By the time URochester women’s soccer team finishes warmups, the nerves have already set in: “You just want to be on the field so you don’t have to feel it anymore,” sophomore Natalie Santangelo says. “But it’s a good stress.”
Since age 4, Santangelo has been obsessed with soccer. Growing up in an athletic household, this now-Division III athlete has been in her cleats for as long as she can remember. She has always taken life by the horns, describing herself as an uplifting, reliable, and competitive soul.
Now a sophomore striker for the Yellowjackets, Santangelo has learned quickly that college soccer brings a different kind of pressure, yet she applies her carefree attitude nonetheless.
Santangelo, an English major double-minoring in Business and Spanish, was raised in northern Virginia. Her mother, also a Yellowjacket, played varsity volleyball during her time at the University.
Although Santangelo has played soccer for as long as she can remember, her parents officially enrolled her in a recreational league at age four. They often joke that her interest began even earlier. “They would bring me to my brother’s practices, and I’d try to hop on the field and join in,” she said, laughing.
While Santangelo has played soccer for practically as long as she could walk, she revealed there was no single moment that sparked her love for the game: “Honestly, there’s no reason I was really drawn to the game, it’s just kind of been around for as long as I can remember. I can’t really imagine my life without it, you know?”
She had always seen soccer as something in her future. However, as she grew older, she adopted more realistic expectations: that soccer was not going to be her professional career.
Santangelo sought to weave her career with her passion for soccer: thus wanting to be a sports journalist — a Spanish-speaking journalist to be precise (hence her minor in the language).
Santangelo knew she wanted to play the sport at the collegiate level. “Because I went to a lowkey ‘bad at soccer’ high school, I never got many offers [to play college soccer],” she lamented. Yet just because the scouts didn’t go to her did not mean that she couldn’t go to the scouts; her father enrolled her in soccer camps to get her name out in the world.
Santangelo felt uneasy about the application process. She recalled corresponding with the New York University soccer coach until she was “ghosted.”. “Senior fall … that was the one time I was struggling a lot,” she reminisced. “That was a rough period.”
By this point, Santangelo had received only rejections and was beginning to accept that she wouldn’t play soccer at a smaller school, as she had once imagined.
All that changed when one of her biggest cheerleaders, her dad, insisted that she try out for one more school.
Santangelo’s last attempt turned fruitful when she was offered a spot on the URochester roster.
“I do believe everything happens for a reason,” she said. “Like, if I didn’t take this last camp, I would have just been, maybe, a sorority girl somewhere else.”
When Santangelo arrived in Rochester, the reality of college soccer set in almost immediately. Within her first season, she was moved out of her familiar midfield role and into the attack, a shift that forced her to adapt on the fly, as she is now the main goal scorer.
Earning minutes as a starting player early brought opportunity, but it also brought pressure.
“I kind of pushed myself a little too far sometimes,” she said, reflecting on the season. “I forgot why I was doing what I was doing.” For the first time, soccer wasn’t just an outlet, it was a test of confidence, patience, and identity.
When on the field, Santangelo thinks of nothing but the game. Sprinting up the field, she glides past opposing defenders as she seamlessly drops ball after ball into the goal. To observers, everything looks choreographed, making soccer look less like a game and more of an art.
Yet Santangelo lives for the pressure, it means adrenaline for her, not stress. “The anticipation of the game is, like, one of the best feelings ever … when you are about to play, you get the energy up, it’s an unmatched feeling.”
To quell pregame jitters, Santangelo focuses on her own potential performance rather than the other team, she shares, twirling the rings on her fingers.
Besides the worry of not playing your best, injuries are a constant worry plaguing the team. While Santangelo said that she had not been injured while playing, she did recount one of the more disturbing events in her collegiate soccer career.
“The stands went silent, and she was just screaming. I never heard someone scream that loud,” she said when describing the moments after her friend, Eileen, fell to the ground after being injured in play. Despite not being injured herself, Santangelo explained that seeing her friend writhing shook her.
“I thought she broke every bone in her body. I turned away so fast because I was like, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to throw up.’”
Despite this traumatic injury, Santangelo knew one thing: The game must go on. “It was hard at first, but we all knew that we were playing for her. We knew that we had to finish the game, like how she wanted,” she said.
Santangelo prides herself on remaining focused and on target, even when things get shaky. What keeps her going is the camaraderie and support she gets from her teammates. Although game days are dominated by focused energy, team bonding and locker room rituals are an important staple in her pre-game routine.
While donning their uniforms, Santangelo and her teammates build that bond by blasting a five-song mashup playlist that gets everyone excited.
With the interlude of “Viva la Vida” by Coldplay blaring over the speaker, the space erupts with dance-club reminiscent energy as team members jump up and down and fists fly into locker doors with the rhythm of the music. “It’s just one last unifying experience before we step onto the field,” she explained.
That pressure, however, is not something Santangelo carries alone. At the University, it exists alongside a team culture that values connection as much as competition: This is a balance she has come to rely on.
Her charisma was underscored by her sophomore teammates, midfielder Hannah Nagashima and defender Remi Cherkas: “She’ll say hi to, like, everyone. I’m like, ‘Who is that?’ I don’t even know who that is,” Nagashima joked.
Her personable nature has made her an ideal mentor, the two explained. This past fall, as incoming first-years arrived on the field, Santangelo stepped into a new role, taking time to train the next generation of strikers.
“I tried to make [the new freshman strikers] feel confident to take shots and be selfish when given the opportunity on the ball,” Santangelo told me in a later interview.
Cherkas explained that each coach has different preferences for how the position is played, something that can be confusing for a first-year. Having navigated that learning curve herself just a year earlier, Santangelo quelled those concerns by teaching the first-years the ropes of playing striker.
Santangelo explained that being a mentor meant that she learned things too: “We worked on holding defenders off of our backs … And because I was also semi-new to the position, I took things from [the first-years] too. We built off of each other.”
Santangelo’s role on the team has extended beyond her play on the field. Teammates describe her as someone who shows up consistently, offering support, encouragement, and attention to those around her.
Santangelo, Nagashima, and Cherkas have been a trio ever since the fall of their first year. One thing is clear, Santangelo brings the same commitment and kindness to her relationships as she does to the game.
Nagashima described Santangelo as being one of the first people she connected with on campus: “It was just me and her, and we were talking about, like … personal stuff. Relationships and that kind of stuff.”
Now, with the rhythm of college soccer familiar and her place on the team established, Santangelo has begun to think more deliberately about what comes next.
While soccer remains central to her life, it exists alongside growing ambitions in journalism and storytelling. While in high school, she hoped that she could combine her passions with a profession. Commenting on her ambitions in sports journalism: “I think it’s so cool that, like, I could go to a game, write about it, and get paid.”
This is something she is attempting to pursue now as she serves as a contributing sports writer for the Campus Times.
In her future, Santangelo hopes to continue to play recreationally in her future, but says she wants to appreciate her years on the team while still in college.
While graduate school remains a path for her, she confessed that she hasn’t figured it all out yet.
One thing Santangelo will bring with her throughout her collegiate career and beyond is her lightheartedness: “I feel like, all in all, being positive and lighthearted, it really can’t hurt you.”
