Scoring in the game of soccer always came easy for Mountain View forward Shauna Rohbock. Even from her earliest years in the game, coaches knew the quickest way to put the ball in the net was to put the ball in front of her feet.
Opponents discovered Rohbock's danger the hard way. It didn't matter if she was playing bigger or faster players, nor if they were more skilled and more experienced. Least of all she didn't care if it was male opponents. In the end, she just made them all look bad.Bruin coach Mike LaHargoue remembers when he first saw how quickly Rohbock could humiliate a defense. She was 12-years-old and playing against older high school squads. "Shauna as a seventh grader was every bit as good as any players I had on the team back then," LaHargoue recalled. "She had to play on a boys team. A lot of her better skills came from there."
Rohbock put the official stamp of her scoring finesse into the high school records last week as she fired four goals in M.V.'s 6-0 win over American Fork. The four goals gave Rohbock a career total of 117 to break the state career scoring record.
Last year Rohbock and the Bruins went 17-0 going into the state finals where they were only one goal short of taking the championship title in a loss to Viewmont. The preseason favorite Mountain View team is now on the earnest road of revenge in the hunt for the 5A crown.
But earlier in high school, Rohbock felt the need to accomplish something more than a team soccer title. What she needed was a new challenge.
"She first decided to try the heptathalon on a dare," Chuck Rohbock, Shauna's father, said of her sudden talents in track and field. "Pretty soon it was apparent that it was something she could master."
In only her second year of heptathalon competition, Rohbock broke the state score and then won the Great Southwestern Invitational last May with a record shattering 5,113 points.
"People had been doubting me being able to take that record," Rohbock said. "I needed a 2:28 in the 800 meters for the record and I decided nothing was going to stop me." Rohbock ran 2:28.5 to take the necessary points and win the meet with the highest score ever by a Junior Olympian.
Rohbock was invited to compete with the National Track team last summer, but refused in order to play soccer for Club Devastation in preparation for her senior campaign with the Bruins.
"Soccer is her love," Chuck Rohbock added. "She could eat, drink and sleep soccer if she wanted. But she knows she'll have to include both track and soccer into her plans as she prepares for college.
"That's one of the things I've told them," Rohbock said of the many top recruiting schools that are following her, "I really want to be able to play both of them."
Until then, the only way to stop Rohbock on the soccer field is with more than one opponent. "Other teams have always triple-teamed or even quad-teamed her with defenders," her dad said. "But physically she's never been dominated."
"When you have Shauna on the team, (the competition) has to mark her up or she'll go wild on you," LaHargoue warned. "She's phenomenal. Teams don't ever find that out until she's scored four or five goals on them."