June 14, 2009
Santiago, Rome, Toronto, Beijing. Star soccer player Chelsea Stewart has been there, done that.
Now she’s heading to Music City.
Stewart has played soccer on four continents, competed in the World Cup and been to the Olympic Games; with that kind of resume accomplished before age 20, it’s not surprising that the Commodores are more than a little excited that she has decided to play at Vanderbilt, where she will begin her freshman season this fall.
“She’s a very, very good player,” said head coach Ronnie Coveleskie Woodard. “We expect her to come in and immediately make an impact on the program.”
Stewart typifies the Commodore student-athlete in her ability to succeed on the field and in the classroom. So Vanderbilt was a good fit.
“The athletic side, the team and the academics all together,” Stewart said, “it was just the perfect combination for me.”
Lucky Vandy.
Dual citizen
Stewart was born in America, but her talents, and dual citizenship, are enough that she’s played at the national level for both the United States and its neighbor to the north.
The daughter of an American mother, Carla, and Canadian father, Bill, who played for his country’s national ice hockey team, Stewart was a High Honor Roll student in high school and also excelled on the soccer field enough to play for the USYSA (United States Youth Soccer Association) U-16 team in 2006, who won a national championship.
She went on to play for the U.S. national U-17 team and originally committed to play for Vanderbilt in her junior year of high school and would have played as a freshman last season. However, the Canadian U-20 national team learned of her dual citizenship when she was a senior and invited her to training camp, where she then earned a spot and had to sit out her first year of college play.
The highlight of her time with the team was defeating the U.S. 1-0 in the CONCACAF (Confederation of North, Central American and Caribbean American Football) Championship last June, qualifying Canada for the FIFA World Cup in Santiago, Chile. She played against several Americans she knew, including their team captain, a friend of her sister’s growing up.
During the season, Stewart earned 15 “caps”, or appearances, for Canada and scored two goals. At age 18, she was added to the national team as an alternate in the Beijing Olympics in August of 2008, where the Canadians finished in eighth place.
Stewart had a hard time describing the meaning of taking the field in her nation’s red and white colors.
“It’s definitely the experience of a lifetime. It’s so many emotions wrapped up into one, it’s not like any other experience,” she said. “There’s so much pride behind it because you get to wear your country’s jersey. You get to play with the best players in the world.”
As an alternate, Stewart trained with the team but had the added freedom of viewing other events at the games, including one of Roger Federer’s tennis matches.
The duality Stewart has in her bloodline matches her multiple abilities on the soccer field. Coveleskie Woodard described her as a `great attacking player,’ and Stewart agreed with that characterization of her style of play … mostly.
“I think so, with a little twist of defense,” she said.
`She’s a special kid’
Stewart has made a major impression on her new head coach without even seeing any Southeastern Conference action yet.
“I think she’s one of the hardest workers I’ve ever seen. She has an amazing work rate, and she has a keen competitive spirit,” Coveleskie Woodard said. “When she shows up to train, she’s there to train.”
And even when can’t come to school, she still goes to school.
Stewart was on campus taking classes during the spring semester but left to train and play with Canada for almost all of March. Despite being away from Vanderbilt for four weeks, Stewart worked with the university to complete her assigned work, sometimes using Skype.
“That was actually really hard, learning how to balance playing soccer and having school on top of that, because you want to be good in school,” Stewart said. “It’s definitely a challenge.”
Stewart made the Dean’s List with a 4.0 grade point average.
“She’s a special kid,” Coveleskie Woodard said. “She loves working hard, being challenged and working herself one more step than she thought she could.”
Stewart trained with her Vanderbilt teammates during the spring and has worked to adapt to the team’s different style of play from Canada, who employ a more direct approach to playing soccer with fewer touches, while the Commodores are more indirect.
“I think we can learn some things from her Canadian experience, and I think she can learn some things from her American experience,” Coveleskie Woodard said. “It’s going to make her a better player in the long run.”
“They’re definitely different styles of play,” Stewart said. “That’s hard to adapt to.
Coming from both ways, there are definitely pros that you get out of it that help your game in both situations.”
Stewart and her new teammates bonded right away.
“Even the first few days of classes down at Vanderbilt, they were so accepting,” she said. “We definitely have a good team aura going on.”
Ready to make a jump
Vanderbilt struggled last season after a 5-0 start, going 3-7-1 in conference play and missing out on the SEC tournament, finishing with a 9-8-2 record. Of those seven SEC losses however, five came by one goal.
With Stewart leading an incoming recruiting class of seven players, Coveleskie Woodard thinks this team can make the marginal corrections to turn those ties and close losses into victories. Four of the team’s top five scorers return next season, including twin sisters Molly and Megan Kinsella. Molly was an All-SEC pick after scoring eight goals and tallying four assists, both best on the team, and Megan was second with four goals.
More importantly, the Commodores’ training efforts and improvement during the spring has their coach believing that this team is ready to make the jump back into the elite of the SEC.
“We’ve got some talented kids. This is the hardest-working group of Vanderbilt soccer players I’ve ever seen,” Coveleskie Woodard said. “They value putting on a Vanderbilt jersey and they’re not afraid of a challenge.
“Chelsea’s going to help us, our incoming freshman class is going to help us, but the development that I saw over the team in the spring is going to help an awful lot too.”
Stewart has primarily been practicing at the outside midfielder position, but Coveleskie looks for her to possibly play up top, depending on how things shake out with the other incoming freshmen.
“She has a nose for the goal, she loves to take players on,” Coveleskie Woodard said. “She’s very unpredictable for defenders to handle.”
But this player puts more emphasis on her team achieving goals of progress, not just scoring them.
“(The goal) every year is to take steps toward improvement, not only in the scores and the results, but also what you’re producing on the field,” Stewart said.
Pretty down-to-earth for someone whose talent is world-class.
