Airpods on full blast, cleats laced up, and hair braided, senior Kylie Anderson runs onto the field to warm up. Chills fill the air as the stress and excitement rush over her. The time on the scoreboard hit zero and the team wraps arms around one another to huddle up for Harker girls soccer’s first-ever Central Coast Section game. Reflecting on her first high school soccer season and realizing how far the team has come, she listens to the team captains preach leaving everything out on the field since CCS was either win or go home.

After being invited to join her cousin, senior Claire Anderson, at a soccer practice when she was eight years old, Kylie developed an unbreakable love for the sport, from the cohesiveness of the game to the team atmosphere. She was especially drawn to the urgency with which each player had to fulfill their role and the way every position depended on the others; no aspect of the game felt isolated or self-contained.

That same year, she joined the Los Gatos United Soccer Club, the team that first sparked her love for the sport. Over time, she built meaningful relationships with her teammates and coaches, and her role as a goalie helped her develop strong leadership and teamwork skills. These qualities have carried into her four years on the Harker girls soccer team, where she now serves as co-captain alongside Claire. As captain, she works to keep team morale high, encourages teammates through moments of low confidence and directs players on the field to adjust their positioning, experiences that have been central to her growth as a leader.

“I love the leadership position that I have,” Kylie said. “Even as a freshman, being the goalie, I’m meant to act as an on-field coach. Something special about Harker soccer compared to club soccer, is that everybody comes from different soccer backgrounds, so there will be some people where it’s their first year playing. It’s fun to know that I am that person for somebody who looks to me for guidance.”

Beyond soccer, Kylie applies her leadership skills in the workplace as a Membership Counselor at Power4 Pilates, where her mother is an instructor. With over a year of experience interacting with both potential and current members, Kylie values the variety of relationships she’s able to build, which mirror the connections she fosters on the Harker soccer team.

“Working has definitely taught me a lot of maturity,” Kylie said. “Working has definitely shown me a lot about how to act in the professional sphere and through talking with the members, I have had so many interesting conversations. It gives me so much perspective that I wouldn’t have had otherwise just talking to people my age. There’s people from all different backgrounds, all different ethnicities, and you really learn a lot from everybody you talk to.”

Kylie’s ability to connect with others shines both on the soccer field and in the Pilates studio. Claire, who has witnessed Kylie thrive in every environment, often highlights her warmth and appreciates how rare that quality is.

“I feel Kylie can be friends with anyone and she can just have a full, genuine conversation with anyone she sees, which is such a special quality to have that I don’t see in anyone else,” Claire said. “She’s the type of person that can make you feel like you’ve known her forever and feel comfortable around her even if you just met her.”

English teacher Lizzy Schimenti echoes Claire’s praise for Kylie’s warmth and friendliness, noting her kindness toward classmates in both academic and social settings. Having taught Kylie in English 3: American Literature during junior year and English 4: Short Fiction in senior year, Schimenti values the consistently positive energy Kylie brings to the classroom.

“Kylie is a super bubbly person, even when she was in my first-period English 3 class,” Schimenti said. “She has a great attitude in the classroom in terms of prioritizing and making sure her peers are included and feel seen.”

Schimenti’s observations extend beyond the classroom as Kylie’s commitment to fostering inclusivity carried over into her time working at Harker Summer. Searching for a productive way to spend her summers that includes her interest in working with kids, she worked at Harker lower school summer camp for two summers as a Junior Staff and made it a priority that everyone felt welcomed and engaged.

“I was never one of the kids who went to summer camp because my family lived so close by,” Kylie said. “So it was really fun being part of that experience, even though I wasn’t one of the campers, to just make that experience as fun as possible for them. Even though they may not have initially wanted to be there, it was just fun being able to have complete control over how much fun they had that summer.”

Gifted with the ability to connect with people of all ages, from campers and soccer teammates to coworkers, Kylie has a natural way of making everyone around her feel seen and valued. Close friend and fellow senior Sahil Varma, who met Kylie in middle school advisory, admires how thoughtfully she considers others’ emotions in every interaction, regardless of who she’s speaking with.

“I really admire her outlook on how she can balance out the positives and negatives of anything and adapt how she responds or reacts to things based on what the other person is feeling,” Sahil said. “She’s super easy to talk to and always makes time to listen to whatever is bothering someone regardless of how little the problem may seem or how close she is to that person.”

Kylie brings that same thoughtfulness and balanced perspective to the soccer field, where she leads team huddles as a captain and fosters strong connections with her teammates. She values every opportunity to build relationships, whether with new teammates, potential members at work, or peers in the classroom. Her appreciation for diverse perspectives enables her to form meaningful, lasting connections across all areas of her life.

 “A lot of us go from elementary through high school with the same group of people, and playing a sport is such a different bonding experience,” Kylie said. “Especially in a team sport, you have no choice but to build that chemistry with your teammates and so it’s a really special connection that you can’t really get anywhere else besides on a sports field.”