FORTVILLE — At a glance, the missing pieces to the Mt. Vernon girls soccer puzzle are significant.
The Marauders graduated two players — Alexi Hardie and Cleo Mills — who combined to score 45 goals in 2018 and who had won county Player of the Year honors three times during their high school careers.
Despite that much offensive production and talent moving on to college, Mt. Vernon coach Steve Williams is feeling good about this year’s Marauders. There are missing pieces, sure, but he feels like he’s got a lot of strong options to fill in the blanks.
“I’m as optimistic as I’ve ever been about a team to be honest. We’re loaded with talent,” Williams said. “If we get this puzzle figured out, we’re going to be hard to beat.”
The Marauders were tough to beat last year, with a 16-2 record and perfect 7-0 Hoosier Heritage Conference mark. They’ve won three straight HHC titles but fell short of a sectional title last year with a heartbreaking, 1-0 loss to Franklin Central in the championship game.
Three all-county players are gone — Hardie, Mills and goalkeeper Jaici Wright — but two are back, with senior Riley Hurst and sophomore Maddie Swingle. Hurst scored 11 goals with 11 assists last year. Swingle bolstered the backline for the Marauders and added a pair of goals.
Joining Hurst in the attack will be junior Rylie Pearson. A mixture of others could rotate in as forwards.
“Our chemistry I feel like is really strong this year,” Hurst said. “We all have been playing together since we’ve been in sixth, seventh, eighth grade. Our chemistry molds really well because we’ve all known each other for so long.”
Williams expects a lot of the offense to come from the midfield, where Katie Gawrys, Stay Stindle and Shay Shipley all return and will be joined by move-in Anna Isger, who previously played with the Indiana Fire and Cincinnati Development Academy.
Sophomore Alex Overshiner will take over for Wright in the net. Williams said she’s put in a lot of work and has made significant improvements in her game since her freshman year.
Last year, the Marauders were a young team, starting several freshmen. They expect that experience to help them heading into this year as they aim at a fourth straight conference title.
“The good thing is everybody now has experience. Whereas last year, we had two freshmen that were starting on defense, there’s experience for every person,” Swingle said. “Now that we’ve gotten a year under our belts, we’ve all adjusted and we know how to play and respond to different situations.
“We all, as a group, are capable of winning as far as we want to. It just takes every person, so we all have to show up to keep winning.”
Change in the air for Dragons
Almost everything is different at New Palestine.
The Dragons have a new coach, former Greenfield-Central coach Erin Clark. They are playing in a new class, moving from Class 2A back to 3A this season. That also means they have a new sectional, now joining their county counterparts after two years apart.
They also will have an almost entirely new team. New Palestine graduated 13 seniors from last year’s team and only has 25 total players on the roster this season.
To say they’ll be a new-look team is probably an understatement.
“Really, if you watched the team last year and you watch the team this year, you’re not going to see many familiar faces,” Clark said.
The Dragons went 15-5 last year and 5-2 in the HHC. They won a sectional title and advanced all the way to the regional final before seeing their season come to an end.
Only a few players are back from that team, though. New Palestine has five seniors — Edin Hurst, Maddy Miller, Olivia Murphy, Haley Weinrich and Riley Moss — a few juniors, one sophomore and a bunch of freshmen.
Clark expects as many as five or six freshmen to be in the starting lineup.
“I don’t even think you can look at last year’s team to compare. There’s going to be nothing the same,” Clark said. “It is a completely different team, but I think the girls are embracing that, too. They came out here and there was zero expectation of who the starters are. They don’t know who is on varsity yet. They’re all trying to win a position. I think that is definitely breeding the competition a little bit more, making them work harder.”
Maddy Miller is the leading returning scorer, having amassed 14 goals and nine assists last season. Weinrich and Moss are back in net after splitting time last year, although Moss is currently out with an injury.
With a young team and a lot of questions, Clark has been working on conditioning and running with her new squad. The team did CrossFit all summer, two days a week, and then worked out in the weight room at the high school two more days a week.
Exceptional conditioning was something Clark prided herself on with her Greenfield-Central teams. That is carrying over to New Palestine as the Dragons look to win a conference title and a third-straight sectional title.
“In high school soccer, that will get you a lot of places,” Clark said. “Especially with a young team and not much experience, we need to outrun people, outlast them and play longer.”
Cougars look to take next step
This season, the Greenfield-Central Cougars are looking to take one more step.
They’ll begin that search with a first-year head coach, Brandon Steeno, and without the 2018 Hancock County Player of the Year, Lucy Brand.
Steeno spent the past three seasons as an assistant with the Cougars, so he’s not exactly a new face. The big challenge right way for the new head coach is replacing a standout player who has moved on to play Division 1 soccer at Xavier.
“You don’t really replace Lucy Brand,” Steeno said. “We’re going to change some things up and it’ll be a team mentality. Players last year waited for Lucy to do something. This year, they’re going to have to step up and do it themselves. We’re putting more responsibility on several of our players to make sure we’re successful.”
The Cougars graduated four players from last year’s team that went 12-3 and finished tied for second in the HHC at 5-2. A large core returns, including two all-county players in senior Anne Marie DeKeyser and Kelsi McLaughlin.
They are two of several players that Steeno is looking toward to help lead the team into a new season.
“We’re going to ask an awful lot of Anne Marie DeKeyser in the middle. She’s going to have to take on a much larger, vocal leadership role,” Steeno said. “She’s a fantastic individual and leads by example. Pushing her to be more vocal is what we’ve really challenged her to do. And then sophomore Kelsi McLaughlin is such a dynamic player that we’re going to have to ask her to do a lot of things as well, which she is completely capable of doing.”
DeKeyser scored 16 goals with 14 assists last year, leading the Cougars in both categories. McLaughlin’s 14 goals were second on the team and she added nine assists.
Several other players are expected to play a big part, including senior Emily Davidson and a slew of juniors — Kennedy and Kambell Trapp, Zuleny Caldron, Schyler Slunaker, Macy Huber and Morgan Murdoch.
The Cougars weren’t satisfied with how last year ended — a shootout loss in the sectional semifinal against rival Mt. Vernon — and started working the day after that defeat to try to improve on that this year.
They are ready to take one more step and win their first HHC title since 2009 and first sectional since 2016.
“That’s kind of been our mantra throughout the summer,” Steeno said. “Making sure that we work out hard enough so that you can take one more step to make that defensive stop. One more step to toe-poke a goal in, or one more step to move your grade from a B-plus to an A-minus. Whatever it is, taking that one more step. Goals for us, obviously we want to take one more step, and that means winning conference and sectionals.”