Sacramento State women’s soccer goalie Jenny Lawrence is crazy.

Sounds like a personal attack, right? Actually it isn’t. Most players on the team would agree that maybe Lawrence has a screw or two loose.

To a goalie this is a term of endearment.

“She’s completely out of her mind,” head coach Katie Poynter said. “She slide-tackles balls on concrete.”

Lawrence plays the game with unmatched intensity and she demands the same from her team. One time in practice she nearly dove head first into the goal post attempting a save.

“She’s fearless and she demands that her team give 110% in front of her,” Poynter said.

Lawrence, a freshman hailing from Carlmont High School in Belmont, Calif., has played soccer since she was 4 years old. Much of that time has been spent playing both goalie and fullback.

“I didn’t get really serious about playing goalie until I was a freshman in high school,” Lawrence said.

When asked what she thought of her coaches calling her “crazy” Lawrence just smiled and said, “You have be crazy to play goalie. It has to be in your blood.”

That’s one of the things that stand out most about Lawrence.She does not deny that maybe there are a few bricks missing from her load when she gets on the field. Off the field she is as normal as anybody, but between the lines something just clicks.

“I live for the intensity of the game,” Lawrence said.

Lawrence is listed at 5-foot-7 in the team program, but that is a bit generous. Lawrence freely admits that she is actually only 5-foot-4. She is small for a goalie, but that doesn’t stop her from making big plays at the biggest of times. “She plays big,” Poynter said. “She plays like she’s 5-foot-10, not 5-foot-4.”

Poynter also added that Lawrence is in incredible physical shape and routinely is the first one done when the team does wind sprints. Assistant coach Randy Dedini, a former collegiate goalie who works with Lawrence one-on-one during practice, said that what Lawrence lacks in size she more than makes up for in quickness.

“She has very strong instincts as a goalie,” Dedini said. “It’s very hard to teach what she has.”

During practice it isn’t uncommon to see the whole team on one half of the field doing a drill and on the other side there are Lawrence and Dedini working on diving drills, attempting to improve Lawrence’s range.

When asked if she ever gets lonely over there by herself with Dedini, Lawrence cracks an ear-to-ear smile and says “No, I love Randy. He is the best goalie coach ever.”

The team does not have a backup goalie, which almost made for a desperate situation on August 28 when Lawrence was kicked by a UC Riverside player in the left hand, breaking her middle finger. Somehow the coaches knew Lawrence would not miss any time.

“We were originally told that she would be out two to three weeks,” Poynter said. “But she was playing in a game five days later.”

Poynter admits that Lawrence’s toughness has spoiled the coaches a bit.

“We never really thought she would be out, even when they told us that she needed two weeks. We knew she would beg us to let her play.” They were right. Lawrence wears a brace on the finger, which she admits still gives her trouble in the morning and that she still cannot fully bend the finger.

Lawrence has played in four games since the injury, helping her team to a 1-2-1 record while allowing only four goals in that time. Lawrence has amazed coaches, teammates and fans forcing three shutouts in her first six collegiate games.

It’s no surprise that Lawrence is playing through her hand injury, seeing as how she was kicked in the face during her senior year at Carlmont so severely that it broke her nose and blackened her eye. “I would have come back in that game if they didn’t make me sit out,” Lawrence said. Two weeks later she was back in the net.

Lawrence credits her growth as a goalie to a team she played with in 2004, a club team called the Stanford Quake in Palo Alto.

“Playing on that team improved my game so much,” Lawrence said. “The coaches were great.”

There was a time, however, that soccer was not quite so enjoyable. In 2001, as a member of the Palo Alto Blue, Lawrence explained that she had tendonitis in her left knee and shoulder and the coaches always made her play through it.

“I was always re-injuring my knee and shoulder,” Lawrence said. “I didn’t like the coaches of that team.”

Just a few years later she is a college goalie, winning awards for defensive excellence from her team’s conference. Lawrence received the Big Sky Defensive Player of the Week award after shutting out archrival UC Davis on Aug. 26. The Aggies took 20 shots, but were unsuccessful on each, thanks to Lawrence.

Dedini raves about how good Lawrence already is, but he is absolutely giddy about the fact that she can get even better. “We’re working on her jumping ability and improving her range,” Dedini said. “She also needs to get a little more physically strong.”

Don’t bet against seeing a stronger, faster, higher-jumping Jenny Lawrence as her soccer career progresses at Sac State. She is just crazy enough to pull it off.

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Benn Hodapp can be reached at [email protected]