Patrick Newell

Contributor

NORWICH – Karen Snyder was such a dynamic track and field athlete; it’s easy to forget that it wasn’t her first love. From the time she was about 5 years old, she was putting in many hours practicing and playing soccer.

“I started [playing sports] pretty young , and I was fortunate my parents threw me into everything,” Snyder said, 33, who now lives and works in New Hampshire. “Some of those sports stuck and others did not.”

Long before she graced the Norwich High School varsity track and well before she joined the NHS varsity soccer team, she competed at the club level as a standout defender for the Chenango Chargers. Usually, Snyder was the last line of defense to protect her goalie. She would carry those many years of training into a standout four-year varsity soccer career for the Norwich Purple Tornado.

Snyder came up the soccer ranks with the same core of young ladies, and that group would ultimately jell into the program’s defining team.

Snyder’s senior season, the fall of 2001, stands alone as the Purple Tornado’s best team performance in school history, and no team has come close to matching that 11-5 overall record.

Snyder played with some outstanding athletes, and again, she was the anchor of the defense at fullback, earning Southern Tier Athletic Conference all-star accolades following her junior and senior seasons, as well as her Norwich team’s Most Valuable Player.