Under 8 soccer team goes from gruesome to gold
Photo from Rob Scholz
Back row, from left: Oscar Colbert, Joshua Lewandusky, Mason Stanco, Dylan Phillips, Gavin Fung, B.J. Rizvanovic, Sam Manzella. Front row, from left: Aidan Glunk, Ryan Scholz (who has his arm around T.J. Anderson), Shiner Lindsay. Players not shown are Minh Tri Turnbull, Marco Rosa, and Brady Covington.
GUILDERLAND — It’s a story of willpower and learning to work as a team, said coach Rob Scholz, talking about his Football Club Dutchmen soccer team of players under the age of 8.
A former collegiate player, Scholz was brought in for the first time this year by FC Dutchmen coaching director Mike Kinnally.
The first tournament that the Under 8s played in was in Rhode Island in November. The team lost three games and won none. The third game’s score was 17 to 0. The tournament was an “eye-opener” for the kids, Scholz said.
“We got whooped. They were demoralized, frankly,” said the coach.
Scholz helped guide the team from that point to becoming undefeated gold medalists in the season’s last tournament on June 11.
To get there, the players worked really hard. “They sacrificed for each other and learned how to work together as a team,” Scholz said.
He kept “scrimmaging them, bringing them to tournaments, and letting them have fun and see new things,” he said.
“Each time they practiced or played, it was like building blocks,” Scholz added. “You could see things click as they worked and worked.”
Over the course of the season, they went from individual soccer players, each with his own talents, to a cohesive team that knew “how to highlight each other’s strengths and hide each other’s weaknesses,” said Scholz, whose son is one of the team’s members.
“You can’t make them want to do it. Their ‘want’ was extraordinary, for little kids,” he said.
The June tournament at Syracuse University was something they had been working toward all season, and an opportunity to see how far they had come, Scholz said.
“They did extraordinarily well,” he said.
The team was entered into two different divisions in the Syracuse tournament. It won one division undefeated.
The team’s last game in the other division was tied, 0 to 0, with 15 minutes to go, Scholz said, when they scored a goal — and then two more — to finish the day completely undefeated, with two gold medals.
“They were all a proud group of kids,” their coach reflected.
What’s next for them? Scholz hopes to see them — and other new players from the area — try out next year for the Under 9 team.
And his hopes for these kids, who he says have a tremendous amount of heart and grit, go far beyond soccer.
“The sky’s the limit for them, not only in soccer, but in all of life,” Scholz said.