Despite being a young team, Bruin Soccer is ready for a new season.
This year, the Boys Varsity Soccer team only has four seniors playing. The team needs to join up with Junior Varsity players for preseason games. Junior Varsity Coach Tim Highsmith says this dynamic is positive and he likes the challenges facing them.
“I think the team played really well [regarding the preseason game against Forest Hill],” said Coach Highsmith. “We have a lot of young players. I think we only have ten upperclassmen and the rest are freshmen and sophomores. There are a lot of young kids that are getting a lot of experience with the Varsity level. For being a very young team, they work very well together.”
Riley Slater, a senior, believes that having a small amount of seniors is going to affect the season after preseason games.
“We only have four people in the senior class and none in the junior class, so we might have a rough season this year,” said Slater.
Sean Cullers, a sophomore, also had concerns. He said he thought the team’s lack of practice is going to hurt their prospects this year.
“We have been having practice but not really practicing because we don’t focus very much at practice,” said Cullers.
Ben Coffman, a senior, doesn’t see having only four seniors as a problem because they have a lot of experience playing at the high school level.
“I think it doesn’t matter because the seniors are the four best seniors on the team,” said Coffman. “I think we are going to be undefeated when the season starts. We are having a rough preseason but I definitely think we are not going to lose.”
Slater said he hopes the team will do well during the season.
“I think the JV team is going to do really well,” he said. “We have a lot of really good freshmen players.”
Coach Highsmith said he is concerned that, after having a solid group of seniors that graduated in 2017, the team is going to be hard to rebuild.
“It’s definitely what we would call a ‘rebuilding phase’ where we would have the majority of our kids are freshmen and sophomores so, in the next two or three years, we are going to have a really strong team especially with Placer and Lincoln moving out of our league,” he said. “I think we are going to be really competitive.”
