Ontario Tech lands speedy Brown

Mya Brown isn’t messing around.

The Grade 12 student at Notre Dame recently committed to playing scholarship soccer with the Ontario Tech Ridgebacks and she is heading there with lofty expectations for her freshman season of Ontario University Athletics play.

“I am setting the bar pretty high. I want to be the OUA rookie of the year and I want to go and show everybody Mya Brown from the little town of Welland,” the 17-year-old Welland native said. “I think I have a lot to give and I have been working really, really hard. I want to prove myself.”

She can’t wait to get started on the next chapter of her soccer career.

“I am really looking forward to finding that team and family feeling. I am excited that the girls have already made me feel so welcome and I can’t imagine how fun it is going to be. I want to see how far I can go and how much I can grow and develop as a player and as person. I want to challenge myself and I think this competition is going to be really good and I want to rise to that challenge.”

Brown also had interest from St. Francis Xavier in Nova Scotia and talked a bit with McMaster but Ontario Tech approached her at a showcase tournament and expressed considerable interest.

“Normally you have to do a lot of researching and e-mailing on your own side to even talk to schools but I was at the showcase and I hadn’t reached out to anybody. I played a game and they came up to me and my coach and said ‘Hey. Who is No. 8? I want to talk to her.’ We had a conversation about my goals and school. They told me they liked my style of play and wanted me to come for a visit.”

That later visit solidified Ontario Tech as the future forensic psychology major’s soccer and academic home for the next four years. She committed to the school in October.

“When I stayed with some of the girls for the weekend, I went to watch their game and the men’s game after. Just feeling the environment, the love and the family that they have was amazing and I knew that I wanted to be a part of something way bigger than me.”

She feels she is much different soccer player than she was a year ago.

“A lot of my growth has been done not necessarily as a player but as a person. It’s easy to have talent and skill and those things are coachable, but to be humble, to have grit and those other things that you can’t really teach, you need to work on those things yourself. That was a big area for me of growth that I needed to improve and looking back from last year to this year, I am a very different soccer player.”

Brown started playing Timbits soccer in Welland when she was three and suited up for Welland travel teams until Grade 9 when she moved to Club Roma, quit gymnastics and decided to take the sport more seriously.

“I realized that there was so much more than what I knew about soccer, the world of soccer and how big it can get. I started to focus and train a lot.”

Her eyes were further opened in 2023 when she was selected for a Club Roma team that competed in the Peace Cup in Italy.

“Omigod, it was an amazing experience and unreal. I can’t even begin to describe how awesome it was,” she said. “It kept opening my eyes that soccer is not just this big. It’s everywhere and it’s huge. I had already been talking to schools at that point and it was ‘This  is what I want to do.’ ”

This past season, the right forward played a year up on a Club Roma under-18 squad and she recently made the League1 under-20 reserve team.

Her style of play takes advantage of her athletic abilities.

“I am fast so I like to use my speed, take advantage of the space that I am given, close those gaps and attack hard.”

She is looking forward to next year’s Club Roma campaign.

“That is a really good league and a good spot to be in. It will be extremely challenging for me and I am going to have to step up this season. I am going to work my butt off and keep training like I do. I have been going to the gym and training on my own outside of actual team training. I am trying new things, seeing how far I can push myself and trying to be as fit as I can going into my first OUA season.”