Brianna Langelaan: Snacks, you ready?

Brianna Langelaan didn't grow up dreaming about the NCAA. She grew up on a dairy farm in East Richmond where milking time takes two and a half hours, twice a day, every day, and somebody always has to do it.

For most of her life, that somebody was her dad. Then it became her older sister Kylie. That quiet shift, never posted about, never announced, is what made everything else possible. It freed her dad to drive her to training six days a week, to organize recruiting emails when she was fourteen and had no idea what the NCAA even was, to fly across the continent and sit in the stands at the Historic Crew Stadium in Columbus Ohio, and watch his daughter win a conference championship.

But we will get to all of that.

First, you need to understand something about Brianna Langelaan that she does not fully understand about herself. Fewer than 2% of youth soccer players in North America will ever play NCAA Division I. She is one of them. When I told her that number during our conversation, she paused. She had no idea. She has won at every level she has ever played at, from Safeway Soccer as a five-year-old to back-to-back MAC championships at Western Michigan, and she still cannot quite believe that people across the continent specifically wanted to talk to her.

That is who she is. A player who has found a way to win, score, and get better at every single level, and who still calls her dad before a fitness test because her ankle hurts and she is nervous. A striker who has scored in nearly every important game she has ever played, and who sees a sports counselor because the pressure of playing with older more experienced players at university has turned her into a perfectionist who sometimes forgets why she started playing in the first place.

She is not the kid who showed up and dominated on raw talent alone. She is the kid who showed up, outworked everyone around her, and never stopped finding another gear. And behind all of it, a family that reorganized their entire lives around her dream without ever once making her feel like she owed them anything for it.

The Yellow Team

Soccer found Brianna the way it finds most five-year-olds. Somebody's mom signed somebody up.

Her earliest memory of the sport is not a goal or a win. It is a rainy day in West Richmond, Hugh Boyd, a yellow Safeway Soccer jersey, and a field she only went to because a neighbourhood family friend was putting their daughter in. She does not remember the soccer. She remembers being there with her friend, and one photo of the two of them together.

That is it. No radioactive spider. No secret serum. No billionaire parents with a cave underneath the house. Just a rainy field, a yellow jersey, and a kid who does not even remember touching the ball. That is the origin story of a Division I athlete.

She moved into the Timbits program at RGSA and was immediately placed with the year-older group. The coaches saw it right away. She was faster, more aggressive, more intense than the kids her own age. They moved her outside because they were worried she would hurt someone in the small elementary school gym. Or hurt herself running into a wall.

Then came the Richmond Flames. Her coach was Priya's dad. She still says hi to those girls when she sees them around Richmond. And this is where the scoring started.

"I was probably the ultimate cherry picker, but I just scored every game. That's when I realized that I was a striker."

Around this time, Brent Branker, now Fusion FC's Grassroots Technical Director, pulled Brianna aside after a Thursday night session and told her something she has never forgotten. If she were to focus herself, she had something special, and she should not waste it. She was maybe ten years old. She makes sure to see him every time she comes home.

Winning at Every Level

The thing about Brianna's career is that you cannot find a level where she did not dominate. The résumé does not have gaps. It just keeps going.

At Fusion, she met Chloe Van Schalkwyk. They were the same age, but Chloe started with the 06s. Brianna found her intimidating at first. Then she got to know her and realized she was the softest, kindest person. They have not gone a day without talking to each other since. Four years later, Chloe is someone Brianna cannot imagine her life without. Chloe now plays for UBC Women's soccer.

Brianna was competitive in the BCSPL from a young age and was the only player from her team selected to the BC Soccer provincial program. Fusion FC moved her up to the 06 age group, a year older, and she earned a starting spot. Chloe made the jump with her. Both of them started.

Then came the game that everyone who was there still talks about. Brianna played her own age group match against Burnaby Mountain, the biggest rivalry in BCSPL Woman's soccer at the time. She scored a goal and added an assist. Then she walked off the field, did not take off her cleats, and stepped onto the 06 field for their game.

She scored a perfect hat trick. Left foot. Right foot. Header.

In 2022, Fusion won the provincial championship. Brianna scored in all of the playoff games, including the game-winning goal in a 3-0 final against Mountain United. She also assisted the second. That win sent them to Nationals in Prince Edward Island.

At Nationals, she scored against Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Saskatchewan, and Quebec. She was the runner-up for the Golden Boot, but her nerves before the final cost her. She forgot her cleats at the hotel. Her parents had to fight their way back into a building damaged by hurricane flooding to find them. By the time they arrived, she had already missed the first half of the game.

Her team finished fifth. She nearly won the Golden Boot anyway. Those two things do not usually go together.

"If we had known that I was that close to Golden Boot, they would have played me more, and they did say that."

The girl who won it plays at UBC now. Brianna knows her.

In the quarterfinals that year, Fusion was the number one seed playing the last-place team, Coquitlam Metro Ford. They were losing. Nobody wanted to take the penalty kick. Brianna stepped up. She missed. The keeper saved it. But she did not sigh, did not drop her head, did not walk away. She stayed in the play, pounced on the rebound, and scored. The game went to penalty kicks and Fusion advanced.

She did not say it out loud at the time, but she felt like she had saved the game. She had.

At Notre Dame, she won the Catholics MVP and Golden Boot in grades 10 and 12, both years she played. In Grade 11, she went to Austria for three months to play soccer in a completely different system, in a completely different language, on the other side of the world. She was sixteen. In Grade 12, she came back and scored 34 goals in the season. Roughly two per game. She played the entire season on a sprained ankle. She continued her scoring at Provincials by winning the Golden Boot there to go along with her Provincials Golden Boot from Grade 10.

At Western Michigan, she walked into a Division I program as a freshman and earned minutes behind a fifth-year grad transfer from the University of Michigan. Her team won back-to-back MAC championships. Her dad was in the stands.

Jason Jordan was a constant through all of it. He had played professionally, knew what it felt like to be the one expected to put the ball in the net, and understood the specific pressure that comes with being a striker. When Brianna was nervous about missing, about letting the team down, Jordan knew how to talk her through it. He had lived it.

He also could not help but laugh watching her play. Anyone who has seen Brianna on the field knows what he is talking about. She is acrobatic. Arms and legs going everywhere. It is chaotic and effective and, apparently, very entertaining from the sideline.

From shooting Tessa and Aubrey's games, I knew they were both left-footed. I had marveled at how similar their kicks were. I had photos of the two of them that were practically identical. During the photo shoot with all three sisters, I asked Brianna if she was left-footed too. She said she was both. Jason Jordan still jokes about which foot is her strong foot. "Depends on the day", she says. Then she started striking the ball, and the speed coming off her foot was astounding. I got a shot of her left foot that was practically identical to her sisters. Three sisters, three matching left-footed strikes. You do not develop that kind of power without years of relentless training. It is the kind of thing that is inherently obvious to anyone who knows anything about sports. She is operating at a different level.

John Ribeiro was the coach the year they won provincials and went to Nationals. He ran a formation that nobody expected to work. It worked. They won. Brianna remembers looking over and thinking he had tears in his eyes. She was lucky enough to have him again when she moved up to the 06 team for their U17 Nationals run.

Every level. Every time. She found a way.

The Body and the Bus

Winning like that does not come free. The price is paid in hours and in ankles, and the people closest to you pay it too.

In her final year with Fusion, Brianna trained every single day. Mondays were Fusion. Tuesdays were the provincial program at SFU. Wednesdays were Fusion. Thursdays she did personal training with a girl she used to play against in Fusion Prem, ten minutes from the farm. Fridays were Fusion. Weekends were games.

No rest days. No job. No other sports. Soccer was the only thing.

She did not have her driver's license yet. So she rode the bus for an hour to Notre Dame every day with two backpacks. School bag on her back. Soccer bag on her front. She would change out of her school uniform before practice because she did not want to wear it to training.

Her dad drove her to the extra sessions. The Tuesday nights at SFU. The Thursday training near the house. All the weekend games. For years. But her dad could only be in the car driving to SFU if someone else was on the farm doing the milking. That someone was Kylie.

Every drive to training was also Kylie doing the milking.

The physical cost caught up. Tendonitis that she still deals with today. Ankles that never fully healed because she never fully stopped.

She is not hiding from any of it. She gets treatment at Western Michigan whenever she needs it, one of the perks of college athletics, and she is on an ankle recovery plan from her athletic trainer. But she wants people to know what this level costs. The body keeps a tab.

102 Kilometres

When COVID shut everything down, most kids waited for it to come back. Brianna did not wait.

When word came that soccer restrictions would be easing, she started running at home on the farm. In June, she challenged herself to run every single day. Her dad got her the Strava app so she could track it.

That month, she ran 102 kilometres. Around the farm. Laps of the fields. Long grass or short. Wet or dry. It did not matter. She wanted to be ready for when soccer came back in July.

When July came and the family holiday was booked, Brianna skipped it. She stayed home so she could start back training the moment soccer returned.

She was maybe fourteen. Nobody told her to do that. Nobody made her a training plan. She just decided that when the sport came back, she was not going to be behind.

His Love Language Is Sports

When I spoke to another Fusion athlete, Alix Boogemans, about her relationship with her dad, she said his love language to her was sports. When I mentioned that to Brianna, she did not hesitate.

"Yes. That's exactly it."

Brianna's dad has never once made her feel pressured after a game. Not once. It was always the same thing. I think you did great. And when she was critical of herself, which she usually was, his answer was simple. Okay, so go to the field tomorrow and work on that. No drama. No lectures. Just calm, practical support.

The car ride home after a bad game can destroy a young athlete. Brianna never had to worry about it. Not once in her entire career.

When the recruiting process started, she was fourteen and had absolutely no idea what she was doing. Her dad stepped in and organized everything. The emails. The spreadsheets. The visit logistics. They flew together to MacEwan University, right after the program had won a national championship. Then UBC. Then Western Michigan.

In July 2023, Brianna was invited to the FTF Top 60 Combine in Toronto. They flew out on Sunday. The combine was Monday and Tuesday. At lunch on Tuesday, while Brianna was still at the combine, her dad was on his phone checking them in for a flight home that night. And also checking them in for a flight to San Diego the next morning for a tournament.

That is what the logistics looked like. That is what her dad did. Over and over and over.

He was in the stands for the MAC championship at Western Michigan in Columbus. Brianna said something about that moment that stuck with me. She said this is what we have worked for. Not I. We.

She still calls him when she is stressed. The night before her beep test, her ankle was bothering her and she was anxious about it. She called her dad, three time zones behind, and he said the same thing he always says. Everything is okay. Get treatment when you get back to school. And she said the pressure just lifted.

"It's insane how much my dad has helped me."

After the photo shoot I did with Brianna and her sisters, she left because she was freezing and turning blue. Her dad stayed because both her younger sisters had training. I stood there with him on the field near Aubrey's 2011 BCSPL training, and he talked about his daughters for 47 minutes. Unprompted. This is a man who played football, a giant of a man, standing on a soccer field being completely open about how proud he was of his girls and how much he loved being part of Brianna's journey. It was the most touching moment of the entire project.

I totally agree with that, because it melted mine too.

With three daughters playing high-level BCSPL soccer, her parents had to divide and conquer on game days. Mom took one kid, Dad took another. Her mom has always been supportive, always been there, always showed up. But the sports bond between Brianna and her dad is something specific. It is the language they share.

The One Nobody Talks About

There is a reason Brianna's dad could be at every training session, every tournament, every recruiting visit, every flight to Michigan. That reason is Kylie.

Kylie is Brianna's older sister. She is not a soccer player. She was into field hockey and had a real community through it. Then COVID hit and cut that short. Her social world was her teammates. When the sport ended, that world ended too.

"Now it's just her and the cows."

Kylie runs the family dairy farm. Fully. She took it over so her dad could step back from the daily operations and be available for Brianna's career. Milking time alone takes two and a half hours, twice a day, every single day. That is not something you skip. That is not something you delegate to a neighbour.

Brianna did not mention Kylie in passing during our conversation. She stopped and said, clearly and firmly, that Kylie deserves to be talked about.

When I asked the family about including Kylie prominently in this article, the answer came back immediately. Everything you included is all good. She loves it.

From Kylie's TikTok, which I found after Brianna's dad mentioned her, she seems genuinely happy. She loves the farm. She has a following. She found her thing. This is not a sad story about a sister who gave something up. It is a story about someone who quietly made her sister's dream possible. The highlight reels do not show the person back home doing the milking so Dad can be on a plane to Kalamazoo. But that person is there. Every single day.

Growing up, all the girls had chores on the farm. Feeding grain, bringing hay around, feeding bottles. It was part of the rhythm of the household. But Kylie is the one who stayed. And because she stayed, Brianna could go.

Remembering Who She Is

For someone who has won everything, Brianna Langelaan has spent a remarkable amount of time doubting herself.

The nerves started around age ten or eleven, when soccer shifted from fun to competitive. Natural talent was no longer enough. Everybody was catching up. She started putting pressure on herself that nobody else was putting on her.

The aggression that made her great also caused problems. She practiced the way she played, full intensity, full contact, and her teammates did not always appreciate it. It created friction early in her Fusion career. The same fire that separated her on the field made things complicated off it.

At Western Michigan, it got worse. Surrounded by older, more experienced players, Brianna became a perfectionist in a way she had never been before. When she was the best player on the field back home, the pressure was manageable. Now she was a freshman competing against fifth-year grad students, and the voice in her head got louder.

"It's changed in more of a negative way, which is something that I'm trying to get out of right now."

She is completely open about seeing a sports counselor through the university. She wants people to know. She wants young athletes to understand that this is a side of high-level soccer that nobody talks about enough.

Her coaches tell her every day that she is there for a reason. She believes them, mostly. But believing it on Monday does not mean she believes it on Wednesday. It depends on the day. It depends on how she is feeling. Consistency is the thing she is chasing, not on the field, but in her own head.

"Consistently remembering who I am. Because depending on the day of how I'm feeling, is where my brain's at."

Her teammates at Western Michigan call her Snacks. Her head coach Lewis gave her the name. She was always seen with snacks on away trips, and in pre-game meetings last season she would always have them tucked under her chair. It stuck. When it is her turn to go in, Lewis says the same thing every time. Snacks, you ready? And she stands on the touchline and the word in her brain is just breathe. Then she gets her five minutes or her twenty minutes and she gives absolutely everything. Sprinting, dirt on her socks, running her head off. Because other girls are on that bench not getting picked, and she is the one they called.

In her first MAC conference game, against Miami Ohio on a terrible uphill field, she came on in the last fifteen minutes as the only freshman. Madi Canada, one of the senior leaders, was on the field with her. She turned to Brianna and said, you got this, Bri.

"It was like a big sister on the field."

Hearing it from someone older meant more. It always has. Brianna has been getting picked to play with older girls her entire life. The pattern has not changed. The scale just keeps getting bigger.

Brown Coats on the Sideline

Brianna did not grow up planning to play in the NCAA. The idea appeared gradually, like something coming into focus.

She was watching the 05s graduate from Fusion, and one of them went to New Mexico State. That was the first time she thought, oh, what is this?

Her dad was already on it. And then came the tournament in Toronto.

It started on the travel day. Brianna noticed that one of the Western Michigan assistant coaches, Nate, had started following her soccer Instagram. She called her dad. He told her to send them her tournament schedule. She was in the top tier, which meant a lot of coaches at her games.

She played well. She scored a bunch of goals. And she remembers seeing a couple of coaches on the sideline in brown coats.

About a week after they got back from Toronto, a package arrived at the farm in East Richmond. A get-to-know-me card from Western Michigan. They looked up the school and the coaches. The two assistants in the brown coats were Nate and Paige, and they had watched every one of her games.

She filled out the card and sent it back.

"That was when I first knew a NCAA school was interested in me."

June 15th. The first day NCAA coaches could legally contact her. Brianna woke up to a text. Time difference. She got on a call with them that same day. They told her they had been watching her, that they were interested, that they liked who she was as a player. Then came the visit. Then came the scholarship.

"I had seen this number, and it was thousands of dollars. I was like, holy shit."

Even then. Even with the offer sitting in front of her. She was surprised.

"These people are across the country, even in another country, and they specifically are talking to me."

The phenom who still cannot quite believe it.

She knew she wanted to study nursing, and Western Michigan had a program she could complete within her time there. The coaches knew before they recruited her and said they would work around her clinical schedule. A Canadian senior on the team, also in nursing, became her big-sister mentor before she even arrived.

Student athletes are not usually encouraged to go into fields like nursing because the schedules are brutal. But the Western Michigan staff told her they could make it work. That mattered.

The Next Generation

Tessa Langelaan, Brianna's younger sister and best friend, is following her to Western Michigan. Same school. Same dream. Two sisters from the same dairy farm in East Richmond, both beating the 2% odds. They will overlap for at least two years.

"That is something I think of every day."

Tessa is a centre back. Calm under pressure. Incredibly tough. Brianna told me a story about a school soccer game where Tessa went into a slide tackle and ripped up the side of her calf on the turf. A massive burn. She cried at night from the pain. She kept playing the next day.

The toughness runs in the family.

Their youngest sister Aubrey plays in the 2011s. She is the youngest of the soccer sisters, still finding her path, and the whole family will be watching to see where it leads.

What She Would Tell Her Younger Self

When I asked Brianna what advice she would give to her eleven-year-old self, she struggled to find the words. She tried a few different ways and kept circling back to the same idea.

"Just remember what part of the game you find the funnest. Don't forget that why, why it's fun."

She went through a period where she forgot soccer was supposed to be fun. The pressure, the perfectionism, the seven-day training weeks, the injuries. It ate away at the joy. Climbing back from that has been part of her journey at Western Michigan, and she is still working on it.

Work hard, she says, because someone always wants your spot. This is a choice to be here. But at the end of the day?

"Being successful is fun."

The Langelaans do not shout about what they have done. Brianna will not brag. Kylie will not post about the milking schedule she rearranged. Dad will never tell you about the seven-day-a-week driving, the recruiting spreadsheets, the flights to Michigan, unless you stand on a field and let him talk for 47 minutes.

That is the real stuff. The stuff nobody sees. The two backpacks on the bus, the 102 kilometres around the farm, the sister who took over the dairy, the father whose love language was always sports.

Fewer than 2% make it to Division I NCAA. Behind Brianna's 2%, there is a whole family.

"This is the part that nobody really knows. Everybody just sees the other stuff, but this is the real stuff."