Drive comes in many forms. It can come from desire, fear, and pride, among other factors. For senior Karlie Lema of the No. 22 California women’s soccer team, who leads the nation in goals and points, it comes from her competitive genes and a childhood’s worth of contests, many of which took place in the home.
Lema comes from a family of athletes down the road in Morgan Hill, about 90 minutes south of campus. Her father, Dave, played football at San Jose City College and her mother, Annie, ran track at Northern Colorado. All her four of her siblings and step siblings were involved in sports very early on, and some still are today.
“There was never a dull moment. Everything is a competition,” Lema said with a smile. “There’s not one day where we weren’t competing for something – who gets to the dinner table first, or whatever it is.”
For Lema, soccer began around the age of 10, a much later start than that of many Division I stars. She grew up participating in track and field and gymnastics. It wasn’t until she saw her stepbrother, Drew Bergholz, running around on the pitch that she thought she might try her foot at it.
“I saw [Bergholz] playing and thought I’d kind of like to try that,” Lema said. “I just immediately loved it.”
Before long, Lema was not only playing soccer, but she was also playing on her stepbrother’s team in a boys league. Even then, she was a standout athlete and goal-scorer, and credits those days for making her the competitor she is today.
“I think that toughened me up a bit,” Lema said. “I really enjoyed playing in that league. The boys were very welcoming to me. I think they liked having me on the team. They definitely gave my brother a hard time, though.”
Lema began playing for the Mountain View Los Altos Soccer Club (MVLA SC), where her explosive play and athleticism earned her a spot on the Elite Clubs National League (ECNL) U16 Northwest All-Conference Team. She immediately started to catch the eye of coaches, including that of Cal head coach Neil McGuire.
Before she ever stepped foot on campus at Live Oak High School in Morgan Hill, where she would compete for the next four years, the then-eighth-grader Lema verbally committed to Cal, a program whose youth camps she had been attending for years.
“It kind of just happened in the blink of an eye,” Lema said. “I went to all the Cal camps, and I have wanted to go here since I was little. I kept thinking ‘it’s going to be forever before…
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