Let’s kick it back

Varsity soccer gets old coaches back

With a record of 12-2 their freshman year, the current senior girls’ soccer career was off to a phenomenal start. This was largely in part due to the coaching of Charles Ward and Emmanuel Allie.

Three years later, Varsity girls will get the chance to play for their old coaches one final time. Allie and Ward will return this year as the head coaches of the varsity girls soccer team.

To the girls and the coaches, this is a promising opportunity to reunite.

“I’m really excited.We get to finish our senior year with them as our coaches, so that’s always nice,” senior Kennedy Weaver said. “We all have gotten super close with them over the years, and it’s nice being able to finish with the people we started with.”

Ward and Allie said they are very excited to come back and see how the girls have grown individually and as a team since they last coached them three years ago.

“When you coach them as freshmen, you have dreams and aspirations and hopes for their development of the game,” Allie said. “Meeting them at perhaps the end of their high school career and then being given the opportunity to help develop the character that we first instilled.”

Parents are also as equally excited as the players.

“I’m excited this year to have coach Ward and Allie back this year because my daughter played for them when she was a freshman and they had a great season,” mother of senior Abby Diemer Jenise Diemer said, “They learned a lot, grew as players, [and] played as a team, so I’m excited for that to happen again.”

With the season still six months away, preseason is very important when getting ready for such a physically demanding sport. The team has begun conditioning two months earlier than normal.

“We’re starting conditioning a lot earlier than we usually do, like conditioning started on Nov. 2,” Weaver said.

Along with conditioning starting earlier, the coaches are looking to focus on aspects of muscle activation.

“We’re pushing a wide variety of workouts, anything from high intensity interval training to plyometrics,” Ward said. “Were pushing hardcore core strength, so active body movements that will help increase the deep core muscles.”

Not only are they conditioning two to three times a week, the girls are also assigned a list of workouts for them to do as homework. Keeping toxins out of the body such as junk food and sugary drinks is just as important.

“We’re implementing a healthy diet consisting of high and mean proteins. We’re minimizing junk food and empty carbohydrates, and increasing hydration to help flush out the negatives in our diet,” Ward said.

Coaching teenage girls, this could be a lot to ask for, but the girls are willing to do everything they can to improve their skill for opportunities beyond high school. With their old coaches behind and a brand new recruiting system, playing at the collegiate level is not out of the question.

“We have a new recruitment system, and they are really working hard to get us in the paper and our face out, so that we can have college coaches to look at us,” Weaver said.

Allie said that soccer isn’t just a sport, but they look to instill important traits that can help the girls on and off the field

“For us, soccer is an avenue of the personal, emotional and psychological development. It’s a place to connect to a community of like minds with common interests,” he said. “Those are all important aspects to human development. When you fail, you reset and you learn from it and you make the adjustments, that’s what sports is.”