Like many of Ogden High’s returning starters, striker Kate Pulley envisioned a glorious finish to her senior season regardless of who took the teams’ reins as head coach following Ryan Robinson’s departure and a 3A state championship in 2023.

“The seniors, I think, really wanted to prove ourselves,” Pulley said. “That we’re still the team and that maybe even the seniors wanted to show what we could do with this new team that had a lot of younger girls playing. … We started off the season knowing we wanted to have fun and second, knowing we wanted to prove ourselves.”

However, when newly hired head coach Alexis King and the Tigers got off to a 2-6 start, Ogden’s prospects of another state title run appeared dreamlike at best.

By late August, Ogden found themselves in a tight spot with just two non-region wins and a string of three losses at Weber, home against Davis, and on the road again at Fremont. Still learning about her team, King noticed a special name within her captain circle.

BRIAN WOLFER, Special to the Standard-Examiner

Morgan, reeling from a 3-1 defeat to Ogden in the previous state championship, sat a week away in the Tigers’ Region 13 opener. It was around this time Pulley’s impact on her teammates became almost impossible to ignore.

“(Pulley) stepped up,” King said. “A lot of those games, I think, were mentally hard for some of the younger girls at times, and sometimes emotionally.”

King continued:

“Losing to penalties three times in a row is really hard. The third time sucked because it’s like you don’t think that’s going to happen. An area where Kate stepped up was reassuring the team that if we’re doing our best, we’re working hard and it’s going to pay off later — that was definitely an emotional support for some of the girls on the team.”

Pulley, scoring 35 goals in 17 matches to become the school’s new single-season scoring record holder, is the 2024 Standard-Examiner All-Area Girls Soccer Player of the Year.

Sophomores Seren Gee and Megan Beus were on the receiving end of that encouragement, going on to string two goals and defeat Morgan at home in a game King said reflected the Tigers’ preseason growing pains.

Pulley considers Morgan the annual pinnacle of the season. And recently, that description’s fairly accurate.

Ogden, Morgan, or both, have played in the past five 3A state title games.

“It’s a battle,” Pulley said. “It’s the biggest battle of the season every year. Our preseason was difficult because we’re 3A and we had a lot of games against harder teams, but I think it also set us up to play at a higher level, so that first game against Morgan, we could win it.”

The Tigers later fell to the Trojans on the road, chalking up their only loss of the Region 13 schedule and eventually becoming the region title decider heading into state.

Ogden closed the regular season winning its four remaining matches, embarking on a run that’d pit the Tigers against Morgan one final time in the big one — but without Pulley.

Helping the Tigers string together back-to-back shutouts to reach Herriman, Pulley tore her left meniscus five minutes into Ogden’s semifinal with Manti. Two goals by senior Bella Gray helped Ogden go on to clear the Templars 3-0 and seat themselves with Morgan vying for the title.

With one stroke of her foot, a couple of pops in Pulley’s knee sent her senior season and scholarship at Colorado College into question. She’d made her decision to head for Colorado Springs after visiting early into her junior year. She had it all figured out.

“Once you’re awarded something like this opportunity, you don’t want to do anything to wreck it,” Pulley said. “My first thought was if any of that was going to change. I called (head coach Keri Sanchez) the next day and told her what happened, and they were awesome and didn’t change anything.”

Pulley’s role within the roster changed. She went from a voice on the field to a voice on the sideline mere days before her team’s tallest battle. They’d climbed back from unlikely odds and now had an opportunity to defend their title from a year ago.

They fell short.

Kendall Peterson’s forehead pushed Ogden into runner-up status with a 2-1 loss in the 3A title game, but in the loss Pulley’s lens shifted.

Pulley said the game itself, and the weeks following her surgery, emulated something that of a scout or coach watching hours of game tape simply to become closer to the sport.

On track to return in time for her college debut, Pulley said her time away from the pitch is beginning to pay off.

“It’s something I’m learning,” Pulley said. “I’m watching a lot of soccer like every day now and it sucks that I can’t play, but it’s also giving me a new level of IQ because you have a different perspective when you’re watching it rather than playing it.

“I was watching it being able to see how our team plays with the perspective of how they’re working, how they’re trying different things. How our defense was working, how our offense is working.”

Before being sidelined, Pulley produced a historic number.

It wasn’t revealed to Pulley that her 35 goals are now a school record — snapping the mark previously held by four-time All-State Tiger and University of Portland midfielder Nevaeh Peregrina — until well after the stat was broken.

For Pulley, her own game is secondary. It’s the whole puzzle that she’s interested in.

“For the younger girls as we’re leaving, I think (King) showed a team needs to be unified,” Pulley said. “You need to work together, you need to overcome differences and every player is valuable, whether you’re playing or not. I think it was very team-oriented, maybe more so than we’ve had in the past.”

While King and the Tigers are miles away from electing their next set of captains, Ogden’s head coach certainly knows what to look for.

“How a captain communicates with the team is important,” King said. “As a coach, when you have 35 girls total on your team, you don’t see everything and it’s hard to be that support person for everybody.

“Kate has a lot of confidence in herself and a lot of confidence in our team, and just became that reminder that we can achieve sometimes what looks like the impossible.”

Connect with prep sports reporter Conner Becker via email at cbecker@standard.net.