High School North boys’ soccer coach Trevor Warner says his team really lived “the dream” this year when it made it all the way to the NJSIAA Tournament, after first capturing the Group III sectional title days before — the first state championship for the program.##M:[more]##
That dream for the 12-seed team was to pull out of a slump near the end of the season to make it as far as they did in the state tournament. The team even came very close to snatching a victory on November 13 from Ocean City, ranked second in the state, after the game wound up in double overtime and came down to penalty kicks.
“The regular season is just a part of what you can achieve come the end of your seasons,” Warner explains. “If you can just make the state tournaments, dreams can come true.”
The final week of the regular season for the 13-8-1 team was what Warner refers to as the biggest down moment. No team plans on peaking, but doing so at the right time can work to its advantage. “At that point, it wasn’t lose and go home,” he said. “We had a chance to recover and fix things and develop a different plan of attack. Because it was the end of the season, we were able to do that after a loss.”
Junior Drew Eccleston echoed this sentiment. “We started off pretty strong; then in the middle we were on a losing streak,” he said. “We weren’t playing to the best of our abilities. Near the end, we just got it all together. We started really wanting to win.”
The boys began playing as if it was their “second season,” and were able to turn things around dramatically, Warner said. While he admits making it so far was a little surprising, over the last several years the team has played a lot of nonconference games against difficult opponents and it hellped them improve a lot for this year.
Being ranked 12 out of 14 heading into the tournament also helped because not much was expected of the team. “When you can enter a game or a tournament with that kind of attitude, good things can happen,” he said. “You’re not playing to fulfill anybody’s expectations.”
First the team plowed its way to the sectional final after Eccleston scored two goals against Neptune in the semifinal round on November 6. In the final, Scott Kelly led his team to victory over Red Bank Regional. Against Ocean City, he again came through with one goal in regulation to tie the game and send it to overtime. The team fell during penalty kicks, 4-3.
“Scott is a special player,” said Warner. “He gets everybody together and huddles. He gets our team fired up. He doesn’t just do the talking, he gets it done big time.”
It’s that attitude and ability “combined with our senior class who absolutely refused to allow their high school experience to end,” that pulled through in the end.
Most of the team’s six seniors play defense with the exception of one, and Warner said they’ve played the best defense in the past 13 years he’s been a coach.
Looking ahead to next year, even though the team will be losing six seniors, there are more than a dozen juniors ready to move up.
“To say they’d be able to duplicate what we did this season would be asking a lot,” Warner said. “Good teams don’t make it here all the time. I think it would be putting a lot of pressure on our guys at this point, but I do think we have the chance to be a special team next year, without getting too far ahead of ourselves.”
