It's not exactly a newsflash to hear an elite high school athlete say he's been playing his sport for as long as he can remember. But in the case of Bullis senior Rodney Wallace, this kid is speaking literally.

From his nightly one-on-one tangles with his dad in the living room to backyard pickup games to street soccer games where neighborhood kids shot at lacrosse nets to indoor soccer at a local gym to all those hours on that playground where the monkey bars served as a makeshift goal, Wallace has pretty much had a ball at his feet forever.

"I always seemed to find myself in a soccer game no matter where I was," says Wallace, a 5-foot-10, 155-pound center midfielder. "I've always thought I wanted to play soccer for a living, but as I got older and realized that I wasn't all that far from having a chance to do that, soccer started getting really serious for me. I saw that I had to take advantage of every opportunity to improve my game."

That approach seems to have worked. As it stands now, Wallace has reached a point in his soccer evolution where his on-field contributions are indispensable.

"The thing that makes him stand out is that he's the engine for the team," says Bullis ninth-year head coach George Moore, 38. "He's the table setter. He's the tempo setter. He practices as if he's playing a game. His intensity is such that he's constantly pushing his teammates -- I think even to the point of frustrating them sometimes because they're not used to going that hard every second."

Wallace, the only junior to earn first team All-Met honors from The Washington Post last fall, demonstrated his pedal-to-the-metal mentality the moment he donned a Bulldogs uniform. In the first half of the varsity opener during Wallace's freshman season, visiting Bullis was trailing St. Andrew's 1-0 on a damp, rainy pitch and looked as sluggish as a hibernating bear. Suddenly, Wallace received a right-to-left cross just outside the 18-yard box and left of the circle. He one-touched the ball to the turf and ripped a left-footed rocket into the side netting inside the far post to tie the game.

"I looked at my assistants and I said, 'Holy smoke, this kid could do a lot for us,'" recalls Moore. "He totally pulled us out of a funk and re-established our game. That's what he does out there. Oh yeah, he scored the go-ahead goal that day about two minutes later."

Wallace, a member of the U.S. Youth Soccer Region I Olympic Development Program player pool since 2000, entered this season having anchored the soccer equivalent of the quarterback position for the Bulldogs throughout three highly successful campaigns during which Bullis posted a cumulative record of 40-12-2.

As a junior, Wallace scored 14 goals and dished out seven assists to help lead the Bulldogs to a 17-1 record and the Interstate Athletic Conference championship. He also owned the midfield for a squad that scored 61 goals and surrendered just seven.

"I've always had this competitive edge," says Wallace, 18, who was born in San Jose, Costa Rica and moved to the United States when he was 9. "I don't like to lose. Even if we're playing seven-on-seven in practice, losing is not an option. That's why that level of intensity is always, always there."