She Doesn’t Just Skate By in Soccer

Long before Eva Dixon scored two goals -- including the decisive one in the 79th minute -- to lift the South Pasadena girls’ soccer team to a 3-2 victory over Monrovia, clinching the Tigers’ fifth consecutive Rio Hondo League championship, Curtis Springfield understood how fortunate he was to know his star forward.

The boys in his freshman English class had told him.

“She’s got a rep here,” said Springfield, in his first season as the Tigers’ coach. “I guess one time, they were all trying to do some trick with their skateboards, and she came up, did the trick and then rode off.

“With ninth-grade boys, being a great skateboarder makes you a quasi-celebrity, because one day, she stopped by my room, and there was just silence. And when she left, they were like, ‘You know her? That’s Eva Dixon.’ She’s a real skateboarder, not just some kid with a skateboard.”

Dixon, a 16-year-old junior, loves hearing such tales.

“A lot of people know me for skating, and they’re like, ‘There’s that skateboarding girl,’ and that’s fine with me,” she said. “I love it because it’s a male-dominated sport, and I love to go against the boys. I think I’m pretty good at it.”

A member of the California Amateur Skateboarding League, Dixon placed sixth in the intermediate division of the All-Girl Skate Jam at Venice Beach and competed against boys but did not place in the Nike Core Tour in Huntington Beach in 2003. She also won the 2004 CASL Best Trick Competition.

“It’s hard to believe what you can do with a skateboard,” Dixon said. “You’re just up there and your mind has to be completely there too. And then when you land, it’s a just total relief.”

Dixon would like to make a name for herself in soccer that surpasses her community-wide reputation in skateboarding.

“Soccer is just the best thing right now,” Dixon said. “I just feel like, wherever it takes me, I want to go. I feel like I’m always going to be playing.”

Dixon is South Pasadena’s leading scorer with 22 goals and eight assists this season. Blessed with a natural left-footed shot and excellent quickness and field vision, she scored both goals when the Tigers tied Pasadena Poly, 2-2, for the 2002-03 Southern Section Division IV title in her freshman year.

She hopes to lead the Tigers (16-6-1, 8-2-0) to the final game again after they were eliminated from the playoffs in the first round last season.

“I love the team aspect of soccer,” Dixon said. “I’d rather play the more difficult teams because I like the games where you need everyone out there and playing their best.”

The Tigers have played especially well lately, and will take a seven-game winning streak into their first-round playoff game against visiting Anaheim Magnolia on Friday. Dixon has scored five goals and assisted on four in the recent surge.

“Whenever I put it in there, I know she’s at the end of it,” said junior center midfielder Courtney Anderson, who assisted on both goals by Dixon in a 2-0 victory over Temple City on Feb. 7.

“I know she loves skating, but whenever I think of Eva Dixon, I’m always going to think soccer because she makes that much of a difference to our team.”

That’s what Dixon wants.

“I just love playing the game. I like everything about it, and I like the places it has taken me,” she said.

A member of the Santa Anita Soccer Club, Dixon has traveled to Hawaii, where an Alhambra AYSO team she played on placed second in the Big Island Cup in 2002.

She also has taken two trips with all-star club teams to Europe and has played in England, Sweden, France and Spain, where she watched the annual running of the bulls in Pamplona last year.

“It really is crazy,” Dixon said, “but I can see what people like about it. It’s something on the edge.”

Just like skateboarding.