s going to give you a lot of opportunities. And it’s going to give you a great family. I’m still extremely close to the wrestlers that I went to college with. They’re basically like family members.”
No matter what happens her freshman year, she won’t be held down, because Skyleigh Thompson is irrepressible. That’s one word to describe the force of nature that had a 4.0 GPA in high school and was the Flathead High student-body president as a senior.
“She’s just Skye. I don’t know how else to describe her. As soon as you’re around her, you’re just happier. She’s one of those people who pulls people together, because you want to be around Skye. Next thing you know there is a gaggle of humans around her,” Citowicki says.
“Skye is just the way I describe people now. You’re either Skye and that type of personality or you’re not. I don’t know how to describe her other than as soon as you’re around her, you’re just happier. It’s not bubbly. It’s just raw happiness.”
She may not be some of her teammates, at least on paper, with their impressive resumes, but she’s got plenty going for her. That work rate and the knowledge — whether it’s true or just something she’s using for motivation — that she has a long way to go to catch up.
“One of my favorite parts of this program is how they take players that are already outstanding and help them become better players,” she says. “That was appealing to me, because I truly believe I have a lot more potential than where I’m at right now.”
And those teammates, the other freshmen in this class? It’s not envy she feels. It’s excitement. It’s time to stop comparing what they’ve done and start focusing on what they’re going to do.
“Every single girl has impressed me with how great they are, soccer-wise,” she says. “I’m like, wow, this is my class of girls.
“When I saw them play for the first time, I was like, usually you’d see these girls on another team and be like, yeah, I don’t want to play against them. It’s super cool that they’re on your team it’s the other team that’s saying, yeah, I don’t want to play against them.”