Opponents, Teammates Agree: This Soccer Player Can Steal the Show

It’s difficult to say what kind of thinking goes into the creation of a television character these days, but a dude named Doogie? A brat named Bart? A punky Brewster?

Please.

Let’s get real for a moment. TV could use a little Donohue.

Kim Donohue, a soccer player at Mater Dei, has a prime time personality. She is feisty and funny and so zany it seems her brain came programmed for antics.

You want food fights? Pass Donohue those tasty treats. Sure, she’s been given a penance of two week’s worth of trash pickup before, but what’s life without blasting a buddy with a squished Twinkie?

You want personality? Ask Donohue about her spiritual beliefs.

“My religion is Kim-ism,” she says in a mock-haughty monotone.

Ask Donohue anything and she laughs. Not the nervous, giggly laugh common to 16-year-olds but a hearty guffaw heard from here to Hawaii. Like hiccups, her laugh-attacks hit without warning.

The only time you can be sure she’ll be serious is on the soccer field, where she has developed a reputation as a most aggressive player. Of course, that might be partly due to the tattoos she wears on her arms during the games.

(OK, so they’re only pen and ink. But wouldn’t you be a little intimidated to see a player coming at you with snakes and skulls drawn all over her arms?)

As a center fullback, or stopper, Donohue’s job is to mark the other team’s biggest scoring threat, usually the center halfback.

Mater Dei soccer Coach Becki Schelhorse raves about Donohue’s tenacity; she does whatever it takes, within the rules, to stop the opponent. Donohue, a 5-foot-4 junior, continually wins air balls over taller forwards, and rarely is beaten on a tackle. She marks her player so closely, few have been able to break away.

“She’s basically a stud,” Schelhorse says.

Once, during a club match, Donohue went for an air ball and collided with another player. When she got up, blood was oozing from her head. Donohue was ready to continue playing but a player’s mother insisted she needed to see a doctor.

“You know how your head bleeds a whole lot?” Donohue said. “Ellie’s mom had a spaz and took me to the hospital. It was good luck though because I had four stitches and four is the number on my jersey, and my team’s colors are blue and yellow and that was the color of my stitches. So it turned out pretty cool.”

Not everyone classifies Donohue’s physical play as “cool,”though.

At an opening-season tournament in San Diego, Donohue was guarding her opponent so closely, the frustrated player suddenly stopped, looked at the referee and started screaming, “Psycho! This girl is psycho! Get her off my back! She’s psycho!”

Funny how nicknames get started.

Besides being likened to a horror film, Donohue has had her long black hair pulled and has been tackled more times than she can remember.

Her only retaliation, she says, is to play harder. That comes to Donohue quite naturally--on or off the field.

When she was 2, Donohue was at a park where a few teen-age boys were playing on swings that looked like carousel horses. After they left, Donohue waddled over, hoisted herself onto the saddle and just as she started to swing . . .

. . . she fell over and broke her arm.

In kindergarten, she played with toy trucks and fire engines while the other girls played house. She remembers being sent to the corner after ramming the play house with a truck.

Donohue loves playing football in the mud, riding dirt bikes and surfing. Her favorite movie is “Marked for Death” because it involves lots of blood, guts and “a guy who breaks people’s arms in two and pops their eyeballs out.”

She added that “Pretty Woman” was “a pretty cool movie too.”

Donohue went to Mater Dei’s Winter Formal, and still shudders at the memory of nail polish, heels and panty hose. “And hair spray!” Donohue says disgustedly, “My hair was solid! “

Although she comes off as feisty--she says the Flintstones’ character Bam-Bam is her role model “because he’s so outgoing”--Donohue says, overall, she’s really laid-back.

“I don’t like to stress about things,” she says. “I don’t have many worries.”

Few great TV characters do.