See what Coach Ally Tucker and some of her players had to say about the upcoming Sayre girls’ soccer season.
Jared Peck, Real-Time Sports Reporter for the Lexington Herald-Leader and co-founder of SoccerintheBluegrass.com, visited all nine Lexington high schools and spoke with coaches and players about the upcoming season. Over the next several days, SITB will release the notes and videos from those interviews that were used for the Herald-Leader’s preseason preview: Girls’ soccer: Big players, big games, high stakes in Lexington
KHSAA link: Tates Creek schedule
Coach Ally Tucker
It was a big challenge. Every time you step out on the field in this district and region, you’re facing essentially a top 20 opponent. There’s hardly any room in the schedule for a break, but we wouldn’t have it any other way. We enjoy the challenge. Lexington soccer is just fantastic, right now. It’s in a great place. These girls play club with a lot of those girls on other teams, so the rivalries are pretty intense.
What we talk about a lot with this group is, you know, we think we’ve got a good group of players. We think that we try to do things the right way and work hard, but until we take it from someone else, we’re still the ones chasing right now.
We know that we haven’t earned anything yet and I think the girls are just hungry to get out there and compete.
We’ve got a good group. It’s a young group. I think in a lot of respects, we may still be a year or two away from some of our players really getting experience.
I always feel that just to make it to the regional tournament out of this district, we probably play three games just to get into the regionals that some teams may night face throughout the whole tournament. That’s just the nature of the beast. It’s brutal. It’s pretty cutthroat. I think this year, in particular, every team in our district has probably gotten better. I think that it’s going to be a lot of close games. It’s kind of a badge of honor. If you get out of this district, you know you’ve proven something and it’s a pretty good indication of where you are as a team.
We graduated a significant senior class, it wasn’t a big class, but a lot of players that ate up a lot of minutes, so there’s going to be some new opportunities available for some of our players.
We return three center backs from last year, two seniors and a junior, and that’s a real luxury to have that much experience coming back. We return a sophomore goalkeeper who really, we didn’t expect her to have to play last year and we had a senior that went down with an injury game one, so she had to step up as a freshman, that’s Jenna Shalash. We’ve also got a couple of keepers who are going to be pushing her everyday in practice, which is what you want.
We’ve got some returning, leading goal scorer Shae Robinson, she’ll just be a sophomore. We’ve got a lot of young pups that are impact players, Carson Prigge, she’s returning in the midfield. She probably played 80 minutes per game last season.
Our two captains, … Isabella Waldrop and Abby Bischoff, they bring a lot of leadership to the table. Brooke McNiece is one of the other center backs.
Then, we’ve got a ton of players in that sophomore class who didn’t really see the field last year on the varsity level and they’re going to be expected to fill some big shoes, and we’ll see how they do.
We work really hard from the day the season ends. The girls are playing high-level club soccer. We do a lot of stuff together in the winter. They do a lot of stuff together on their own without coaches having to encourage them to do anything.
What you’re seeing, even though it’s the beginning of the season, it’s the product of essentially constant being together, trying to find ways to get better as a team. I think the skill level cannot do anything but go up when you’re working that hard at it.
Isabella Waldrop, senior
I’m looking forward to a new dynamic. We lost a lot of seniors last year, and we do have a lot of returning players, but I’m kind of excited to see how our team changes from last year.
Our district is super tough. Our goal for this year is definitely just to get out of districts. We’re not taking anything away from those teams. They are amazing.
We’re definitely coming together. We’ve been out here for probably like two months doing kickarounds and stuff and it’s definitely coming together now.
Abbey Bischoff, junior
We’re a really young team, but they’ve gotten so much more experience over the past year, so I’m excited to see how everything works out this year. It will be fun. It will be a lot of fun.
Every game in this district is like a fight. It’s till the last whistle. You have to go all out the entire game or you’re going to get caught.
We’re almost kind of lucky to be in such a tough district, because you never get static. You’re always having to push yourself and get better.
