SAN JOSE — The South Bay has a long tradition of developing talent in women’s soccer. Stars like Brandi Chastain, Aly Wagner, Lorrie Fair and Danielle Slaton honed their skills in Santa Clara County before representing the United States on the national team.

Naomi Girma has included herself in this pantheon.

The 24-year-old San José native is on the verge of winning an Olympic gold medal in Paris and has dazzled on the world stage, standing out among the world’s elite talents.

The USA will play against Brazil for the championship on Saturday (8 a.m. Pacific Time).

“It’s just a great joy to watch her, and I can say without exaggeration that she is the best center back in the world,” Slaton told the Bay Area News Group on Thursday.

Those traits have been well known in Silicon Valley for a decade, where Girma was an otherworldly force on the Pioneer High School youth soccer scene from 2014 to 2018.

Former Santa Teresa High coach Andrew Levers recalled briefly having the upper hand against Girma’s team during the star’s senior year. His Saints, the underdogs, led 2-0 at halftime and needed only to defend the advantage.

“I said, ‘Let’s stick with what works, because they’re not doing much and not much is happening,'” Levers told the Bay Area News Group.

He recalled the 3-2 loss to Pioneer, in which Girma whizzed past defenders at will and played breathtaking passes: “She took over the game in the second half. She absolutely dominated us.”

Before she was a starter on a World Cup and NCAA championship team, Girma, the daughter of Ethiopian immigrants, was simply a kid who enjoyed playing for the Maleda Soccer Club in San Jose.

The organization, founded in part by her father, Girma Aweke, was designed to provide children in the South Bay’s Ethiopian community with an opportunity to have fun playing soccer, and gave Girma her first chance to play without pressure.

“Once I was introduced to the higher levels, I had the background of just playing with joy and freedom, and I think that really helped me in the more important moments,” Girma recently told USA Today.

When she was still in her teens, she moved to another club. Longtime South Bay soccer guru Bob Joyce, coach since 1975, bucked the traditional strategy of putting his best players in midfield.

Girma’s excellent defensive skills arose out of necessity.

“We were often behind against superior teams, so we needed our best player at the back as a centre-back,” Joyce told this news organization.

When Girma became a teenager, her enormous potential was obvious. Some of her peers were skipping preparatory sports and concentrating on club competitions.

Not Girma. She joined Pioneer’s soccer team and was named league MVP as a freshman in 2015. She remained on the public school’s squad all four years.

“There are clubs and coaches that don’t allow their players to play high school soccer, and I’m not saying that’s wrong or bad,” Joyce said. “But there’s something beautiful about playing high school soccer on a social level.”

Longtime Pioneers athletic director Joe Berticevich has known Girma for years, having coached her older brother Nathaniel on the school’s basketball team. Berticevich’s daughter Jami dated Girma for a few seasons in high school, and the two are still friends.

“She’s just so down to earth and someone who doesn’t think too much about what she’s doing,” Joe Berticevich said in a phone interview. “We’re her biggest fans.”

After four years of juggling high school, club and national team commitments alongside her school work, Girma joined a strong Stanford team and immediately started as a freshman on the 2019 National Championship squad.

She became friends with goalkeeper Katie Meyer, a fellow champion who committed suicide in 2022. Girma has since become involved in mental health initiatives and dedicated the 2023 World Cup to Meyer.

“When you lose a true friend, it’s not the big moments that are the hardest,” Girma wrote in The Players Tribune in 2023. “It’s actually the little ones. It’s the everyday, boring moments in life that made them so funny, so witty, so meaningful.”

A few months before Meyer’s death, Girma was selected number 1 in the National Women’s Soccer League draft by the San Diego Wave FC.

She left Stanford as a three-time team captain, two-time Pac-12 Defensive Player of the Year and 2021 Pac-12 Scholar of the Year.

Girma has excelled at club level for San Diego and has become a face of the U.S. national team.

Mainly due to her outstanding work in defense, she was named the best female soccer player in the USA in 2023, even though the Americans were eliminated in the round of 16.

The U.S. team played with a roster that was just becoming a younger group. Now the young core is there, with Girma as the main defender and fellow Cardinal Sophia Smith as part of a three-pronged attack with Mallory Swanson and Trinity Rodman.

Girma’s abilities as a playmaking central defender exceed the expectations of a traditionally defensive position.

JT Hanley, the girls’ soccer coach at Archbishop Mitty High in San Jose and involved in the game for decades, struggled to find a historical comparison for Girma, who completed 95 percent of her passes and created two scoring chances in the Americans’ 1-0 semifinal win over Germany on Tuesday.