The LSU soccer team went all the way to Oceania to recruit two longtime friends and teammates.
Junior defender Megan Lee and sophomore goalkeeper Lily Alfeld played together while growing up in the New Zealand national program and are now teammates at LSU (8-4-3, 2-4-1 Southeastern Conference).
Lee went to Massey High School in Auckland, New Zealand, while Alfeld attended Lincoln High School in Christchurch, New Zealand.
Lee was a three-sport athlete in high school, competing in track and field, touch rugby and soccer. She was the Auckland Region High School Senior 100-meter and 200-meter champion, and she led her high school team to the 2008 Touch Rugby Regional Championship.
The raw speed she displays on the pitch stems from her track and field background paired with the physicality of rugby has made her one of the top defenders in the SEC.
Alfeld was named the Coastal Spirit Goalkeeper of the Year in 2011, and in 2013 she accepted an athletic scholarship to LSU. She spent the
majority of her youth career commuting between Christchurch and Auckland while training with the New Zealand National Team.
It takes about 90 minutes to get from Alfeld’s hometown of Christchurch to Lee’s hometown of Auckland by plane. Each player who didn’t live in Auckland was paired with a host family while they trained for the FIFA U-17 Women’s World Cup in Trinidad and Tobago in 2010. Alfeld was paired with Lee during her first stint with the national program.
Alfeld said living with Lee and her family was a great experience because they treated her like she was family.
“It was fun living with her,” Alfeld said. “She has a lovely family. I got to know her really well, so we’ve known each other ever since.”
Sometimes the National Team held weekend training sessions, forcing Alfeld to fly back home for school the next week. She said balancing the rigorous National Team’s schedule with school was tough.
“It was intense,” Alfeld said. “Especially at that time because it was my first serious football situation that I had ever been in, and I was only 14. It was almost like being thrown in the deep end and getting used to the hectic lifestyle of training constantly.”
In New Zealand, high school soccer is meant to prepare players for club soccer and if they’re lucky enough, they’ll get a chance to represent the country on a national level, Lee said. As a result, the level of competition at some schools is not as strong as club soccer.
Lee said her family — particularly her father — would hint at trying to recruit Alfeld to live with them in Auckland full-time during the school year so they could play together at Massey High School.
“Since she was a goalkeeper, my dad kept saying, ‘Let’s keep her here because we need a goalkeeper for our high school team,’” Lee said. “We were secretly trying to train her up to be one of our goalkeepers, but she had a to go back to Christchurch.”
Lee cashed in on her second chance to recruit Alfeld once she found out Alfeld was interested in attending LSU. The two provide support for each other off the pitch because they both face the same problems when it comes to traveling or obtaining certain documents like the I-20.
“She’s the only person I can go back and talk to and use our New Zealand lingo,” Lee said. “I’ll say a one sentence line to her, and everyone else around us will be like, ‘What?’ It’s good in that respect, we can keep holding on to our roots from back home.”