Nothing worth having comes easily on the road less traveled where tough times don’t last but tough people do and pressure makes diamonds.
We’ve heard all the perseverance cliches, right?
Imagine taking the road less traveled with a broken leg.
Natalia Lodeserto’s path to becoming a college athlete runs laps around the well-worn platitudes.
By the time she was a teenager, she’d spent nearly half of her life as a gymnast. Lodeserto climbed all the way to Level 6 in the 10-tier USA Gymnastics Development Program. She dedicated 16 hours each week to the gym for training. It was during one of those sessions, with state competition looming, that Lodeserto overrotated on a dismount from the beam and fractured her tibial plateau.
After an often painful rehab and recovery, Loderserto was back on the mat a year later when she was executing a front handspring front tuck and overextended the knee, once again fracturing the tibial plateau.
Good thing her arms were fine. Lodeserto went on to join the volleyball team as a server while her knee healed. Then she was a cheerleader. When the next September rolled around, three years ago during her eighth-grade year, Lodeserto signed up for soccer.
About a month ago, she signed a college offer to play for an NCAA Division I program.
“She’s just wired differently,” said Fayetteville Christian coach Bobby Graham. “She’s a special athlete.”
Lodeserto announced her commitment to play soccer at Virginia Military Institute in mid-September, earning a coveted spot on the roster and a future on the Shenandoah Valley campus just a few years after picking up the sport.
It’s a rare accomplishment to become a college athlete, particularly at the Division I level, and especially when your years spent playing the sport are shorter than the wait time between seasons of “Severance.”
“I really just think if you want something bad enough, you’ve gotta put in the work, even when no one’s watching,” Lodeserto said. “It’s about what you do when no one’s watching that really counts.”
Graham has had a sideline view of the journey.
With Lodeserto in goal as an eighth-grader on the varsity squad, the Warriors hit another level with their first win over Fayetteville Academy. She made 13 saves in the four-overtime 1-0 grudge match, which also happened to be a playoff game.
That win was a launching pad for Fayetteville Christian’s breakthrough 2025 season with a program-high 14 wins, a second straight state quarterfinals appearance, and an undefeated run through the NCISAA Sandhills Conference for the Warriors’ first league title since 2018.
Loderserto, still learning the sport as a freshman, led the Sandhills Conference with a 1.681 goals-against average and her 89 saves ranked third as nine of the Warriors’ record 14 wins were shutouts. She didn’t give up a goal in a run of nine straight wins, spanning March 25-May 2.
“The tremendous amount of work she put in,” Graham said, “knowing the game, learning the nuances. … She has two important qualities: courage and fearlessness.”
She was, after all, a gymnast at a young age.
Lodeserto said that background made her steady in the face of leaps and dives in goal.
“Gymnastics is a great sport when you’re younger to start out with because it just helps you with your athleticism, not being so scared,” she said. “Goalkeeping is a lot of diving on the grass and it’s just like throwing your body around in gymnastics. It’s sort of like it prepares you for that.”
The challenge of a new sport has been welcome and Lodeserto has taken on a more vocal role with the Warriors, organizing the defense in front of her, improving her footwork, routinely booming goal kicks past mid-field, even hitting 100% on PKs.
“She put the time in with personal training, training on holidays. If they were out of town on holidays, her dad would find a coach and she would train,” Graham said. “She really put the time in and now just to see her evolve … I keep going back to courageous and fearless.”
Lodeserto played on South Carolina United FC’s U19 squad the summer before her freshman year along with local club soccer for Villareal Force Academy. This past summer, she joined the semi-pro UPSL’s Carolina Crew FC and was named All-Mid-Atlantic first team. Lodeserto also plays for the Wake FC Girls Academy, a top-tier program nationally.
Next up, the VMI Keydets.
Lodeserto met coach Jim Robbins and assistant McKayla Wetsel at ID camps and the vibe was right, particularly with Wetsel who was a goalkeeper at ECU.
“June 15th is the first day that colleges can talk to you about, you know, recruiting you,” Lodeserto said. “So, I got a text at 9 a.m. on June 15th.”
They set up a visit the next day and the path was set.
With recruiting behind her, Lodeserto can turn that laser focus to another breakthrough season in Fayetteville, where she’ll return with other standouts Autumn Barton, Lacey Anderson and Londyn Harris for the spring season.
If the past is any indication, Lodeserto’s future is bound to be a success.
“It’s in her DNA, it’s in her fabric,” Graham said. “And she still wants to get better.”
This article originally appeared on The Fayetteville Observer: True Warrior | Fayetteville Christian goalie battles way to DI roster
