To begin with, goalies are different.
They take a perverse pleasure in making other people unhappy. The other team’s shooters, of course.
During practice and especially games, they stand around by themselves a lot, watching and waiting.
And then, in the blink of an eye, they have to react and give up their body for the team. Which is what LSU senior Catalina Rubiano, the goalkeeper with a tattoo of a humpback whale on the inside of her left bicep, does best.
“Rubi is a New Orleansie, nothing-flusters-her, I’m-gonna-beat-you goalie,” LSU coach Brian Lee said. “The ball goes in the back of the next and Rubi goes and gets it, throws it back out and says bring it on.”
And why not? Rubiano, the product of Dominican High School in New Orleans who had offers but walked away from the game before college, is having a blast.
How she ended up leaving the sport twice, diving with whales and last year winning the job as LSU’s goalie is, as she put it, “a long story.”
As she entered her junior year of high school, after yet another long club and Olympic Development Program season, “I felt burned out. So I took the year off.”
No soccer.
“That was when I got scuba certified and it was like a personal journey,” she said. “There was a lot to it.”
But she missed the game and her old club coach, Mark French of Louisiana Fire, she said, encouraged her to play her last year of high school.
“And we ended up winning state and it was pretty awesome,” she said, reflecting on the memory. “It was a wild run and pretty incredible.”
She had interest from some small college programs but the interest wasn’t mutual. So she came to LSU.
“I didn’t play. I wasn’t recruited here,” she said matter-of-factly.
But she did play club and intramurals. And then for the fall semester of her sophomore year, through LSU, Rubiano went to the University of Hawaii.
“I’m very into nature and the ocean,” she said.
But there was more to it, including a lot of diving and developing an affinity for whales.
“It was another journey,” she said. “I was doing my own thing over there, but essentially I was just finding myself.”
When she returned, Rubiano left LSU for the University of New Orleans. That spring, admittedly “in limbo and without direction,” the goalkeeper started thinking about soccer again.
“One day I got a ball and went out to the field and started kicking it around.”
Indeed. All by herself, booting the ball and chasing it down.
“It was one of those weird spiritual moments where it felt really right. It was natural and where I belonged.”
And she asked herself what the chances were of walking on somewhere. Her old coach, French, told her she had limited time but it was worth a shot. She trained and ultimately connected with Lee at LSU.
“He offered me a spot and I jumped on it,” Rubiano said. “I was ecstatic.”
She was on the 2013 LSU team, but never played.
“It was a tough year and quite an adjustment,” she admitted. “And not playing for two years and then being in a D-I program, that was quite a shock to the body.”
The shock got worse when Rubiano was in a car accident that season.
“That was a pretty big setback,” she said, pointing a finger from her gnarly, taped-up goalie’s hand to a vicious scar on her right knee from the wreck that occurred one night after practice.
But nothing was broken and she stuck it out. The spring of 2014 was tough, too, and then last year she won the job on September 26, coming in at halftime against Texas A&M. She started LSU’s remaining six matches.
“She’s a great shot-stopper,” Lee said.
“Catalina is absolutely relentless in goal,” LSU sophomore teammate Jorian Baucom said. “No matter what she’s going to sacrifice her body to get in front of the ball. It’s either the ball or the player and 99 percent of the time she’s making that save.”
Rubiano came up big a few times when LSU opened the season with a significant 2-1 victory last week at Oregon. The Tigers, 1-0-1 after returning home and tying Northwestern State 1-1 in two overtimes in which Rubiano played all 110 minutes, entertain Western Kentucky on Friday.
LSU finished a disappointing 5-13-2 last year, 1-9-1 in the Southeastern Conference.
“It was a bad season for the team, but for me there was a silver lining. It was my good year. I got to start,” Rubiano said.
“But for the team I look at it like you can’t succeed without failing at least once. We learned so much from it and where we’re at right now is such 180. And it makes sense, because we’ve put in so much work and worked so hard at developing culture and working hard on the field. Those 6 a.m. fitness sessions and knowing we have each other’s backs, especially the seniors. There’s nine of us and we’re very close. And I feel awesome about this season.”
She also has a chance to play for, of all places, Colombia, her father’s native country. Andres Rubiano went to California as an exchange student when he was high school and then visited his older sister, who lived in New Orleans. He stayed but has taken Catalina to his home of Cali, Colombia many times.
“I always had the crazy idea in the back of my head of playing for a national team one day,” she said.
Last year, when Lee was recruiting Gabriela Maldonado in Bogota, he made the connection for Rubiano. It worked out great, because Maldonado is now an LSU freshman and Rubiano got to train with the Colombian national team in the summer of 2014 with an eye on doing it again and hopefully playing for them. Not coincidentally, she’s been scuba diving with humpback whales in Colombia.
But in the meantime there’s this season and the high hopes that go with it.
“We’ve had team meetings where we talk about our goals and we think it’s not out of the question to go to the NCAA Tournament,” she said. “We want to win the SEC Tournament and we have the mentality and the momentum to do big things this year.
“Honestly, if we go as far as winning the SEC there’s nothing to keep us from going far.”