Soccer
Favorite athlete: Lionel Messi
Favorite team: Manchester United
Most embarrassing/funniest thing that has happened while competing in sports: Peeing myself while running our high school fitness test
Music on playlist: Country Music
Future plans: To major in Engineering and play soccer at the University of Dayton
Word to live by: “Be uncommon out of the uncommon”.
One goal before turning 30: Run a marathon
One thing people don't know about me: I love to bake
By Andrew Robinson
A person can be an artist in anything.
Paint, dance, music, food, photography, whatever the medium, there is always a select tier that perceives it differently than everyone else. What elevates that group isn’t talent, although that’s certainly a significant factor, but a willingness to endure the path to mastering that medium.
Liv Grenda’s art is soccer and the Pennridge senior left her canvas full during a record setting career.
“I’ve always loved the technical part of the game,” Grenda said. “When I was younger, I was always one of the smaller players. Playing ECNL growing up, it felt like everyone around me was so big so the part of my game I focused on was my technical piece.
“Now that I’ve gotten older and had the chance to grow, I think focusing so much on my technical piece was really helpful to me being able to control the ball as well as I can and create those plays.”
There wasn’t much Grenda didn’t accomplish in four years with the Rams. Two state titles, two District 1 titles, four SOL Colonial championships and the program’s career scoring record with 66 goals highlight an impressive resume that picked up a couple more accolades at the end of November when she was named to the PA Soccer Coaches Association all-state team and as a United Soccer Coaches All-Region midfielder.
It might have seemed easy at times for the midfielder, the ball seemingly dancing between her feet as she dribbled on the move or ducking and swerving through the air as she whistled another strike into the back of another net. But like any artist’s work, the finished product only followed in the wake of unseen toiling, repetitions and frustrations not meant to be aired publicly.
“Right before COVID hit and that break between March and August before high school started is when I really started to think about how much I could improve,” Grenda said. “I knew my technical skill was a special part of my game and I wanted to really hyper-focus on it.
“I really got into juggling, I started out with my brother outside and I think I ended up crying every single time because I wanted to learn how to do it so bad and just couldn’t do it.”
Some people can juggle a ball all they want, but as soon as they get put on a field in a competitive game, they don’t offer anything. Grenda’s aim was to fine-tune her touch so much that anytime the ball came off her foot on the move, she’d know where it was going and wouldn’t have to break her line of sight to look down and check her feet.
In Pennridge’s first meeting with CB South this season, Grenda scored a goal where she picked up the ball and without breaking stride or her gaze, navigated the Titans’ defense and threaded a shot between two defenders and into the far post of the goal 20 yards out from where she’d shot it.
“By the end, I was able to hit almost 2,000 juggles and do certain tricks and things like that,” Grenda said. “That’s where I really got better at that skill and really learned the touch on the ball more than I would have.
“I like to do certain tricks, like around-the-world, so getting a different part of your foot to touch the ball and understanding if you hit it at a certain angle, where the ball will move in certain ways and certain directions became a really big part of my game during that time.”
Grenda tallied 29 goals as a senior, helping Pennridge to a 25-0-1 record and the team’s second PIAA 4A title in four years, the first coming in her freshman year during the 2020 season. Rams coach Audrey Anderson has known Grenda for a long time, and it’s not the highlight goals that have most impressed her when it comes to Grenda.
“Consistency is a great word to use for her,” Anderson said. “She never falls below the expectation. I remember talking with her parents before she got to the high school, and they said she was so excited and would do anything that needed to be done and she really did.
“It was almost like the moments were never too big for her.”
Anderson saw Grenda elevate her standard each year she was in the program, saying it culminated in a point where “you couldn’t ignore Liv Grenda.”
“Most players at the varsity level are good with the ball at their feet, their first touch on the ball on the ground is really good. Her first touch in the air is outstanding,” Anderson said. “I can’t tell you how many times I watched a ball be played in the air, she brings it down to her feet and is on the dribble right away or she’s shooting.
“Her presence in the midfield, not many people are knocking her off the ball, you’re not taking the ball from her. Everybody has their off games, but when she had an off game, it never felt like an off game - you would never know it. When she had the ball, you knew something good was going to happen.”
Artists are also performers, their next work expected to at least match, if not outdo, their last. It’s those who can embrace that part of it who set themselves apart.
Grenda didn’t have a perfect passing game every time out, she didn’t score every time she played, but she did get the expectations that came with her ability.
“It’s a cool feeling to be under that pressure and have to perform, to have to go out there and do my job, play for my teammates and leave it all out on the field,” Grenda said.
The Numbers
Grenda joked she got her sports acumen from her mom Christa, a Division I basketball player at Monmouth, and her smarts from her dad Terence, who carries an engineering degree from Villanova.
Athletics and smarts run in her family, with both of Liv’s older brothers moving on to the college level. Marco was a successful player for the Rams’ boys’ soccer team and went on to have a nice career at Ursinus playing from 2019-22, while TJ is a junior at Susquehanna University on the cross country team.
Liv started out as a three-sport player in her early days, trying basketball and softball in addition to soccer. One of them stuck.
“I first started playing when I was three or four, but I hated softball and basketball,” Grenda said. “I was scared of the ball in softball and just did not like basketball at all, so I gravitated to soccer. My oldest brother played it and I always looked up to him and wanted to follow what he did.”
Even with a few years’ difference in age between them, Marco let his little sister tag along when he went to work out and gave her some of the juggling drills that helped build her technical proficiency. When it was time for Grenda to step up to high level club soccer with FC Bucks on the ECNL circuit, she did so a year above her age group where she’d undoubtedly be one of the youngest and smallest players on the field.
“Playing all these girls that were bigger than me and better than me, I strived to be as good as them,” Grenda said. “I think it was either eighth grade or freshman year - seeing the seniors at Pennridge like Lindsey DeHaven commit to colleges and figure out they wanted to play in college, that’s when I knew I wanted to do that and I wanted to be the best version of myself and go to the highest level I could possibly go to and try to make an impact.”
Soccer isn’t known as a huge numbers sport. Unlike baseball or basketball or even football where there seems to be a statistic for everything, soccer’s a little less.
However, the analytical side is there if someone is willing to look for it. Grenda, an admitted math person, found the appeal in that part of the game and it helps explain the basis of the skills that make her an artist on the pitch.
“I truly don’t know, but in my hea, I like to think of it as a specific type of focus of every touch on the ball. I’m a math person, it’s my favorite subject, so understanding kind of the angle of hitting the ball, your touch, momentum shifting if someone is on your back and spinning off them, I find all of that really interesting,” Grenda said. “I think that’s just always clicked with me.
“A lot of it comes from coaches when I was younger building that confidence in my dribbling and being willing to take players on. As I’ve gotten older, I have a better understanding of where I’m going to be placing the ball to move around players.”
Anderson called Grenda a “soccer-head” and said the midfielder has one of the best soccer IQs of anyone she ever coached. At the same time, Grenda was always receptive to her teammates’ ideas and would try to see a way to implement different thoughts or movements based on what they felt could work for them.
“I like the logic of it and how everything pieces together and makes sense in the real world,” Grenda said. “Of course, I try to, but you can relate it back to soccer in all the specific little pieces and details of the game.
“Everyone always says ‘make triangles on the field,’ but that comes from certain angles opening up a certain way and those are the little things that make all the difference in games.”
The Debut
Grenda was absolutely stellar as a freshman, starting all season alongside classmates Anna Croyle, Sophie Craig and Casey Malone and looking far from her first-year status for most of it.
Grenda had a little bit of an idea of what to expect from watching her brother go through his career and watching the girls’ teams in the years preceding her, but even that didn’t compare. The midfielder pointed to two specific moments in her freshman year that showed her not only what high school soccer was all about, but also what playing for the Rams meant.
Pennridge has been the class of its conference, this fall marked the team’s eighth straight SOL title in either the Continental or Colonial since 2016, so every other SOL side goes all-in to get a result over the Rams.
“We’d won every single game until we played CB West away at their place, and I remember when we lost that they all celebrated on their field,” Grenda said. “That’s when I started understanding teams take this super-seriously and these teams are out to beat us, so we have to make sure we give our best game to every team.”
That would be Pennridge’s only loss of the 2020 season, but it didn’t mean the rest of the way was a clear path. The state semifinals against Parkland would be the other moment that has continued to stick with Grenda and not just because she scored one of the biggest goals in Pennridge history to win it 4-3 in double overtime.
“That was such a crazy game, I think we all felt the pressure of knowing we had to put away our opportunities,” Grenda said.
In a case of only the final result seeing publication, Anderson is always one to back up the work her players do behind the scenes. Grenda was never an exception to that. If anything, the midfielder took it to the next level by often going from a team practice to strength training or a technical session, anything to keep pushing her boundaries further and further out.
“She puts a lot of work in, people may just think she’s naturally gifted and while she is, she also has an incredibly high work ethic that really shows when she’s playing,” Anderson said. “Everyone sees our score lines, but they don’t know what these kids put in.”
The Break
Grenda knew something was wrong, the pain emanating from her foot was proof enough of that.
With eight starters back from the prior season, the Rams went into the fall of 2021 with dreams of repeating as state champions. Plus, they’d had some naysayers from the year prior because of the protracted COVID-19 season they wanted to prove wrong.
Unfortunately, Grenda’s broken foot ended up sidelining her for more than half the regular season and the entire playoff run.
“That was a hard one,” Grenda said. “My doctor kept telling me I’d have a chance to come back for the state championship game if we were to make it, so that was keeping my hopes up.”
It wasn’t just Grenda - the Rams lost a couple more key players to injury with a few others gutting it out to play through their own. While they battled, it ended up being too much to overcome, the season ending in the state quarterfinals in a shootout loss to Conestoga and more than a few “what if” questions still lingering.
“The what if, what would have happened if she wasn’t injured sophomore year, I can only imagine,” Anderson said. “When you’re losing a player like Liv who is so dynamic on the ball and isn’t afraid to shoot, get into the box and draw fouls, you lose a big piece of what made your team successful. It was a piece of that puzzle we were not expecting to lose, but I do think everything happens for a reason.
“It was a motivational type thing for her where she saw ‘my season ended too soon, so I’m not going to take anything for granted moving forward.’”
Grenda took the injury in stride as best she could. She couldn’t be on the field, but she wanted to be there for her best friends and teammates who were giving their all in any way she could.
As for the break, well, it’s sort of still there.
“I broke a piece off the outside of my foot, and they just kept hoping it would re-attach,” Grenda said. “It never did. It's not, I guess floating, but it’s still in there. I went through physical therapy, and they said everything around it is just holding it there, but it never reconnected.
“It hasn’t bothered me since and I hope it won’t ever.”
The Mask
Grenda had never had so much as a nosebleed in her life prior to October 13, 2022.
That night, in a pivotal SOL contest at CB East, an inadvertent elbow caught Grenda square in the face. Almost immediately, she was off the field in a bit of a state of shock.
Grenda not only had a nosebleed, she had a displaced nasal fracture that had to be reset and protected.
Grenda had her nose reset four days later, on Oct. 17. That night, she showed up at War Memorial Field an hour before tap and played against CB West.
It’s still the defining moment of her career as far as her coach is concerned.
“She had her nose reset, came back and played as if it was no big deal,” Anderson said. “She said, ‘I’m going to play.’ I just thought ‘wow, this kid is willing to sacrifice so much for this team.’
“It just goes to show what these kids, because they believed in this program, were willing to do and that’s just how Liv is wired.
“She said it was the worst thing she’d ever been through, then goes out and plays a soccer game an hour later. That’s how I’ll remember her.”
When Grenda returned to the field, she did so behind a plastic face mask more often seen on a basketball court than a soccer pitch. Aside from former Detroit Pistons guard Rip Hamilton, almost nobody seems to enjoy wearing those masks, and Grenda was decidedly in that group.
It wasn’t comfortable and worse off, it hindered one of the most important aspects of the way she played.
“It was very difficult getting used to it and having to start looking down instead of just taking a glimpse down,” Grenda said. “There was a reflectiveness in the mask, which is weird, it was weird to play with, so getting used to it was pretty hard.”
Grenda adapted eventually but still didn’t feel quite like herself as the Rams moved into the District 1 playoffs last fall. Hosting a Council Rock North team they’d had a tough time with in the regular season, Pennridge went into the half trailing 1-0.
That was when Grenda made a decision.
“We came into the locker room after wearing it the first half and I just left it in there,” Grenda said. “I said if we’re going to lose, I’m not going to do it wearing the mask. I was going to go out and give everything I’ve got and hope for the best.”
Her vision no longer disrupted, Grenda scored a vintage goal in the second half for the winner in a 3-2 Rams win to kickstart the postseason run.
As fate would have it, Grenda broke her nose again this year to give the mask a second tour of duty. This time, she didn’t have to get her nose reset and she was able to sit a game before returning but at least the reunion wasn’t totally rocky.
“This year, I think I was more ready,” Grenda said. “I already knew the mindset I had to come in with to play with it and push through it.”
It also worked out that while her vision was hindered in one way, it was opened in another way. Having to dial back some of her strengths on the field showed Grenda where she wasn’t as strong and gave her some more motivation to improve on it.
“Having the mask on made me realize that even if I wasn’t able to contribute as much technical skill, I could still contribute with my work rate and help defensively,” Grenda said. “The mask gave me an opportunity to step back, look at and realize I did need to work on it and that was my chance to focus on and get better at it.”
The Finale
Grenda came back a more determined player for her senior season.
It was a trait she shared with all her senior classmates, but even Anderson noticed quickly there was something different in the way Grenda was playing this fall. On the teams’ opening night, with standout striker Tori Angelo out, Grenda took charge against Owen J Roberts in a 4-0 Rams win.
Once Angelo re-joined the lineup, the duo meshed right away, and the rest of the team seemed to fall in step alongside them.
“The players behind her recognized ‘she wants to go to goal, she wants to score goals and we’re going to help her,’” Anderson said. “That was the mentality the players had this year. There’s always the piece of the puzzle of who’s going to be the leading scorer and is it going to become an issue. The girls on the team just really rallied and said let’s do this because we know it’s what we can do.”
Aside from the second broken nose, nothing seemed to slow Grenda this season. Her teammates dubbed October as #Livtober on the team Instagram page, and by the time the postseason rolled around, she was playing in top form.
Once states got going, the coaches also tallied up her goals and let Grenda know she had a chance to break the program scoring record. It wasn’t something she’d ever considered and when factoring in all the time she missed - or games she didn’t get in the shortened 2020 season - her goal against Parkland in the state semifinals to break it was a pretty remarkable accomplishment.
“When Aud mentioned that our freshman year was basically half a season and sophomore year I played less than half a season, I think that’s when it hit me how crazy it was,” Grenda said. “It was basically taking a full season out of it, so to break the record, it wasn’t something I saw coming.”
Grenda is off to Dayton, where she will continue playing and plans to pursue an engineering degree of her own although she’s not sure what specific discipline she’ll focus on yet. The Flyers aren’t a top of the table team in the A-10, but Grenda saw a lot of potential in the program, a coaching staff that wasn’t afraid to play the best teams and an opportunity to make an impact early on.
Anderson adamantly believes Grenda’s best is still yet to come and she’s excited to see what the next form of Grenda’s artistry on a field looks like going to the next level.
“It’s crazy to look back,” Grenda said. “Thinking back to freshman year, I remember the moment exactly when Leah (Malone) scored and we won and to think it was four years ago and now we did it again in our final year, it’s crazy how much of a full circle moment it was.
“It’s a great feeling to know we came in really strong and we’re going out on such a high note.”
