Xochitl Nguma couldn’t figure why her ankle and foot kept hurting. Surely, she had stayed off it long enough after rolling it before her sophomore season began to be able to play.
Something wasn’t right. That’s when she found out she also had a foot fracture. Her sophomore season — 16 goals and just one district game in — was suddenly over.
This past season, she wanted to make up for that lost time. So, she scored 68 goals before the season was cut short due to the COVID-19 pandemic just prior to Sharyland High playing in the first round of the playoffs.
Those 68 goals — and 18 assists — were more than enough to name the junior The Monitor’s All-Area Girls Soccer Co-Offensive Player of the Year for the 2019-20 season.
Her scoring output tied the girls Valley record, set by Los Fresnos’ Tanya Prazelina in 2017.
Her resume this past year was more than just impressive. It was jaw dropping.
Nguma was named the Brownsville and Donna North tournaments MVP, scoring six and nine goals, respectively, in the two events. She scored 35 district goals and set a team and district record with 10 goals in a game. (She scored seven against the same team earlier in the season.) She was named MVP of District 31-5A and her Rattlers won the district title.
And she believes there’s more to come.
“The fact that I didn’t play last year made me really upset and I wanted to come out and prove myself as a player,” Nguma said. “I wanted to do something momentous in my career and do something important and get noticed because I want to play soccer in college. That was the individual goal of the year and my coaches and teammates knew it.”
It wasn’t easy to achieve. As the district coaches and players started to recognize the superhero type talents in the forward, their strategy changed — and usually ended up with two or even three players marking her. The concept: stop Nguma and you stop Sharyland.
The plan was much easier said than done.
“There was a lot of pushing and pulling. It was very physical, especially when there’s a girl in front and a girl behind. Where do you move?” Nguma said. “Sometimes I would have to push the girl behind me and get in front of the other or get in front of all of them, pass the ball out and ask for a pass back. Sometimes when I would go out for a few minutes, the other team would take the girls out who were marking me, as well. It was insane.
“If a team marked me, I would come back to the ball around midfield. I’d turn and try to dribble past one player and take it down the line then lay it off to a teammate and lay it off to teammate, or dribble past the last player and take the shot. I had to end it.”
She ended it more often than not.
Nguma seemed destined for a certain greatness from an early age. She said her dad knew before she was born that he wanted her to play soccer and would put a ball in the walker with her to start kicking around. She started playing at age 3 and hasn’t stopped.
Her first name, which sounds like “so chill,” is definitely not an apt description of the offensive powerhouse who realized as a freshman (and maybe earlier) that her feet were gifted. Even with a shortened sophomore campaign she has 124 goals and she’s looking not only to break the tie for most goals in a season, but has her eyes set on the all-time goal-scoring record, unofficially at 164.
Even if she breaks those individual records, however, she’s quick to point at what she said is the real reason she’s had those opportunities.
“It’s because of my teammates, my coaches and my family,” she said, adding that she and defender/sweeper/midfielder and coach’s daughter Chloe Ribera have developed a bond over the years. “We’ve been playing together for a long time and I can always count on her. Us playing soccer is all that matters.
“Setting and going for that record could not have been done without everyone. It stressed me a lot this year and it put a lot on me. Without the people I have in my life, there’s no way I would have come close to that record. They all knew I wanted to break that record and they helped me so much.”
She’s not done yet, either.
“There are always more things to do and you have to keep your standards always high,” she said.