SARATOGA SPRINGS, NY – Lyndsey Miller has spent quite a bit of her life in Saratoga but hasn’t been able to call herself a resident for some time now.
This year, she decided to hang out for a little longer and go to school at Saratoga Springs High School. The beneficiary of that decision has been the Saratoga girl’s soccer team.
“I actually grew up here for six years,” Miller said, the Blue Streaks new center-forward. “My parents got divorced, my mom went to California and I went with her. I came back every summer to see my dad and this past summer I just decided to finish school out here.”
“I wasn’t expecting to have her,” said Saratoga coach Adrienne Dannehy. “One of my other seniors said that there was a girl who just moved into town and she came to play with us over the summer. She had told her to come try out, but she wasn’t sure if she was going to play.”
Miller’s initial connection to the captain’s practices over the summer began with ’21 graduate, Emme Baldwin, who connected Miller with Schuyler Eddy and Mia DiBlasi.
Eddy then started telling her coach about the new player they’d just found.
“Lyndsey had just moved here and was coming off one injury after another, but she was like one of the only ones of our whole team showing up to all our practices that we were planning,” Eddy said. “It was that commitment to want to get better that really stood out to me.”
During her freshman year, Miller started for and was one of three freshman to make the varsity team at Arroyo Grande High School in California, a coastal town about 200 miles north of Los Angeles.
Her first of two major injuries occurred during her sophomore season when she broke her hip during a game.
After recovering from the hip injury, Miller then broke her fibula and tore her ACL and meniscus in her first game back. The road back to the field became even longer then expected.
“Even after my first injury, people were surprised that I was willing to risk getting hurt again, which I did, but I haven’t given it up yet and I’m not going to,” Miller said. “Coming off of two serious injuries, I was pretty skeptical even of playing my senior year and I wasn’t sure until pretty last minute.”
“We didn’t know if she was going to play, because of the injuries,” Eddy said. “She finally got cleared to play, she didn’t do any contact over the summer and finally when she got cleared for contact, it was like two days before the preseason started.”
“The first day, I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, this kid’s going to help us big-time,'” Dannehy said of her first impressions of Miller at tryouts. “She hit the ground running and she hasn’t stopped. She just brings so much energy to a team that already had great energy. She fits right into the cohesive unit we have this year and is really another great leader for our young team. She really completes our puzzle.”
In Saratoga’s first game of the regular season Miller scored the decisive goal in a 3-2 victory over Queensbury.
Against Columbia, she scored three of Saratoga’s five goals, all on corner kicks and two with her head.
“I’ve been serving corners for years now, since ninth grade and nobody’s been able to get anything on them,” Eddy explained. “Lyndsey comes in this year and it’s been one after another that she’s been able to put in. She was always saying, ‘coming off an injury, I don’t know if I’m going to be as good,’ and now she shows up and kills it every single day.”
Miller wasn’t taking all of the credit though.
“Schuyler is such a composed player. She doesn’t let anything get into her head and as much as it may affect her, she doesn’t show it and that’s something a great player knows how to do.”
“They’ve been really welcoming since day one and I couldn’t be more appreciative of that, especially being a senior at a new school,” Miller added on her fellow seniors Eddy, DiBlasi, Madison McMaster and Isabelle Shields. “I wouldn’t say I was scared, but I definitely set myself back a little and they just accepted me from day one and I feel like we all just clicked.”
The Columbia game also marked Senior Night for the Blue Streaks, which actually had to change dates due to a conflict with the high school’s (virtual) open house.
“I knew that they were coming, but because Senior Night got switched kind of on short notice, I wasn’t sure,” Miller said of her mom and younger brother being able to attend the game. “Everything worked out and they were able to come.”
“She had like the biggest crowd,” Eddy joked.
The two seniors discussed what might be next for them as they begin to make decisions on the next phase of their lives.
“That’s where I joke with Lyndsey because I want to go to California,” Eddy said. “That’s where I want to go, I just feel like there’s so much more to do, compared to here. There’s so many big cities you can go explore.”
While college soccer is still on the table for each, Miller’s focus the last couple of years has been on returning to the field.
Whether she finds a spot with a college program or ends up playing club, one thing is for sure:
“I can’t give up soccer,” she said.
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