I sit here this morning, watching the rain fall outside and feeling pretty happy but also a little bummed that our season has come to an end. This is the first free weekend I've had in 3.5 months and I'm loving it, but there is a bittersweet taste to the end of each season. What takes so much time and energy is also so enjoyable.
We finished the season up by beating a tough Monterey team and completing our seaosn in 5th place. As many of you know Monterey had an offseason transfer student from Oregon. He is quite an impressive player in size and skill. He was athletically ineligible until this past week, but was able to play in the league tournament. Dane Maughan had the assignment of guarding him all game and absolutely shut him down. Dane and the team held him to just 3 goals. We ended winning the game 15-11 as we pulled away finally in the 4th quarter. Leading scorers were Dane Maughan with 5 goals, Zach Weston had 3 goals, Ryan Ehlke and Jay Louis each had 2 goals, and Fred Hertlein and Brady Hopkins had one goal each. It was a great team effort. We had brought up 5 JV players for the League Championships. Joe Hamwey, Brady Hopkins, Sean and Ryan Pickert (Ryan was sick all week unfortunately), and freshman Romie Kristl, and Mike Airola. We held a 3 goal lead with about 3 minutes left in the game. I decided to give the future of our program a shot at playing in their first varsity game so we pulled the starters and seniors that had played so great all game and were able to get Joe Hamwey and Brady Hopkins in their first varsity game. Wouldn't you know it Brady gets a steal, hustles up the pool and scores a beautiful goal! There is such a bright a future in our freshman and sophomore group. We are excited.
What a great year we had this year. Although we sure would have liked to have won a bit more this year, I think most would say that the improvement displayed by the varsity from August 6th to Nov.7th was dramatic and quite impressive. We knew it was going to be a tough year, some would call it a rebuilding year after a quarter-final showing in CCS last year and losing 11 seniors. Our boys rose to the occasion. We worked diligently all season on the fundamentals of the sport and by mid October it really began to show. As the season concludes we have witnessed a team (Palma) who Carmel beat in the regular season beat us on Wed. night and then go on to beat Hollister in the consolation game finishing in 3rd place and advance to the CCS playoffs. We've also watched an RLS team who we lost to by only 1 goal in the regular season, then beat quite easily in a tournament just a few short weeks ago, go on to beat Hollister in the semi-finals of the TCAL tournament and advance to the championship game. They will be going to CCS as well. I say all that to prove the point that our Padres were right there. If a few small things, and I mean small things went our way we would be advancing to CCS for the third straight year. Carmel High had not qualified for CCS since 1998. We broke that downward trend by qualifying the last two seasons. The level of play is rising each year as again we proved to be highly competitive in what some what could consider a "rebuilding year". I have a really good feeling that we will be back in the post season playoffs very soon and quite frequently these next couple of years.
We will see you all at the banquet.
Coach Gaily
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