Three years ago the girls’ soccer team was playing in the Pacific Division of the Monterey Bay League. After proving that year that they were fit to play harder teams, they moved to the Gabilan Division, and they’ve shown that they belong after earning their third playoff berth. Coach Ramon Hernandez said, “Being in the Pacific was not too hard to keep the level of play but being in the Gabilan is like a final every game. There is no rest at all. You finish one game, the next day you have to be ready for the next one.”

This year was the girls second year of playing in the Gabilan, according to Priscilla Ruiz one of the main differences between the Pacific and the Gabilan was that they had to work harder. “We hardly had any days off, all because we were going to play harder and stronger teams.” The girls and the coach had one goal and that was to win CCS.  They didn’t want what happened last year where they only went to 2nd round of playoffs.

This year the girls showed both their consistency and improvement by going undefeated in the preseason. They continued their strong streak in league, and it seemed like the girls were going to go undefeated.  Unfortunately, the streak ended six games into league with a loss against Salinas High. Priscilla Ruiz said that even though they did lose that game it was one of the strongest games they had, “At that time we had no injured players the whole team was strong. Salinas had a really hard time getting by us.”

Overall, the team went 15 – 3 – 2 including their CCS loss. In league they went 8 – 2 – 2, which was good enough for second place. One of the reasons the girls had such a successful preseason and season was because many of them had been playing together for at least 3 years. Out of the 18 girls in the team, 16 were returners. This made the girls confident and stronger as a team. Ruiz said that they wouldn’t have had a team connection in the field if they didn’t have the bond they had. Hernandez felt the players’ connection contributed to their success, “Our strengths lay in our defense that only allowed 3 goals in 13 games, and our forwards who scored 40 goals combined.”

Hernandez thought that the girls were really strong until they started losing players due to injuries. “Normally teams get stronger by the end of the season, but this was not the case for us, with so many injuries we had this year, the team started to lose power by the end of the season.”

The team made it to CCS but they didn’t have the same success they had during the season. Hernandez said, “Even though we made it to this big event, we had so many injured players that we weren’t able to play our game, ending our season very early.” Brenda Garcia agreed with her coach, “We had to move players around and put girls in positions they hadn’t played.”

Even though the girls didn’t win CCS, they did exceed the coach’s expectation, “We had a very spectacular year, we won 15 games of 19, we finished second in the league, we broke our school record of more minutes played and not allowed a goal, and we regained respect from the other schools, now they don’t want to play us because we are not an easy team anymore.”