Wilsonville High School is still barely underway, as many classes have only touched the surface of curricula, and most classes haven’t had much in the gradebook yet.
However, what has begun is school sports, with teams kicking off their seasons in the second and third weeks: football, soccer, cross country, Unified soccer, and volleyball. This got me to wondering just how teams are established here, as after all, schools need to find out who the best players are, especially on freshman teams, comprised of people who only came to high school a couple of weeks ago.
Ian Reschke, who’s responsible for all 3 boys’ soccer teams (as opposed to 4 as was the case for the past 13 years), shares his methods, namely, holding a tryout the week of August 18th; the summer vacation date isn’t actually a problem here.
Reschke says that sometimes players who don’t come to tryouts are “too late.” This being said, “sometimes you need more players,” he continues.
Reschke sometimes asks players who want to take slots “to show up for a tryout to see if they are a good fit for any of our teams.” In a frequent case, athletes can play on the JV2 team, even if they weren’t fully present during tryouts or are completely new to the sport. Rarely, teams have to make cuts to ensure that every athlete on the team can participate to the best of their ability.
In this case, soccer is apparently losing popularity among boys, as Wilsonville no longer has a dedicated freshman team, being merged with the JV2 team. As the season begins, JV2 has 19 players, JV1 varsity 17, and only 15 players on the varsity team. Despite these being well below the OSAA maximum of 22 players, it’s also well above the minimum of 11, and Reschke says this tends to sort itself out, as “players from lower teams will get pushed up as the season goes.”
However, Mr. Humphries, coach of the freshman-sophomore football team, has an easier time finding players, as most freshmen “sign up on their own”, and it’s not too hard to integrate them into the team, as “most of our players played middle school or younger.”
Forming the actual team, including formations, plays, and a depth chart, is not difficult as well, as fortunately, the players make it easy, as they “want to do well and want to work together.”
Essentially, despite the initial struggles in assembling a team, once a coach has their team, it is relatively easy to set it up and build a successful team that operates as one and achieves athletic success.
