Shelsea Carillo and Nicole Goldingay began playing soccer together at the age of 5. Now, they are both midfielders on the Green River Community College team and are hoping to get the Gators to the playoffs for the first time since 2011.

Carillo first met Goldingay when she began playing mod soccer in Federal Way. Goldingay’s father was their first coach. Since then, the two have been almost inseparable.

“If it wasn’t for her dad, I probably wouldn’t be playing,” Carillo said. “And without soccer, we wouldn’t be such good friends.”

“We’ve also gone to pretty much every school together since then too,” Goldingay said.

They continued to play mod soccer while they attended Valhalla Elementary and at the age of 10 they began to play on select teams. They attended Federal Way Public Academy, Totem Middle School and Thomas Jefferson High School before heading to college.

Both say the current high point of their careers, not including playing at the collegiate level, was reaching the postseason while at Thomas Jefferson.

Soccer isn’t just limited to their time playing for Green River, however. The two also work at Starfire Sports in Tukwila. Every once in a while they get to play with some of the teams that train at the complex. It was there that they played against each other for the first time.

“I was asked to guest play for this team I’d played for before,” Goldingay said. “I went to see if Shelsea wanted to play and she told me she already knew about it. When we got down there she walked past my team and I didn’t know what was going on. Turned out we had agreed to play for opposite teams. It was kind of weird.”

“Her team won, though,” Carillo said.

The two took a year off from playing to attend Highline College together. At the time, they didn’t have options for playing collegiately but they missed playing.

A sophomore from Green River met the two one day and suggested that they transfer. They decided to take her advice and received athletic scholarships after they committed to the team.

“I really like it here,” Carillo said. “The school is really nice and the teachers are very helpful. I really like our team. The girls are really cool and the coach is awesome.”

Their goal is to get to the playoffs in their second year, something that has been done only five times in the history of the program.

Since 1994, Green River has only finished with more wins than losses three times. The Gators’ best finish was making the quarterfinals of the playoffs in 2011. Last season they went 6-13, finishing fifth in the North Division of the Northwest Athletic Conference.

“Last season was rough,” Carillo said. “But we’re starting to learn how to play a lot better. I can already tell we’re going to do a lot better this upcoming season.”

“We started really well last year actually,” Goldingay said. “Then we had a bunch of ankle injuries and we just didn’t finish how we expected.”

Carillo says that her personal goal for the year is to work on her shooting. She says she has a problem with finding the posts instead of the net on her shots and she’d really like to fix that.

The team has a full class of incoming freshmen who will compete with the sophomores in the offseason. Green River head coach Stu Snow plans to have the sophomores play against the freshmen at practices.

This will be the final season for Carillo and Goldingay at Green River. Both expect to transfer to a bigger university once they graduate in the fall, but neither knows if they will be playing soccer elsewhere.

When asked what their favorite part about soccer was, both players agreed that it was playing with their best friend.

“If there is an opportunity to keep playing collegiately, we’d definitely do it,” Goldingay said.

Green River will begin the 2015 season at the end of August.