HOLLIS – Hollis Brookline High School girls soccer coach Peter Clarke had to think about it for a minute, but he remembers when he knew for sure that while watching now senior scoring sensation McKenna Maguire he was completely amazed by what he saw.

It was a late regular season game against rival Milford last year, during the Cavaliers’ run to a title. It was scoreless at the half, and the Spartans, Clarke said, “had been coming after her hard.”

And what did Maguire do? “She opened up the second half with two quick goals, just put them away,” Clarke said. “She took it upon herself to pick up the team and carry us on a very difficult night.”

That, Clarke said, was a “lights out” moment, and convinced him that Maguire had the stuff to lead HB to a title.

“I think I was just frustrated,” Maguire said. “We were scoreless, and I just knew we had to win.They had been our rivals the past few years. … We all got super focused and did what we needed to do to win the game.”

And now Maguire is taking her focus and her game even to a higher level as the Cavaliers appear to be marching through Division II in their title defense. She recently scored her 100th career goal, and the offensive pace she’s been on may end up being a historic one. She has committed to play college soccer at Franklin Pierce, so she’d like nothing better than to make this another season to remember.

All while becoming as complete a player as possible.

“A lot of the chatter around the state is all we have is McKenna,” Clarke said. “But when you watch her play, she’s actually very unselfish. She’s constantly giving the ball away. If we gave assists for the second or third pass before the goal is scored, she’d probably have a bundle of them. She starts the play and attracts a lot of attention.”

Thus others are open, but the Cavaliers still, as Clarke says, “give her the green light. She will wear them down, and we want to open it up.”

Maguire is a born soccer player, going the traditional route of starting out when she was four or five years old, playing recreational youth soccer, then climbing the ladder to travel soccer, etc. and now club.

Why soccer?

“I always loved the game, it was so fun for me right from the start, so I just kept playing,” she said.

But could she have ever envisioned being the player she is now, dominating Division II?

“No, I don’t think so,” she said. “I think it’s the people around me who made me become who I am today, making me better, and giving me all the balls and chances I can get every game.”

You have to finish, and Maguire is an expert at it. She’s played forward ever since the start, and the funny thing is she never felt she was that much of a speedster. But she’ll zip down a soccer field in the blink of an eye.

“I never thought I was that fast,” she said, “until I started taking it seriously and trying to run fast, my hardest.”

But no drills. See ball, run after ball. “That’s it,” she said smiling.

When she began as a freshman, Maguire was on a senior loaded team but she managed to score 12 goals and make an impression. And then in a semifinal against Bow, she got off to a slow start and then Clarke and his assistant, Ashley Hein, knew they had something.

But Clarke knew even before that. He didn’t know Maguire, who is from Brookline, right away but during a pickup game when she was a freshman, he turned to one of his seniors, Paige Magnuszewski and said, “Can you imagine getting her the ball?”

What Clarke saw was “quickness, an incredible ability to carry the ball with speed, and stop on a dime without losing her center of gravity, make a quick directional change and quick start again. A lot of players get going so fast and thent they can’t slow themselves down.”

Not Maguire. That ability, Clarke said, “was almost quicker than the eye.” She made the regional team for the Olympic Development program, plays club soccer at a high level, and “she just keeps improving her game. … very high soccer IQ.”

Maguire is aggressive, but she also deals with defenders being aggressive on her.

“The other thing that makes her a little bit unique,” Clarke said. “The amount of physical pressure she takes and the hammering, she does not complain and turn around and raise her arms to the referee. She drops her head, goes back and waits for the next play.

“It’s not just toughness, but she has the professional composure to just keep playing the game. She doesn’t lose her perspective at all. … ‘I’ll get you next time’ is her mindset. And she does it in the flow of the game.”

“It’s a little frustrating sometimes,” she said. “But I just don’t react in any way. I just keep playing my game, and just continue how I am and not let it bother me in any way.”

So what is her game? “Running (after long balls, getting into space, finding the open space to pass to,” she said. “And make the ball move itself.”

And, she says, being able to pass the ball “gets her out of those situations.” The drills she’s done during club soccer especially have picked up her game.

Now coming into this year, it would be easy for Maguire to relax her senior year after leading the Cavs to an unbeaten Division championship season; she made the commitment to Franklin Pierce over the summer. But not a chance. She’s on a torrid scoring pace.

“She’s aware she led us to our first championship in a long time,” Clarke said, “and everybody talked about the fact they had a weak schedule.

“So we talked about that, that there’d be nowhere to hide. And don’t come in thinking to be complacent, nor should you be thinking it’s a brand-new start, because it’s not. This has been a three-year process, and she’s been the pivotal part of that. And she came in saying, ‘I want to see if I and we can be better. How good can we get?'”

“(Last year) was pretty fun,” Maguire said. “I enjoyed every moment of it and I want to do it again this year. I’m driven all the way. I think we can (repeat) if we just put the work in and keep focusing on every day. Just doing a day at a time, not overthinking it, just playing our game and doing what we do.”

She was happy to settle on her college future before diving into her senior season. As soon as she went to visit, it seemed like a perfect fit. She has always wanted to play Division II soccer.

“I just thought (Division II) would be easier to balance school and academic life,” Maguire said. “Keep myself together, and not having to go from one thing to one thing to one thing, like a (Division) I player. The campus and soccer team, I enjoyed every part of it.”

Maguire enjoyed the recruiting attention, but it was stressful trying to make the decision. She wants to study physical therapy/health science, “working with athletes, helping others get better.”

One thing Maguire is about is t-e-a-m.

“Even the night with 100, she needed two more or one more, she was still dishing the ball off other people,” Clarke said. “She as playing the game first, but she knew or wanted to get 100 that night. Even in that element, it wasn’t her No. 1 priority. It was a big priority, but the game came first.”

She enjoys making a good setup as much as scoring a goal, and in fact did just that for teammate Rosalie DeSantis for the championship game winner vs. Coe-Brown.

“I love passing to others to help them get goals,” she said, “and I know my abilities are good enough to help me make others better. It’s always been a thing of mine.”

But in that title game Maguire learned a valuable lesson. In a race to the ball with Bears defender Samantha Ball, they collided and Ball came crashing down with a game-ending knee injury. Maguire got a yellow card and was benched for about 10 minutes – almost more for her own protection, and to settle things down – before she got back on the field. Clarke says as soon as he saw the tape that he realized it was even a cleaner play than he first thought.

“It was pretty tough for me, because it was my first yellow card and I got taken out,” Maguire said. “I was really worried what would happen to me when I got back on the field. But I just ignored it, just passed it to others to try to get everyone off me.”

And it worked.

And the other thing about the 100 goals was Clarke found out later it was a goal Maguire set as a freshman, “and that impresses me even more.”

“I’d been thinking about this since my freshman year, knowing I could do it,” Maguire said. “And during the summer, I was thinking, ‘What if I don’t do this?'”

Hollis Brookline’s McKenna Maguire gets a full head of steam in taking the ball downfield during last year’s Division II title game vs. Coe-Brown. (Telegraph photo by TOM KING)

Hollis Brookline’s McKenna Maguire gets a full head of steam in taking the ball downfield during last year’s Division II title game vs. Coe-Brown. (Telegraph photo by TOM KING)

Not to worry. She may not have been a big scorer her freshman year, but developed into a regular scorer her sophomore year, “working my hardest.”

She realized after her freshman year, which ended in a tough semifinal loss vs. Bow, that as a starter she could become a player.

Last year was the year that set up her skill level. “It gave her the confidence,” Clarke said. “The way she’s applying her skill level is a factor, for both her and the team to make this team win. That very fast style of play we have, her skill level is a large part of that. And that confidence makes the others play better around her.”

Plus Clarke noticed that Maguire worked hard in the high school off-season in club and ODP soccer, becoming physically tougher.

Maguire plays lacrosse for the Cavs in the spring, but that’s a secondary sport. A sport she does for fun outside of school is skiing.

In the future, Clarke says it’s pretty simple what Maguire needs to do to succeed in collegiate soccer.

“What she’s doing now,” he said, grinning. “Just keep improving it, and she’ll be surrounded by even better players, which will make her even harder to defend.

“If she has space – she’s very good at evading defenders in a crowd, and you’ve seen that. But when she has space to attack, and 15 yards before she sees the next defender, there could be four of them, and they’re not going to be able to stop her. Once she’s surrounded by better players close to her ability, they will have to respect those other players, and that will open up her game.”

“I think it’s going to be way different,” Maguire said of college ball. “I think it’s going to be at a way faster pace. The physicality’s going to be different, the coaching’s going to be different, the atmosphere’s going to be different, everything’s going to be different. But I think after a while I’ll get used to it and play my style.”

And that style for McKenna Maguire is to be a great teammate, and a winner.