Coach believed in team despite personnel losses

By Jeremy Stafford - jstafford@nvdaily.com

WINCHESTER -- Luke Mason never felt that soccer came naturally to him.

Mason didn't make his high school varsity team until he was a junior, and as a freshman at Slippery Rock University, Mason could hardly keep up with the rest of his team.
Sure, he had the stamina to run up and down the field, and he had the intelligence to make proper decisions, but Mason lacked the technical skills to possess the ball on a field littered with soccer prodigies.

Thus, Mason learned early in his collegiate career that if he was going to be an asset to The Rock, he would have to put more work into the skills he lacked, and hold off on training the skills he had honed all through high school.

Which meant that Mason, just to stay even with his teammates, had to put in more work than he ever had to.

"Every day before practice, for about a half an hour, I would just juggle every day," Mason said. "After practice I would stay with the keeper and he would punt balls to me, I would work on receiving in the air ... and I would shoot on him a little bit.

"If we had a two-hour practice, mine turned into three."

Mason, The Northern Virginia Daily's Girls Soccer Coach of the Year, brought that blue-collar mentality to Handley this past season, when team expectations were down.
In 2008, Handley finished second in the Northwestern District and defeated Brentsville in the district tournament final. But the Judges lost seven starters to graduation that summer, leaving Mason with too many holes to possibly fill in one offseason, especially considering only a handful of girls tried out for the team this past spring.

"It just cracks me up sometimes, talking to some coaches from really large schools -- like Loudoun County schools -- where they have like 100 or so kids trying out, and I'm begging to get 40 out," Mason said.

But Mason found a way to turn a team of utility players into a competitive squad, which finished third in the district and lost to Sherando on a last-minute goal in the tournament semifinal.

And somehow, going back to the Judges' first practice under a shower of cold March rain, Mason saw that his team could be good enough to compete with district powers Sherando and Brentsville.

"That first day of just the varsity practice, we all walked away thinking, 'Wow, we are light-years ahead of where we expected to be,'" Mason said. "We felt like those first couple days of practice were where we were hoping to be by the end of the season."

Lillie Rupert and Paula Delmerico, as Mason expected, stood out as some of the best players in the district. But players like Anne Cesnik, who came off the bench last year to fill in at a variety of positions, and second-year keeper Caitlin Glackin, put in the extra work in the hope that they might become integral parts of the team.

Cesnik, in her first year as a starter, became one of the Judges' most potent scorers with 11 goals; Glackin, who gave up only 14 goals and had nine shutouts, became a second-team all-district keeper.

For Mason, this year's Judges team will surely stand out from the rest, not so much because of how much success it saw, but because of how his players so closely resemble him as a player in college, when he worked twice as hard just to plug up holes on a roster.

"I think this team, this year -- even though it maybe didn't do what last year's team did, or didn't have some of the stats that some previous teams did -- that this was probably the most coachable team that I've ever had," Mason said. "It's the most cohesive team I've ever had."

View image