The team calls her “Annie,” but don’t be fooled into thinking that Penn women’s soccer’s junior goalkeeper Annabel Austen is all sunshine and rainbows like her namesake from the musical.
“This season, people have started calling her Annie, and it’s just a joke because she’s so hardcore, and her name, Annabel, in general is so girly,” junior defender Clare Robke said.
Hardcore, dedicated, impressive, passionate — these are all words that have been used to describe the goaltender for the Red and Blue, who is in her first season as the starter for the team. And those traits have served her well, as she finished the season with three Ivy League Defensive Player of the Week honors, making her the only member of the women’s soccer team to be recognized this year.
Despite the recognition, Austen isn’t satisfied quite yet — she’s always hungry to do more.
“She does everything at level 100,” Robke said. “And she doesn’t really ever let anything fall by the wayside. She really puts her all into every single thing that she does.”
Austen’s dedication to the sport isn’t something new. She’s been living and breathing goalkeeping since she decided she wanted to be a recruited athlete.
Sophomore year of high school is one of the most critical periods in a prospective student-athlete’s life. It marks the official beginning of the college recruitment process — a process that can completely shift a student-athlete’s career trajectory.
As in most other aspects of her life, Austen was more than prepared to tackle the arduous process. But ultimately, it was the things she couldn’t control that derailed her recruiting process. The COVID-19 pandemic meant a temporary end to group activities, including organized sports such as New England FC, the club soccer team that Austen was playing for at the time.
Thus, in the winter of her junior year of high school, with the recruiting process well underway, Austen made a cross-country move from her hometown of Concord, Mass. to Arizona. The huge change proved to be the right decision for Austen as it allowed her to put together a portfolio that caught the attention of Penn’s coaching staff.
When Austen visited Penn, she knew immediately that she was in the right place.
“When I came and visited Penn, I fell in love with the team and the culture that they had created,” Austen said. “And I knew that this was a group that would be 30 of my best friends and my family, and that was something that I just really wanted to be a part of.”
Austen’s decision to bring her talents to the Ivy League wasn’t a unique decision in her family. Her twin brother Cooper Austen also committed as a student-athlete to a member of the Ancient Eight: He is currently a member of the men’s cross country team at Princeton. And while the two shared a rivalry like most siblings tend to do, they were also each other’s biggest supporters.
“We’ve always been best friends,” Austen said. “We’ve always been really competitive … but he was just always there, always supporting me, always my biggest fan, and especially in high school, helped show me what it meant to work hard.”
Austen’s path to becoming the starting goalkeeper on the Penn women’s soccer team was a long one that started all the way back when she first started playing soccer in first grade. Back then, goalkeeper was the last position that Austen wanted to play.
“When I was young, I hated goalkeeper and was terrified to go in net,” Austen said. “And then finally, one game, my coach told me I had to. I had no choice. Everyone else on my team had done it. I went in and the rest is history. [I] just absolutely fell in love with the position and never looked back.”
Her favorite aspect of the position is the pressure that accompanies the role — the knowledge of knowing that her teammates are counting on her to do her job for a full 90-minute game.
“I really like having to be locked in for the full 90, and I don’t really get a chance to turn off or make any mistakes,” Austen said. “I just really like that pressure and that responsibility and like having the ability to help my team and lead my team in that way.”
Once at Penn, Austen wasn’t a day-one starter. Instead, she sat and learned behind All-Ivy caliber keeper Laurence Gladu. After Gladu graduated last year, Austen got the call-up to be the starter for the Quakers.
“I feel very lucky to have been under her for two years,” Austen said. “I felt that when my time came, I was really prepared, so a lot of thanks to her and what she did for me.”
Austen has impressed in her first year as the bonafide starter, featuring as a key piece in each positive result that the Quakers were able to secure this year. In a 1-0 loss against a Princeton side that finished first in the Ivy League, Austen recorded a career-high 10 saves. That same week, Austen posted three major saves in the dying minutes of the team’s game against Brown, which finished third in the conference, to preserve the tie.
Seven saves in the Red and Blue’s next match at Dartmouth also played a key part in the Quakers leaving Hanover, N.H. with a tie and not a loss. And to cap off what would have been a winless season for Penn, Austen put up another seven-save performance in the team’s last game of the season to hold the Big Red scoreless en route to the team’s first win in Ivy League play. For these performances, Austen earned Ivy League Defensive Player of the Week honors three separate times.
“She makes amazing saves in training every single day,” coach Krissy Turner said about Austen after the team’s game against Northern Arizona University earlier this year. “So I think she’s just going to keep learning and growing, and the group in front of her is going to keep becoming more and more confident.”
And her teammates have found solace knowing that Austen has their backs.
“It’s a very hard feeling to describe,” Robke said. “She gives us a sense of calm and a sense of peace amidst all the chaos that’s going on, because as a back line, usually it feels like there’s a lot of pressure, and you can never make a mistake. But knowing how good she is at what she does definitely takes the pressure off at least a little bit.”
Despite the season ending with the Red and Blue missing out on yet another Ivy League tournament, Austen’s hopes for the team moving forward are high. Austen’s journey to her current status has been a long one that has involved plenty of sacrifices, but she has no regrets about any of the decisions that she has made along the way.
“I tell myself to trust the process and trust the people around me, and that hard work pays off,” Austen said. “Because I think I’ve always just been someone who’s worked really, really hard, and sometimes it’s hard in the moment to see where that’s going, but it ends up paying off in the long run.”
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