Nicole Garbin thinks it’s ridiculous that anyone could ever find her intimidating.
Never mind that the 5-foot-7-inch Pacific-10 Conference Player of the Year is more athletically built than most NFL kickers, possesses lightning speed and looks positively fearsome when she’s chasing down opposing players on the pitch, or barreling towards the goal with legs churning and fire glinting in her dark, Hawaiian eyes.
“I’m a goofball,” she said. “I just want to make people laugh. I’m always the one in the back of the bus yelling obnoxious things, and Jessie (Chatfield, the Ducks’ goalkeeper) will be in the front, she’ll be like ‘Garbin! Shut up!’”
This is also why Garbin says she would never be able to isolate a most embarrassing moment from the stable of such moments that she seems to collect, just by being herself.
“Well I’m always trying to embarrass myself, so that makes it kind of hard (to pick just one incident),” she said. “I like to make other people feel comfortable around me, because sometimes, when I’m around people, they go ‘oh my god, it’s Nicole Garbin!’ and they get really shy.”
Garbin doesn’t seem to really grasp the magnitude of her celebrity. But in her six years with the Ducks’ women’s soccer team, she has become a legend.
The fact that the Ducks ended up being excluded from the NCAA Tournament after a much-publicized David-versus-Goliath season only seems to add to Garbin’s image as the leader of Oregon’s underdog soccer team.
Few people have forgotten that the Ducks – who were ranked last in preseason Pac-10 rankings – posted a 12-6-2 overall record, beat the No. 3 team in the country, finished the season ranked 17th overall and second in the Pac-10, yet were denied a berth in the NCAA Tournament.
“We still hear about it everyday; from adults, from the kids at school,” Garbin said, who is currently working as a fifth grade social studies teacher at Shasta Middle School as part of the required practicum in the teacher certification masters program that she’s in.
While Garbin has finally come to terms with the injustice of it all, she doesn’t pretend to understand it.
“I met this girl and her parents for the first time, and they started talking about how we got snubbed,” Garbin said.
“And the little girl was just like ‘How did that happen? You guys finished second in the Pac-10!’ And I was just like, ‘I wish I could tell you.”
Amid rumors of pre-determined NCAA selections – Garbin says she’s heard talk that the USC soccer coach knew his team was going to the tournament even before the Trojans’ 3-1 defeat added to the Ducks’ bitterness, Garbin has moved on.
Flirting with Basketball
After the end of her Oregon soccer career, she took her frustration to McArthur Court as the newest member of the Oregon women’s basketball team.
“We suggested her to Bev (Smith, Oregon’s basketball coach),” explained Kaela Chapdelaine, a junior guard on the Ducks’ women’s basketball team. “I’d seen Garbin play intramural sports, and I was like, ‘wow that girl can play,’ so we were really excited to have her join us.”
Thus began Garbin’s reunion with the team. Having played both soccer and basketball in high school, Garbin, 24, originally walked on during her freshman year, and redshirted one season before giving up basketball because former Oregon soccer coach Bill Steffen wanted her to focus all her energies on soccer.
“I think at first, we were kind of in awe of her,” Chapdelaine said.
“Yeah, we were kinda like, oh my god, it’s Nicole Garbin!” senior forward Eleanor Haring said. “But she fit in straightaway. Her personality’s kinda addicting.”
Garbin took jersey number 45 – a tribute to her boyfriend of five years, Matt Toeaina, a defensive tackle on the Oregon football team who wears the same number – practiced with the basketball team over the next two months, and appeared in three games before realizing that she would not be able to finish her masters program this year if she continued playing basketball.
“The class I needed for my teaching practicum only meets once a week on Thursday nights, and that’s when basketball games are,” Garbin said. “I came to the reality that I’ve been here for so long, I just want to get my education over with and get on with my life.”
Two weeks ago, Garbin quit the basketball team and officially ended her career as an Oregon athlete. (No she’s not playing lacrosse in the spring, she says.)
There is the possibility that she might take her soccer career to the next level. Garbin says she’s gotten an offer from a club in Iceland, and that Tara Erickson is working on getting her a tryout with the national team.
Soccer superstar: In perspective
Meanwhile Erickson and the soccer team have resumed winter workouts minus a familiar mischievous goofball for the first time in six years.
“I was watching the girls run through conditioning this morning and I was thinking, now what would Garbin be doing?” Erickson said. “She’d be laughing at herself, you know, tripping over something, or helping one of the freshmen.
“While we still do have a very positive energy, she definitely – be it at 7 a.m., or a bus ride to a game, or after a big win – was the one-of-a-kind player who has the ability to rally everybody, and I think everybody misses that a little bit.”
Garbin’s charisma, her goofy ways and willingness to go out of her way to make people feel at ease around her was the cement behind a team that underwent a 180-degree turnaround in Erickson’s two years at the helm.
Erickson says Garbin made an immediate impression on her.
“When I first met her in my office, we talked about what she could do for the program, and I talked about players having to prove themselves,” Erickson said. “And she said, ‘Well yeah, and the coaches are going to have to prove themselves, too.’
“And I was like ‘Whoa, where’s this coming from?’ I thought it was great. She came right back at me, and that was my challenge, to prove that to her.”
It’s safe to say that Erickson has won Garbin over.
“When I found out what kind of coach Tara was, it was like ‘hey, I’m actually going to learn some soccer here’,” Garbin said. “She taught me practical skills, the practical side of the game. It was all about finding out what kind of player I am, and what I could be.”
Erickson’s belief in Garbin pushed the forward to work even harder. She figured out that Garbin worked best with the weight of the team on her shoulders, and she figured out that she could pressure her harder than she pressured the other players to perform because that would make Garbin raise her game.
“I would ride her harder than the other players because for some reason that was what it took to snap her into it,” Erickson said. “You have to pick and choose your moments, but I knew I could rely on that as a motivational tool.”
Garbin eagerly embraced the burden of carrying the entire team. She says that’s the only way she knows how to have fun on the pitch.
“If I don’t feel that pressure, then I’m not really enjoying myself out there,” she said. “I want to be the one to score the game-winner, to make the game-winning assist. I want to be the hero. And if I don’t have that kind of role, it’s not really as much fun for me.”
It also helped that Garbin was very coachable, and was willing to transform her game to fit her coach’s needs.
“She changed her game a lot,” Erickson said. “She adapted it to what we wanted as coaches, and now I use her as an example for other kids, as someone who has all this athletic talent and ability, but was willing to let us coaches rework her.”
Under Erickson’s guidance, Garbin increased her work rate to the point where she could easily run her defenders ragged for a full 90 minutes, refined her goal-scoring instinct and improved her own defensive skills.
In return, Erickson built a complete supporting cast of players around her, and together, player and coach formed a
lethal onfield and off-field leadership combination that produced Oregon’s first winning season in 10 years.
“Until this year, she’d been good, but she hadn’t realized her potential. I think this was the year for her,” Erickson said. “We talk about how we were an NCAA tournament team this year, and I have no doubt in my mind that without Nicole Garbin, that would not have been the case.
“It’s just sad because I think she had more to give in the postseason.”
Garbin’s sad too. All season long, as she broke record after record after record, all Garbin would say when asked what the records meant to her was that the records would mean nothing unless the team got to the NCAA tournament.
“The hardest thing about not coming back next year is that we have all these returners who are coming back,” she said. “Jen Cameron, Dylann (Tharp), Jessie (Chatfield). Amazing players. I wish I could return with them and we could just plow through and show the NCAA and the Pac-10 that we should have been in the tournament.
“Because I tell you we would have made it for sure next fall.”
With 19 records that include career goals (34), career points (83), game-winning goals (22), and shots (257), Garbin hangs up her cleats as the most decorated player in Oregon soccer history.
Funnily enough, Garbin can barely believe that she has bypassed her own mentor, and former Oregon soccer queen Chalise Baysa, en route to claiming most of those records.
“Coming in as a freshman and watching (Baysa), playing with her, I was always like ‘Oh my gosh, she’s amazing. I don’t know if I can be her, but I’m sure gonna try.’ I thought I’d never get close to her career goals record, but I guess I did,” Garbin said. “I learned so much from her about working hard, and I started to emulate that after she was gone.”
And that’s what Garbin wants her records to stand for: a benchmark that other players will strive to surpass. But more than anything, she just wants the Ducks to avenge this year’s injustice next year.
“The players now on the team, the returners, they tell me all the time how much they want (to make the NCAA tournament) next year, how much they want to win.” Garbin said. “Even the recruits coming in: They were at a lot of our games. They kinda witnessed the whole season, so I think they’re going to come in wanting the same thing.
The Legacy
The Ducks have already begun the rebuilding process. There’s a general consensus on the team that no player will be able to replace everything that Garbin meant to Oregon soccer, a program that was built around her for more than half a decade. So the team is taking a replacement-by-committee approach instead.
“I challenge everyone not to try and replicate Garbin, but to just all pick up a little bit of the pieces of the game that she left,” Erickson said. “We’re all trying to get more goal-scoring potential and assist potential. And if Allison Newton scores a few more goals, if Dani Oster, Leigh Quinlan and all the other players chipped in a bit more, I think sometimes those teams can be even more dangerous, because you can’t just focus on one person.”
Regardless of what happens next season, Erickson believes that Garbin will go down in the history books as the player who jump-started the rise of the Oregon soccer program.
“It’s easy sometimes to be an athlete and go into a program when things are going great and do amazing things,” Erickson said. “I think the hardest thing as an athlete and a leader is to go to a program at the bottom, and help raise it to the top. That’s what Garbin did. She helped to elevate a program that was at the bottom of the Pac-10, virtually all the way to the top.”
The other part of Garbin that the team will miss is the swagger and confidence that she provided, and the energy she injected into the atmosphere of anyone and anything around her.
“We’ll remember her for her goals for sure,” Chatfield said. “But I think her spirit and her presence are definitely a big part of her legacy. It’s something you can’t train a player to have, and she had it.”
“She was always a leader on this team, and she always found a way to relate to all the other girls,” Tharp said. “She was always supportive, and never negative about anything, and that really helped to keep the team morale up during hard times.”
The Future
For now, the oldest person to ever play soccer for the Ducks is focused on just finishing her masters and getting out of school. She says she’s always wanted to teach social studies at the high school level, and coach high school soccer on the side.
And there’s also the option of playing professional soccer abroad, or trying out for the United States women’s team if Erickson can set up a trial for her with national coach Greg Ryan.
But nothing’s for sure beyond that because Toeaina, who is eligible to be drafted in the NFL draft in April, doesn’t know what lies ahead. And Garbin says the odds of her going wherever he ends up are “pretty good.”
“Hopefully I’ll be licensed to teach by then, and probably wherever he’s at, I’ll be a teacher and playing soccer,” she said.
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