Ahead of her Senior Day game on Halloween, goslugs.com sat with soccer player Fiona Nielsen about her time with the Banana Slugs.

goslugs: This season you’ve settled in the 6 (Defensive Midfield) position.

Nielsen: It’s been fun! I’ve been wanting to play midfield since I came here. Even though I grew to really like playing in the back four.

So Freshman year, you just were slotted in as cover or were you recruited as a defender?

I didn’t think I would be playing soccer. I walked onto the team. I decommitted from another school, because I was 'I don’t want to play soccer, I want to come to school for school.'

I wanted to come to Santa Cruz specifically, and once I was here my mom said ‘you should play sports.’ So I went to an ID camp, and that’s where I met (Coach Nadler).  The first time I played at the Lower Field I thought “This is beautiful!”

And if I’m playing here, it’s DIII so I can still make sure I can stay on top of my school and do sports. One of the reasons I didn’t want to do soccer was because I had grown up playing competitive soccer my whole life, and everyone around me went to D-1 schools. I was planning on going D-1 and I realized I couldn’t do that much soccer and have that be my priority. So once Coach Nadler explained the situation to me, I thought “this is a perfect middle ground. I can still play a sport I really care about.”

So I walked on, and growing up I played within the triangle in the midfield; so the defensive mid, link, and sometimes a support striker. I didn’t plan on playing center back, but the first Academy of Art scrimmage, Coach put me in at center back. So I played center back until I got hurt.

It was fun, the only issue was I couldn’t go forward whenever I wanted. I could help build up play or switch the field, but I didn’t have control over other things.

I’d say I relied on Katie Schinnerer, who was a senior when I was a freshman, my other center back. And Peyton (Bell) was my outside back. There was Gaby Powell on the other side. Our backline was nice.

And this year, I expected to be center back again, but every year I’ve asked ”Coach please put me in the middle.” And when she did I was “YES!”

That must have been nice.

It was funny: it'd been so long, the first half of the season I was 'what do I do?’ (LAUGHS)

 It took time to remind myself. Especially with COVID I hadn’t played actual soccer in about two years.

Your fitness certainly wasn’t an issue. You've been a dynamo in the midfield.

It’s how I get my dopamine. I can’t not work out. I got into lifting and long-distance running in college. During COVID I did a lot of trail runs. Fitness is always what I have control over. It’s always been something I liked doing. Playing soccer is a plus.

And I guess it helped we have a lot of depth on defense with this Freshman class and “Super Freshman” class.

Our team culture has been amazing this year. We have a group of girls that are super awesome- personality-wise and skill-wise. Talented and in large numbers, and they are all willing to work hard. 

I was really stoked we have a backline they can come in and play, and we will be confident that they're back there and be a strong unit. On top of that, we have awesome strikers too. With people graduating, we needed certain positions, and we perfectly got them from the freshmen and sophomores.

Sometimes at a DIII school you get a mix of people that really care, and some who don’t at times. Getting people to care is having that team culture of you work hard on this team. This year, it’s a bunch of girls that are going to set the tone for upcoming years.

Then unfortunately, your freshman year got cut short with injury.

That happened in September right before school, and my second year was right before school again.

First time was at Monterey Bay, and Coach wasn’t there. And the second time she wasn’t there either. She never misses anything. We joke that she can’t miss things now or I get hurt.

How do you feel now?

I feel good. I think for a little bit it was tough in the sense I hadn’t played in a really long time, but my expectations of my performance were still how they were when I was playing a lot and had intense training through high school.

Also a bit mentally, I didn't want to get hurt again. I think it took me a while to make sure I understood as long as I’m working hard and doing the best I can, that I’m content with how I play.

You had a great Free Kick to Katie Herm for the first goal vs Dominican this month.

That was my thing, I was very good at sending balls where they needed to go. 

We don’t go for free kicks very often, but we’ve done a decent amount of figuring out the general gist.. They’re kind of hard and it’s so different every time- the score, the players defending us. I don’t think with our season being so short, we have enough time to set up free kicks. Us figuring our playset is the no. 1 priority. 

I feel that against Dominican I felt the most like how I play. Definitely was the most fun game I’ve had this year, and the game we played the best. We’ve gotten better results in other games, but Dominican is the game we had the most opportunities that were built up. We had a lot of multi-dimensional attacks. 

The team flipped a switch against Academy of Art on October 19th with those last fifteen minutes.

That game was weird; I think it was a mix of us flipping the switch and taking advantage of their mistakes.

We’ve been working on taking our opportunities, and when a team messes up, we punish them. One of our things is whenever we mess up, we get punished. We’ve been focusing on how that’s not something we do to other teams. 

I’m excited for the conference. Playing multiple games back-to-back is helpful in figuring out stuff as a player.