See what Coach Mebit Aragaw and some of his players had to say about the upcoming Henry Clay 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: Henry Clay schedule
Coach Mebit Aragaw
We’re excited to start the season, even though we lost a lot of players, the way practice has gone and the way the players are hustling and trying to help themselves is a nice thing to see. It’s a good way to start practice.
We’ve go a lot of expectations, but we’ll see. We have to take it game by game.
A lot of offensive players are coming back. We’re still working on our defense. We try to put those two together. When you go to offense, we’ve got at least eight or nine of them returning. We’ve got Ashley Chindo, our leading scorer, Ruby Kate Gray, the leading assist (player) from last year and and Sara Ueland, our second-leading scorer from last year.
We’ve got two great goalkeepers, Morgan and Hunter Morrison. They are going to be difference makers out there. They’re going to help the defense. In front of them, Elisabeth Hundley is a freshman, but we expect a lot out of her. And Corey’s right in front of her, a junior.
(Chindo) just (needs) to be herself. She’s got the speed. She’s so unselfish. She loves to work hard. We just want her to be herself. I don’t ask any more from her. … The whole offense has been working hard.
We’ll do our best. We just want to take it one game at a time. Injuries are the biggest thing. If you avoid injury, you have a chance to do a lot better when it comes to district.
Catholic … they’re the standard, you’ve just got to measure yourself how you play against them. It’s the same this year. They’re going to be the top team, so, we’ll see how it goes.
This is a tough region. Any day could go to anybody if you don’t prepare yourself. We’ve got to play that 80 minutes (or) whatever it takes. If you don’t worry much about the others and just take it one game at a time – (well), you’ve got to take it that way. If you think about the region (as a whole), it’s just going to kill you. It’s just going to wear you out.
Ashley Chindo, junior
We have a variety of talents on our team. So far, we’ve been working really hard in two-a-days and I think that’s the only way we really can accomplish the goals we want to set.
Ruby Kate Gray, senior
Even though it’s just started, I can tell we’re going to have a tight knit group.
Morgan Patton, senior
I think we’re going to be pretty good as a unit. We have good team chemistry. I think we all work really good together and we all have different things that come together as a whole.
We’re going to try to go as far as our abilities take us. I think with what we’ve got and what we’ve been working on and just how good we are with team chemistry and everything will take us somewhere good.
Hunter Morrison, senior
(Our) Strength (is) all working in practice as hard as we want to play in our games.
