Watching—and Learning From—High School Soccer
by Mike Walker
One of the great aspects of high school sports is the chance to see young athletes develop into the players they’ll be at the college level and beyond, but another benefit of watching high school sports is the advantage of being able to get closer to the game than you normally can with an NFL, NBA, or MLS game or even most college games. It’s not impossible to be pretty much on the sidelines, with the action directly before you which is something much more difficult (and expensive) to achieve at higher levels. Yet the quality of a high school game can quite often be extremely high — the opportunity to see some very serious athletes competing against each other is very much present. In this sense, you’re dealing with still-developing athletes but ones who often have a tremendous amount of talent though games will not move with the same finesse as you’ll see at college or pro games. In this regard, you can in many cases see the deliberate actions of specific athletes unfold in ways you won’t even at the college level: you’ll see the pauses and decision-making which only become more fluid with experience.
This holds especially true with soccer. Having coached the sport and also covered it as a journalist, the fascinating thing to me about watching high school games is often seeing flashes of genius in play-making and incredible speed, effort, and talent on the part of individual athletes while on the other hand, seeing a lack of the cohesion that is necessary to reliably win games. It is not uncommon for me to see, in example, stunningly valiant efforts by players fail to materialize as goals because the savvy athlete’s pass to a team-mate results in the team-mate attempting on goal too hastily without the coordination needed to get the ball in the goal. It isn’t even always a case of an alert keeper on the opposing team stopping the goal, but often over-shooting high over the crossbar or too wide past the post. Of course, with young athletes between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, we expect these errors. It’s part of the learning process and talent accounts for far less than effort in most cases.
Most of these kids have been playing soccer since the early youth levels however their time on their high school team may be scant, especially nowadays as club and travel team elite soccer is increasingly augmenting the soccer-playing experience for this age range. Many of these same young athletes are playing with a travel team outside of school and may have been in that program since middle school or even younger. Some of their team-mates may also be in the same program or even the same team, but forming a cohesive team at the school level is a challenge for coaches and players alike and overlaps what is being done elsewhere with the club/travel-team experience. As individual players are building their skills, so are their teams.
When you watch a high school soccer match, you’re watching of course both the teams and the individual players. Most spectators, aside from parents and college recruiters, probably are more focused on the team as a cohesive whole but there is often a lot happening at the level of the individual player that can either run as a separate narrative to the trajectory of the team or a supporting leitmotif. It is both gratifying and frustrating to watch a hard-working and often very skilled player try his best while general failures of his team as a whole prevents his best efforts from translating to a goal scored or opposing goal prevented. In contrast, seeing a brilliant player supported by a cohesive team effort can prove right before your eyes everything the beautiful game is supposed to be — all the teamwork and rapid decision-making coming together.
A couple weeks ago I travelled to Lecanto, Florida to see one of the state’s best and most talked-about high school players in action. Austin D’Anna, number seven on the Lecanto Panthers is a senior and has carried his varsity team forward with deft skill and determination as the team captain and a very vigorous striker. Across the world stage of soccer, it seems currently that attacking midfielders are the real playmakers and also the position so many brilliant young players have found their success at — Ante Ćorić, Alen Halilović, Martin Samuelsen, Martin Ødegaard all are attacking midfielders, all aged twenty (Halilović) or younger, and all at the onset of what look to become amazing pro careers. I also see young American club and high school players gravitating towards the midfield and see coaches aping the successful formulas for such play that clubs like Real Madrid have instituted. To learn a striker — a traditional striker, with textbook stunning goals, with the aggressive type of play we see still in Mexico or Italy to get the ball right up to the net — is making headlines in a rural Florida county deserved further inspection.
Physicality, speed, and skill in shooting could account for the ability to make goals when given the opportunity but just as YouTube is cluttered with plenty of dudes who have immense skills in shooting — Unisport’s corporate ambassador Joltter comes to mind — yet are not playing at the pro level, it takes far more on the field to win games or even to score goals than just a forward who is handy with the ball. As awesome as they are to watch, many of the cool tricks we see on YouTube of sinking the ball into the furtherest corners of the net or even spinning it into a trashcan or the like are just that: tricks. They attest to skill certainly but are set pieces often impossible to replicate in the frenzy of actual play, so any striker who is routinely scoring goal after goal is something else. He is an adept leader with a team behind him able to offer the necessary assists at the right time while defending its own goal in a cohesive way so its offense does not set up its defense for effective surprise attacks from the opposing team. I wanted to see if D’Anna was that guy.
Arriving at Lecanto’s game against rival school Crystal River I immediately noticed several things: for one, Lecanto has heavily invested in its athletic facilities and while not a huge nor wealthy school it was clear athletics were a source of great pride for them. The spectator turn-out was fine but mostly parents, friends, and team-mates from the junior varsity team whose game had just concluded. The weather was for Florida downright chilly, probably in the high forties which is around the temperature where Floridians just don’t know what to do, but they were hanging on. Hot chocolate was selling fast at the concessions stand, people were friendly. I spoke with a couple parents about the team and especially D’Anna to see what I could learn. For one thing, D’Anna I found out was seriously committed to his sport, having spent summers in Spain and Italy at soccer camps to fine-tune his skills — an obvious outlay of money and time and dedication. What people emphasized over and over though was just what a doggone nice kid he was though, that he never cursed on the field and his Christian faith was his primary focus and guiding strength. He hoped to play in college or perhaps even professionally but was leaving options open. I wanted to set up an interview with D’Anna and his coach but decided against it because I knew whatever article I wrote I wanted to concentrate on high school soccer as a game and not just one player — it wasn’t to be a profile article or the like — yet D’Anna was the type of player who is illustrative of why more people should watch high school soccer, and however talented and hard-working he is, at some level his coach and team facilitated the environment he needed to succeed.
Watching the two varsity teams take to the field I immediately noticed several things. For one, Crystal River seemed skilled, alert, and overall evenly-matched to Lecanto but something wasn’t quite coming together for them and it was speed. They were not getting to the ball in time, simple as that. And when they did get the ball, D’Anna or his team-mate Blake Briscoe were very adept at getting the ball back away from them. Briscoe was especially fast, moving into position with stunning speed and agility and deftly tackling. Briscoe didn’t just play as a strong attacking midfielder but with the type of sensibility we hope for in a developing forward. Briscoe apparently is only a sophomore so he has time to develop in whatever way he desires, but he has classic contemporary attacking midfielder written all over him.
Again, even such solid athletes need a whole team working behind them for their efforts to come through, I cannot stress this enough. In contrast to the Lecanto vs Crystal River match which Lecanto won eight to nil, I saw Columbia High School (Lake City, Florida) play Keystone Heights and Columbia dominate that game despite Keystone having Jason Arzie, a versatile and driven athlete who was competing with the same caliber of individual skill as D’Anna. The difference was the team’s cohesion simply could not back his valiant efforts. Like Crystal River, they were not fast enough for one thing and in contrast, Columbia is very, very fast. They’re also aggressive — in a good way. Columbia’s captaincy was not at the same level of graciousness or constant attention D’Anna provides — he was always communicating with his team-mates as was their goalkeeper — however it was enough to formulate leadership on the pitch and a small cadre of players, the forwards and midfield of Columbia, instituted press after press to ensure they controlled the game. I use the term “cadre” here for a reason: Columbia’s forwards/midfield act in cohesion and while they work together with the defense, the defense is primed to stay back — as defenders very often ought. Crystal River’s defense would rush forward too often, and I saw this on the part of Lake Weir when they played West Port as well — the two Marion County, Florida schools ended with a tie due in good part to the inability of Lake Weir to piece together a consummate defense.
There were flashes of brilliance however from Lake Weir, in that match and also when I saw them play Ocala’s Forest High about a week later. Forest has an uncanny ability to really bring the damage, in example despite Lecanto’s normally outstanding show on the field, they were badly defeated by Forest when they played them. Forest, like Columbia, is an aggressive team, highly-disciplined, concrete in their understanding of their playing style and approach and this normally pays off for them. With Lake Weir, not so fast. Lake Weir was able — repeatedly — to hold off Forest and get a goal in though in the end Forest defeated them four to one.
When watching a game, assuming you’re already fairly familiar with soccer as a whole, looking for regional trends can be fun. In north-central Florida I kept seeing teams play with an aggressive style reminding me of the Mexican, Italian, and Croatian approaches to play whereas catching a match last spring at Alleghany High School in Low Moor, Virginia against Rockbridge County High (Lexington, Virginia) I witnessed a style that was reminiscent of the Premier League circa 1994, albeit with a lot less exactitude. Yet it was clear that in coaching circles up there people were trying to channel Ryan Giggs’ glory days into their forwards today.
Watching high school today is, in essence, watching college tomorrow, even watching the MLS tomorrow. It’s watching the development of young players into the athletes they’ll yet become. This is part of the reason why in Europe the major soccer clubs have youth sides and academies and you see their players come up under the watchful eye of not only expert youth coaches but the very people who manage the first team on the pro level. That’s something we lack in the United States, but high school — despite the challenges it faces increasingly from elite travel teams as a conduit for the best players to get where they’re going — still offers a robust and exciting experience plus a window into the future game.
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Mike Walker is a journalist who covers sports — soccer, track and field, basketball, and action sports mostly — as well as travel and the outdoors. He covered the onsets of both Alen Halilović’s and Ante Ćorić’s careers for the Croatian media and his especial expertise is on Croatian professional soccer.
He is also an avid athlete and certified coach in the sports of soccer, track and field, and basketball himself. His publications include work in: Croatia Week, InSerbia, Coal Hill Review, Slate, SEE: A Fortnight in Review, The Moscow Times, Top-Soccer, Porter Briggs, Valdosta Today, The Bold Italic, Untapped Cities, Goldenseal, and elsewhere.
