Soccer star keeps making goals

Merrick soccer phenom Kayla Cappuzzo, a peerless player in Calhoun High School soccer history, has sustained her athletic career’s meteoric rise in her freshman year at Northeastern University, contributing to her team’s NCAA tournament run and joining the U-20 Women’s National Team training camp roster in January.

Cappuzzo, 19, had four goals and a team-high five assists in her first year playing NCAA Division I soccer. Prior to college, she displayed her skills playing for the U-18 Women’s National Team. Facing Sweden in her first game, Cappuzzo got a goal and an assist, demonstrating her ability at soccer’s highest level for her age group.

She started her soccer career when she was four years old. She said she remembers watching her brother play and wanting to be just like him. Today she still sees the sport as a way to forget the other weights of the world.

“I just like being with my teammates,” Cappuzzo said. “It’s something that gets my mind off of everything else. It’s like a stress-reliever kind of thing.”

Though the Cappuzzo may not have known where her career would take her, her parents knew by her early teenage years that she had the talent to go far.

“We realized that she was a very special soccer player probably around 12 or 13 years old,” said her father Michael Cappuzzo. “We would go to games, and when the game was over, the parents on the other team, the opposing coach and sometimes even the referees would come up to us and tell me what an excellent player Kayla is and how much they enjoyed watching her play.”

In high school, Cappuzzo did not disappoint those early expectations. She was a four-year starting varsity player for Calhoun and helped her team reach the Nassau County championship game from 2011-13. She achieved numerous individual accomplishments, including the 2014 Gatorade Player of the Year award, which recognizes athletic excellence as wells as academic achievement and character on and off the field.