Sports News

After a standout career at North Carolina, Sentnor was the No. 1 pick in January’s National Women’s Soccer League Draft — all before her 20th birthday.

By Amin Touri, The Boston Globe

March 13, 2024 | 8:17 AM

It takes a lot to impress Anson Dorrance.

Four decades and 21 NCAA women’s soccer titles at North Carolina will do that. When you’ve coached some of the best women to ever play the game, standards are raised.

So when Dorrance found himself at a club tournament in North Carolina a few years back, the bar was high, and expectations were low.

Dorrance was watching the Hingham-based South Shore Select team when a stick of dynamite in attacking midfield caught his eye. The talent leapt out — her technical quality, her agility, her balance, her confidence on the ball.

Dorrance didn’t know what he’d find that day, but South Shore Select knew about him. The Hall of Famer found himself chatting on the sideline with a man who got him up to speed on Ally Sentnor.

Laurindo Lima has seen a thing or two himself. He founded South Shore Select in 1995, eventually passing the club onto his daughter, Liz.

The Limas had watched Sentnor develop since she joined the club at 6, and Dorrance got the full rundown: the skill in tight spaces honed in small-sided futsal sessions when harsh New England winters moved soccer indoors; the one-of-a-kind work ethic she’d displayed at an unusually young age; the drive that made her special. Laurindo told Dorrance to keep an eye on her.

Select trailed by a couple of goals, with the opponents dealing with Sentnor the way they often do — an elbow here, a shirt pull there, and eventually the sort of crunching tackle required to floor Sentnor in full flow.

“And unfortunately,” Liz Lima says, “when you knock Ally Sentnor down, she comes back up and she’ll make you pay for it.”

It took just a few minutes for the Hanson native to flip the game on its head. She got on the ball and found the back of the net, then again, and again. Right foot, left foot, in the box or outside, in space or in traffic, it didn’t matter. Opponents were helpless.

Dorrance was stunned. He’d never seen anything like it.

“She was a different player from the very first time I saw her,” Dorrance says now.

That day, Laurindo Lima just gave Dorrance a look.

“I told you.”

Always playing up

There seems to be very little Ally Sentnor wants to talk about less than Ally Sentnor.

But seemingly everyone else in women’s soccer has been talking about her for years. She was being invited to youth national team camps by the time she was 12, attracting scouts from Stanford to watch her play at Thayer Academy by 13, and on the cover of Sports Illustrated by 15.

After a standout career at North Carolina (and recovering from an ACL tear minutes into her first exhibition game to win ACC Midfielder of the Year as a redshirt sophomore), Sentnor was the No. 1 pick in January’s National Women’s Soccer League Draft — all before her 20th birthday.

As she prepares for her first season as a professional with the Utah Royals, who open Saturday in Chicago against the Red Stars, Sentnor is a long way from Hanson, where she first started playing soccer with her father as her coach.

“We had no idea it was going to be to this level, but I think you could tell early on,” Rich Sentnor says.

A young Ally Sentnor had a habit of scoring five or six goals and putting matches out of reach quickly, leading her father to put her in goal to balance the scales. She was never thrilled with that, so Rich often had to compromise, letting her play where she wanted — as long as she only scored with her weaker left foot.

“And she’s the type of kid who would literally go out in the backyard,” he says, “and shoot 500 balls with her left foot until her left foot is as good as her right.”

Sentnor was always playing up, whether it was with older groups with South Shore Select, Thayer’s varsity as an eighth grader, or the U17 youth national team when she was 15.

That was around the time that she and some teammates filed into Damien’s in Hanson for pizza and a place to watch the 2019 Women’s World Cup final. Starting in midfield for the United States that day was Sam Mewis, who along with her sister Kristie put Hanson soccer on the map as regulars for the US women’s national team.

Sentnor had gotten to know the Mewis sisters over the years, as unlikely as it seems that another star was coming out of a small town of 10,000. Sentnor had a chance to train with them on occasion, as well as helping out with their soccer camps.

“I remember training with her and also not really knowing what to expect,” Sam Mewis says. “I was, like, ‘Oh, I’m so much older than this girl. Is this going be weird?’ And it was amazing. She was at such a high level, she was working so hard, she had kind of this, like, professional approach to her soccer a lot earlier than Kristie and I did.

“She must have been — I don’t know, 16? — at the time. And she was so committed and focused and clearly talented and sweet and humble and hard-working. I just loved her immediately.”

Liz Lima remembers how big Sentnor’s dreams were back then, before she even reached high school. Lima played soccer at Harvard. She has spent plenty of time around talented and driven people. Her verdict?

“I’ve never met anyone that was destined for greatness like her.”

Emotional homecoming

Sentnor had October’s regular-season finale circled on the calendar.

North Carolina finished its ACC slate with a trip to Boston College, where Sentnor couldn’t play two years earlier after her ACL tear. It was her first collegiate game in New England, less than an hour’s drive from home. UNC was dominant but couldn’t break down the door and trailed, 1-0.

Just after the hour mark, Sentnor made a run into the right channel, picking up the ball in space behind the Eagles’ back line and driving toward the box. She sent one defender to another ZIP code as she cut inside, skipped past another as though she wasn’t there, and fired a left-footed screamer into the far corner. The goalkeeper never moved.

It was the sort of goal that became her trademark as a Tar Heel, as defenders tried to usher her onto her left just to find out the hard way that Sentnor’s goal-scoring prowess is indiscriminate.

“It’s the one thing that I will take credit for,” Rich Sentnor says with a laugh, more than a decade on from his left-foot-only compromise with his young daughter. “A little bit of credit, anyway.”

It was “Select Night” in Chestnut Hill, with Sentnor’s old team packing the stands with scores of young girls in the same gear she once donned, cheering alongside family and friends.

“That was one of the most special moments of my career,” Sentnor says. “I almost had tears in my eyes because I was once one of those little girls, going to BC games and really looking up to those women at the time, and now these girls were looking up to us and wanting to meet us. It was so special.”

“That night was … it still gets me emotional,” Rich Sentnor says.

It took Sentnor an hour or two to finish signing autographs, with a couple hundred to get through. For the little girls in Select jerseys, she had all the time in the world.

“Our motto in our club is like, that’s great if you’re a great player, but it’s far more important to be a great person,” Lima says. “And Ally completely embodies that. She’s just such a great role model for young girls.

“And you know, every little girl, you hope …I have three little girls. You hope they grow up to be like her.”

Best is yet to come

Sentnor is in a new environment now, not only playing as a professional for the first time, but doing so with an expansion Utah franchise building from the ground up. If you ask her, that’s the focus at the moment, on “creating something special here,” where she will be at the center of the revival.

Sentnor is the sort of player that Anson Dorrance will mention in the same breath as Mia Hamm and Kristine Lilly. The next Women’s World Cups roll around in 2027 and 2031, when Sentnor — who turned 20 over the weekend — will be 23 and 27, perhaps at her very best.

It’s hard not to wonder how long it will be before she’s not just a star in Utah, but a mainstay in red, white, and blue.

And who knows? Maybe there will even be a watch party at Damien’s, where the next generation of girls’ soccer players can look on and dream of following in her footsteps.