Water Polo
Favorite athlete: I can’t pick one. However, my favorite athletes are not famous, but I know them well. My older brothers are my favorite athletes because they’re the ones that taught me work ethic, and they taught me what real strength is, compared to the “fake strength” that people like to show off.
Favorite team: I don’t think I have a favorite team, but probably the Cowboys.
Favorite memory competing in sports: My favorite sports memory was probably beating North Penn this past season for the first time in almost a decade. Being the goalie in such an intense game was stressful, but I don’t think I’ve ever been so proud of my team before.
Most embarrassing/funniest thing that has happened while competing in sports: Oh goodness, I always make weird faces when I tread up, and it’s a habit at this point because I hold water in my mouth during the game and spit it out (it’s how I remember to breathe out when I tread up), so I have the funniest collection of pictures of me that I’m too embarrassed to show people.
Music on iPod: Anything from rock to country
Future plans: I have recently verbally committed to McKendree University, and I’ll study Pre-Law as well as Psychology, as well as playing water polo. I hope to become a lawyer.
Words to live by: Don’t be afraid of going slow, but be afraid of standing still. Learning takes time, especially if you want it done right. So focus, find your goal, and work towards it. The most helpful thing in my personal athletic career was to set three goals: one that you know you can make, one that is a little harder to make, and one that is difficult but attainable. However, always work for the hardest one, and you’ll find the other two will seem easy.
One goal before turning 30: I want to help change someone’s life for the better.
One thing people don’t know about me: I taught myself calligraphy, originally because I thought it looked cool and interesting, but now I learned that it’s an art form.
By GORDON GLANTZ
The three children of Donna and the late John Armstrong have a lot in common.
They were each introduced to athletics via swimming – before paddling off in different directions to find their passions in other sports.
Colt Armstrong, 21, now does Olympic lifting. Cordell, 19, plays lacrosse for Hartwick College.
Which brings us to the No. 3 – Souderton senior Crystal Armstrong, the Univest Featured Female Athlete, who views her brothers as her role models, adding she “gets her drive” from them.
“We’re an athletic family,” she explained, adding that mom played volleyball at Penn State and the father she never knew - as he passed away when she was a toddler - was a body builder. “Growing up, our first sport was swimming.”
It was not, however, an instant love affair with the water.
“I started off at 11,” she said, noting it was a few years behind most. “I hated it at first. I found it difficult and frustrating, which is probably why I hated it.”
She soon found her stride in community leagues and was doing well enough to land a spot on the high school team at Souderton, but Armstrong is an individualist bound to find her passions.
“It was tough growing up,” she said. “We were taught to be independent when others are taught to be dependent.”
For what she said were a multitude of reasons, her passion for swimming was lost.
“I stuck with swimming until my sophomore year,” Armstrong said.
She soon found her home in a related sport, that being water polo, but a mid-season injury to her right shoulder – the one she needed to snap off throws to the opposing goal as a forward – prompted a dramatic position change that altered her athletic path for the best.
Armstrong became a goalie, which she joked worked out well because as the founder of the Souderton’s lifting club, she has an affinity for training her legs above all else.
“I like the fact that you get to be the eyes of the team,” she said. “As a goalie, I can move my eyes and communicate with the rest of the team. It’s like being the backbone of the team.”
Making the Transition
In addition to her brothers, Armstrong drew inspiration from – and feels she owes a great debt – to the “variety of coaches I have had throughout the years,” as she went from swimming to water polo and then from forward to goalie.
“I want to thank all of my water polo coaches,” she said. “I can’t pare it down to just one.”
The list includes current coach, Monica Stiles, for being “incredibly inspiring” and Mike Hay, who played at Fordham, and Melissa “Missy” Doll, who starred at Souderton before playing goalie at California State-Northridge.
“She is the most amazing female athlete I ever met,” she said of Doll. “She taught me the basics of goaltending.”
More than just helping her became a standout goalie, they helped her embrace the concept of stopping goals instead of trying to score them.
“I had a few conversations (with Doll),” said Armstrong of her coach at the time. “I told her that I can’t shoot without my arm hurting.”
And with the team needing a replacement in goal for outgoing senior Ricki Lee Hodges, the timing seemed ideal.
“You have to weigh your options,” she said. “I was not disappointed. I knew I would give 100 percent.
“At first, it was kind of upsetting not to be on offense. But, as much as I loved scoring goals, I wanted to start stopping them.”
Dream Season
A veteran of the Junior Olympics, Armstrong mastered the art of goaltending so much that she finished this past season – one highlighted by the first win in a long time over rival North Penn -- as a first-team all-league and second-team all-state selection.
Armstrong was the captain and backbone of the fifth-place team in the state. As a junior, she won the Coach’s Award. This past season, her last at the scholastic level, she was voted team MVP.
“She is hardworking, dedicated to her team in and out of the water, always looking to make her teammates better, very coachable and just has a passion for the sport,” said Stiles. “She had a huge impact in our win over North Penn this year and had multiple games that were either shutouts or only one goal was scored against her. She was a huge impact for this team and we will really miss her.”
Of all the accolades, Armstrong is most proud of the MVP award.
“It felt really, really good,” she said. “All my hard work paid off and got acknowledged. It felt amazing.
“It was a good (senior) year. We were fifth in the state, but I felt like we could have done better. We didn’t play real well in our first game to get into the the top four, and I really think we could have gotten into the top four. But we beat our rivals. We beat North Penn. It was the first time in nine years. They beat us earlier in the season at our pool and then we beat them at their pool.”
The next stop in Armstrong’s odyssey will be at McKendree University, a small liberal arts college in Lebanon, Illinois.
She will be getting in on the ground floor of a program that is in the process of upgrading from the club level to Division II.
She could have gone the safer route with a more established program, but she continued to go with the same instincts that got her this far.
“I visited other schools, but they just didn’t seem like the right fit,” she said. “The coach first reached out to me after seeing me at the Junior Olympics in the summer of 2015.”
Armstrong’s path to the Junior Olympics – in Orange County, California – came by way of her getting involved with the NXT club team that plays out of Episcopal Academy.
“It was definitely stressful,” she said. “It was a lot of pressure, but I didn’t have to fill anyone’s shoes. I just had to do my best.”
Ace of Clubs
Armstrong, who maintains a 4.0 grade-point average, works at a local restaurant most of the year.
“I’m a hostess/busser/whatever else they need,” she said, adding she has no time for other school activities. “During the season, I stop altogether. It’s just too stressful to do both, so I stopped for about 2 ½ months, but I worked in the summer, every night, about 30 hours a week and 2-3 nights a week (during the rest of the school year).”
She then looked at the price of a gym membership and compared it to the state-of-the-art gym at Souderton, and her wheels turned toward a logical conclusion.
She approached Joe Hay, who runs the water polo program at the school, with an idea.
“I asked him if I could start a lifting club,” she said. “I wanted to do something without having to pay for a gym membership.
“At first, it was just me and him, just two days a week.”
That didn’t last long.
“Eventually, more people got involved,” she said. “It was the water polo team at first, but now we have a wide variety of people coming. Some aren’t even athletes. As of now, we have 15 or 16 members.”
This type of gumption left the likes of her current coach, Stiles, more than impressed.
“Not only is she an awesome athlete but she runs her own lifting club at the school as well as keeps a 4.0 GPA,” she said. “She makes me very proud, and will be a player to remember.”
A side benefit of the lifting club has been improvement in the right shoulder.
“As a goalie, I need to make longer passes,” said Armstrong, who admits to feeling some pain every now and then. “I still need and use my arm. But it feels better. It has begun to heal itself.
“I do think lifting has helped my shoulder get stronger. I did lots of shoulder exercises to strengthen my muscles and tendons in my shoulder and, even now, I do exercises to continue to strengthen them to prevent further injury.”
Laying Down the Law
Armstrong does not remember the teacher’s name, but she can still see her face – and hear her voice.
It was in eighth grade when this teacher responded to Armstrong’s declaration that she wanted to be a lawyer with “you better make a backup plan.”
She didn’t know who she was dealing with.
“It’s going to work out for me,” Armstrong declared of her career intentions. “I guess it’s because of the money, but everybody says they want to be a doctor or a lawyer, and someone will say, ‘You should have a backup plan.’ Well, no, I shouldn’t. I’m not going to make a backup plan.”
In the interim, however, she plans to major in psychology at McKendree. The interest in the subject came rather recently. As a junior she took an AP class that had her mesmerized. Not knowing if it was the teacher or the subject, she signed up for more this year.
“I love it,” she said. “I love it just as much as last year.”
As for the long-range plan of being a lawyer, she confesses to an odd inspiration – classic TV.
“I grew up on the old shows, like ‘Matlock’ and ‘Perry Mason,’” she said. “I always watched them. I always knew what I wanted to do. I always wanted to be a lawyer.”
And there is little doubt she will be the best lawyer she can be.
“It really hit me in high school,” she said of taking academics seriously. “It hit me that I always want to improve. I wanted to be able to show my capabilities to others, and I wanted others to be proud of me.
“I always wanted to be a better version of myself.”
