It was Fall 2023 and St. Vincent Pallotti’s football team was playing an away game. They had scored a touchdown and were lining up for an extra point attempt. The public address announcer made the call. “Now entering the game for Pallotti is placekicker Oliv ... Oliv ... Oliviah? ... Walton?” It wasn’t a typographical error for “Oliver.” Pallotti’s placekicker was (and still is in 2024) a girl named Oliviah Walton.
“Football is Fun”
Oliviah was brand new to the team and to Pallotti, having just transferred from C. H. Flowers High School in Bowie, where she still lives with her parents, Kaya and Todd. She was already gaining attention as a midfielder for Pallotti Girls Soccer, becoming especially known for her long-kick skills. When the school’s athletic trainer asked if she had any interest in playing football, she thought it was a joke. But next thing she knew, Oliviah was standing in front of the football team and head coach Tony Ashley to see if she could kick a football—something she had never done before.
“The coach just told me to pretend it was a soccer ball and kick it as hard as I could, so I did.” Starting at 30 yards, she hit the uprights. The team cheered. They backed her up to 35, and she did it again. By the time she hit a kick from 40 yards, team members were yelling, “Put her on the team NOW!”
“I was shocked,” she says, “but I saw it as a challenge, and I’m always challenging myself, so I thought I’d give it a try.” She made her official debut a few weeks later in a game against Gilman. While Pallotti lost the game, Oliviah connected on a point-after-touchdown and became the talk of the league. Her subsequent appearances became a bright spot in a season that had its share of disappointments and ended with a 1-8 record. For the 2024 season, Oliviah wanted to be used in kickoffs as well as for PATs; she got her wish right away in the first game, against Georgetown Prep. There’s one aspect of being a placekicker, though, that she and her coaches have agreed is best to avoid: the tackle. Standing at just 5’5” surrounded by defensive backs who are up to a foot taller and 100 or more pounds heavier than her, she’s very aware that just one tackle could result in an injury that threatens her soccer career.
“I usually take a knee, so I can’t be tackled,” she says. “My other option is to turn my back after making a kick, since tackling from behind is illegal, but I like to see what happens downfield.”
Oliviah says that, for the most part, being the only female in the league is not as problematic as people might assume. Playing against all-boys schools can present a challenge at times—for instance, finding a place to change in and out of uniform—but her teammates and coaches “help out a lot in situations that could be awkward.” She describes the football world as a community and says that, from the start, she felt accepted by her Pallotti teammates.
“It’s almost like a family. The team treats me like a—I don’t want to say a sister, because it’s more like a brother. And I know they all have my back.”
Being a dual-sport athlete has its logistical challenges. Classes start at 7:45 a.m. and Oliviah puts in a full day of honors and AP classes, with some student group leadership duties thrown in for good measure. After getting a head start on homework during Pallotti’s “protected hour” at the end of the day, she goes to soccer practice for about 2 hours and then joins the football team for its last hour of practice between 6 and 7 p.m. For those keeping score, that’s a 12-hour day—and game days can be even more harried. With two to three soccer games and one football game each week, the two sports’ schedules occasionally overlap. Oliviah sometimes goes straight from a 4:00 soccer game to a 7:00 football start, which requires creative carpooling arrangements between her parents. She laughs about one time when she was still pulling on her football uniform as she ran to join the team. “It’s a little bit of a handful at times,” she says, “but it balances out, and now it’s just become my schedule.” From the start, though, there has been an agreement among Oliviah, her parents, and all her coaches that soccer would take priority over football.
“Football is a recent surprise,” she says. “It found me. But I committed to soccer a long time ago.”
“But Soccer is My Passion”
Oliviah first kicked a soccer ball at age 3, and by all accounts became instantly hooked. Her parents enrolled her in soccer camps to appease what, for most young kids, is a short-lived interest but for Oliviah became a defining part of life. Now, at age 17, Oliviah says that soccer “definitely has been my passion for a very long time.” Advancing from intramurals to competitive travel teams by age 10, she was already envisioning herself as a professional soccer player. She played soccer anywhere and everywhere she could: in community leagues, on middle-school teams, and then at both Flowers and Pallotti.
But it was joining the A3 Soccer club in Anne Arundel County that Oliviah cites as instrumental in furthering her success on the field—even though her experience at A3 didn’t start out the way she expected.
“I wanted to be a goalie because that’s what I had often played when I was younger,” she says. “But I was shorter than most of my teammates and I couldn’t reach the top crossbars [of the goal net] to defend against high kicks.” So, she was put into the midfield instead.
“I didn’t like it at first, and I really got down on myself for a while because I wasn’t playing goalie.” Then, in what Oliviah says was a “total game changer for me and my soccer career,” A3 coach Ty Strawbridge began working with her to gain confidence. “He talked me through it and helped me to reset my perspective. After a while I started to actually enjoy playing midfield.” Oliviah says she liked being part of the action on both offense and defense and really started to appreciate the “we” aspect of playing on a team, getting as much satisfaction out of making an assist as a winger as in making good shots on her own in the striker role. Looking back, she says, “It was probably a good decision to talk me out of being goalie!”
Both Oliviah and her dad are full of praise for Coach Strawbridge, who recognized Oliviah’s talent early on, helped hone her skills, and continually challenged her to reach higher. He sometimes had her fill in for other A3 teams short on players, including some at a higher age group or skill level. And, Todd says, Strawbridge basically created a premier team, A3 Chelsea, to give Oliviah higher challenges to advance her skills even further. He also enlisted Oliviah to be an assistant coach to an under-10 boys team, which has been both challenging and inspirational: “I often look up to THEM,” she says about the younger athletes.
Another coach, Pallotti’s late Troy Eggleston, also played a key role in Oliviah’s athletic journey. Eggleston coached both soccer and track at Pallotti, and he recruited Oliviah in 2022. Sadly, he passed away in February 2023 and never got to see his recruit’s successes, including leading the soccer team in goals and assists and being named to all-conference teams in both soccer and track. As a senior this year, Oliviah serves as team captain and takes that role seriously, studying films of upcoming opponents to help set a game plan and encouraging her teammates both on and off the pitch. “What’s important as a team is the chemistry,” she says.
All-Around Scholar Athlete
As much as Oliviah loves to talk soccer, she gets even more excited talking about Pallotti. “Coming to Pallotti was life-changing for me,” she says. “It made me a better person. I feel like part of a community that’s committed to learning and preparing for the future. I love the interactive nature of the classes, where we discuss and debate things we’re learning about; I love the way teachers have become mentors and friends.” Oliviah excels in academics, with a 4.2 GPA—that’s before adding her AP courses into the calculation. She appears regularly on the Principal’s Honor Roll, is a member of the Honor Society and Student Government Association and serves as student leader for the Union of the Catholic Apostolate, a seniors-only group that plans retreats as part of the school’s spiritual mission—an experience that Oliviah has found to be “personally fulfilling and unexpectedly meaningful.”
There’s no question Oliviah juggles a lot during the fall sports seasons. But she doesn’t slack off during winter and spring, having taken on a third varsity sport by joining the track and field team. She ran the 500m and 300m individual events in indoor track; in the outdoor season she set school records in the 400m individual race and was on the 4x200m and the 4x400m relay teams, the former of which broke an IAAM meet record. While running track helps her stay conditioned for soccer, she stresses how different the two sports are. “In soccer, you have 90 minutes to make adjustments, and you have to pace yourself. But in track you have one goal, one chance, no room for mistakes, and you have to push yourself with everything you’ve got to hit that finish line. It’s a good life lesson, really, and it has taught me to push hard in the moment with a destination in mind.”
As for future destinations, Oliviah recently committed to St. Mary’s College of Maryland, where she will definitely play soccer and might also run track. The relatively small campus, its location near the water, and the fact that she wouldn’t be all that far from her parents were factors in the decision. Meeting the soccer team and coach sealed the deal. “I didn’t feel recruited there,” she says. “I felt like I was already a teammate.”
And after college? “I would love to play professional soccer, especially at the international level; England would be nice.” She also could see herself as a soccer coach or running a business in a related field. “I don’t think there will ever be a time in my life when soccer won’t be a part of it.”
Despite all her awards and accolades, Oliviah remains humble and is quick to praise her parents for their role in her success. “My parents are my role models. They pretty much sacrificed their lives to drive me around, and they found a way for me to transfer to Pallotti.” Her father is quick to repay the compliments, noting that Oliviah has faced many challenges: “She spent 7th grade doing school from home during the COVID pandemic; she didn’t see much of me at all for months when I was spending all day at work and then taking care of my mother; and then she made that huge transition from Flowers to Pallotti.”
Todd looks at his daughter with pride and says, “I couldn’t have done what you did. You never let anything stop you. There’s nothing you can’t do.”
Diane Mezzanotte is a staff writer and member of the Board of Directors for The Laurel History Boys. In addition to covering Laurel city municipal news, she also reports on all things from South Laurel.
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