by Tatum Fisher
On a gray New England afternoon, the first thing anyone noticed was how small she looked. A girl barely five feet tall stepped onto the “Field of Dreams” at Pomfret School, surrounded by towering pines, a sharp fall wind, and a team of players she barely knew. She didn’t say much that first day. She didn’t have to.
Within minutes, the ball drifted toward her as if she’d willed it there. She checked her shoulder once, twice, and in one clean touch, she slipped a perfect through-ball between two defenders. A teammate took off after it. Conversations around the field paused. Attention shifted her way.
“I swear it was immediate,” Pomfret girls’ varsity head coach Erin Fisher said, still sounding a little stunned. “She’s the kind of special player you might get to coach once or twice in your lifetime. When she stepped on that field, she just took it. She didn’t do it loudly. She didn’t demand the ball. But she controlled the entire game.”
Fisher smiled as she recalled the phone call that brought this quiet playmaker to Connecticut.
“Coach Amphone told me, ‘Trust me, she’s a maestro on the field. A 4’10” Messi.’ And he was not wrong.”
The girl they were talking about, suddenly center stage, was Krystal Medina, a multi-year varsity captain from Corona, California, the daughter of Mexican immigrants, and now a freshman midfielder at Columbia University. Back then, she was just 17, frightened, far from home, wondering if she’d made a terrible mistake. At five-feet-nothing, she didn’t look like the player who would run a match. But she is exactly that.
She always has been.
Small, but never small in presence
Medina laughs about it now—the nickname that followed her through high school, courtesy of a teammate who blurted it out in a newspaper interview: “four-foot mini-Messi.”
“When I saw it, I genuinely laughed,” Medina said. “It was kind of shocking to hear out loud like that. But I guess my height gives me a lower center of gravity, so maybe it makes sense.”
Her style of play backs up the nickname more than she ever would. At Santiago High School in Corona, Coach Mike Fleming watched opponents build entire scouting reports around stopping her.
“She was the motor of our midfield,” Fleming said. “She took us wherever we went.”
He still remembers how absurd it felt when every opponent seemed to double-team her, sometimes even triple-team her, yet the ball never left her feet for very long.
“The other team’s focus was always on her: put someone on her, limit her ability to impact the game,” Fleming said. “But she still always found a way to stay on the ball. And it was never about her stats. She just wanted everyone else to score.”
That last part, more than her balance, more than her touch, more than her vision, is what everyone around her sees first. Medina doesn’t want the winning goal. She wants the pass that no one saw coming.
“I really pride myself on giving the final ball through,” Medina said. “I enjoy it more when my teammates score. That feeling of helping make something happen means more to me than taking the shot.”
She smiled as she said it, the kind of smile that suggests she means every word. Her whole style is built on connection: on making others look good, on helping the team find something bigger than the box score.
It’s the smallest person on the field who reads the game at its widest angle.
Underestimated, over and over again
The same qualities that make Medina unique, quiet leadership and small stature, have made her easy to overlook. During the college recruiting process, Medina recalled a coach who fully stopped communicating with her because he “couldn’t invest that amount of scholarship money into a player of her height.”
“It was definitely an eye opener,” Medina said. “I think a lot of coaches underestimated me because of my height.”
She paused. No bitterness. Just memory.
“But I ended up somewhere much better suited for me.”
That “somewhere” didn’t come easily. No one in her multi-generational household in Corona had ever talked about boarding school, let alone a post-grad year spent 3,000 miles from home. There is no blueprint for a first-generation student navigating college sports recruiting.
“When Coach Amphone called and suggested it, I didn’t even know what a post-grad year was,” Medina said. “We had to research it as a family. It was scary because nothing was guaranteed. Everyone else seemed to have a plan already. Mine fell through. I just had to hope it would all work out.”
There were plenty of unknowns, but one thing felt certain: she had worked too hard to turn the opportunity down. Her family was determined to support her, even if the path was unfamiliar.
“Everything I do is because of them,” Medina said. “I just want to make them proud.”
That is her biggest why. Not height, not scholarships, not a newspaper nickname. Family.
Connection as superpower
Medina plays the game the way she approaches relationships: patiently, attentively, and with a desire to elevate the people around her. Before she ever trusts her voice, she listens. Before she takes control, she learns who someone is.
“I try to really form connections off the field,” she said. “So on the field, we already understand each other.”
This explains why her teammates often feel her influence even when she isn’t talking much. Fisher noticed it instantly at Pomfret.
“Despite consistently being one of the best players on the field, she was also one of the most humble and gracious players,” Fisher said. “Never seeking the spotlight. Always lifting teammates up. She modeled the way.”
At Columbia, Medina is the same. She listens before directing and observes before stepping in. She cracks jokes when she’s comfortable, keeps practices light, and works to understand how others play so she can elevate them.
Her passes aren’t just technical reads. They’re acts of recognition.
A city that once lived on her phone screen
As a kid, Medina set a photo of the New York skyline as her phone wallpaper. She wasn’t thinking about recruiting or college yet; she just loved the city.
So when Columbia began recruiting her, the academics surprised her. The location didn’t.
“I had no idea Columbia was an Ivy League,” she admitted, laughing. “When I told my family, my mom and brother kind of freaked out because of how good it was academically.”
She wasn’t chasing prestige. She was chasing a place she’d been looking at since she was ten.
Now she rides buses past buildings she once saw only on a screen, explores neighborhoods on her free days, and walks through the city not as an outsider dreaming of it, but as a student living in it.
Some people shrink in New York. Medina treats it like another field to read.
A freshman finding her voice
Her first Division I preseason nearly cracked her confidence.
“The speed of play was so much quicker,” she said. “The players are stronger, faster, smarter. I remember calling my mom and saying I didn’t know if I was made for it.”
The doubt didn’t push her away from her goals; it clarified them.
“My goal is to make an impact on this program,” Medina said. “Not just on the field, but in culture. I want to leave a legacy. Whether it’s through play, or relationships, or how I carry myself, I want the program to be better when I leave.”
Even her definition of legacy is team-centered.
Building beauty
When Fisher called Medina “the kind of special player you might get to coach once or twice in your lifetime,” she wasn’t talking about goals. She was talking about beauty, the kind you don’t notice until you realize the whole match has been rearranged.
“She exemplified the word beautiful in the beautiful game,” Fisher said. “She brought out the best in her teammates. Everyone around her got better.”
When Fleming said Medina was “the motor,” he meant she wasn’t noisy or obvious. She was the reason things moved.
And when Columbia assistant coach Amphone Keovongmanysar said she was “a 4’10” Messi,” he wasn’t describing her skills. He was describing how she sees the game.
It’s creative. It’s patient. It’s crafty. It’s quiet. But quiet does not mean small.
“Maybe people underestimate me because of my height,” Medina said. “But I don’t know. Everything has worked out. Your journey is your own. It’s not supposed to look like anyone else’s.”
In soccer, a playmaker is measured by what they help others do. By that measure, Medina might be the biggest player on every field she steps on.
She’ll probably laugh when she reads that. She’ll probably shrug it off and pass the credit forward.
Because that’s what maestros do.
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