Gabby Aviles found herself in an extremely rare position during one soccer match this season, on the ground as a result of a collision with the oncoming and opposing goalkeeper that, as Tony Garcia put it, took her out.
“That doesn’t happen often to Gabby,” the Donna North girls soccer head coach said. “You could hear her mom in the stands yelling, ‘Don’t let her do that to you.’”
Less than a minute later, Aviles, a senior, exacted her revenge.
“She popped up, springs toward the ball super upset, goes and takes the ball away, dribbles past five defenders and is inside their box again,” Garcia said. “The goalie comes out again and Gabby jukes right by her and puts it in the net. All in, like, a 30-second span.
“I turned to my assistant coach and said, ‘Did you see that? She just got past the team and scored after being taken down.’ That’s just the natural Gabby being Gabby. That’s her having it within her.”
Aviles scored 49 goals during the season and finished with 176 career goals, leaving her as the Valley’s third highest girls scorer of all time, earning The Monitor’s 2021 All-Area Girls Soccer Player of the Year award.
Her 49 goals this past season equaled her total from her junior year. While last season was cut short right before the playoffs began due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this season had fewer preseason and non-district matches. Aviles also missed four matches due to injury, and played another in goal for the Chiefs.
“Our goalie got hurt and my first position was goalie, but it’s not my most comfortable position,” Aviles said. “I don’t like the mid but I would play that over goalie any day. It was hard.”
Aviles also overcame dealing with COVID herself at the beginning of the season and it took her a couple games to get back to 100%.
“It was hard then at the beginning of the season, but it made me even hungrier to do better when I got back,” said Aviles, who signed her national letter of intent Thursday with Hardin-Simmons. “After what happened with our season last year, you just didn’t know when it was going to be the end. The first game was tough but then I got back to doing what I know how to do on the field and to help the team.”
Aviles doesn’t walk onto the field with an intimidating stature or look. Before games and with friends her exuberance is in her laughter, clearly enjoying her friends and surroundings. Maybe that’s why she’s challenged so often on the field physically. As she said during her signing, “They know of me, but they don’t know me.”
“Being short, I have to prove myself every time on the field,” Aviles said. “But my dad would tell me whenever I would face a tall or bigger girl that I’m not there to carry them. I’m there to play them. Most of the teams saw they needed to go in pretty strong and knew I wasn’t going to let myself fall.”
“She just has this way of not going down,” Garcia said. “She knows how to maneuver her body is such a special way that even when she’s pushed, or when they attempt to push her, she uses that to her advantage to get away from the defender, go toward the ball and to the goal. She knows how to use that to her advantage. That’s something she just learned, something that’s just within her.”
Aviles scored 43 of her team’s 86 goals during district play, shining during the biggest of games. During one district matchup in Brownsville, during a timeout not too far into the second half, Aviles came over to talk with Garcia.
“She was telling me that the other girls were saying stuff like, ‘Yeah, you can score over there but you’re here now. You’re ours now,” Garcia said. “It didn’t bother her and I couldn’t figure out why they were saying that. She had already scored twice in the first half and once in the second by then. We just kind laughed about it.”
If holding Aviles to three goals is a victory for the opponent, there may not be a better testament as to how good Aviles has been at Donna North and how much of a nightmare she’s been for her opponents.
“One of the factors that placed her above everybody else is her resiliency,” Garcia said. “She fights. She’s willing to overcome whatever there is. Always.”