North Idaho College men’s soccer player John Ray said one of his team’s goals this season was to qualify, or as him and his team are saying, “qualifly” for regionals as early in the season as possible.
“That way we can fly to regionals instead of having to drive, because last year it took us so long to qualify, we couldn’t get a cheap plane ticket,” Ray said.
Well, since NIC qualified for the Region 9 tournament Saturday with a 4-0 win against the Community Colleges of Spokane, maybe they can order plane tickets for regionals now.
“We started out (the season) with a lot of depth,” NIC head coach Ken Thompson said. “The second weekend of the year we lost Jake Kraut to a broken collarbone. We had a strong start. As we have had some injuries this year, we’ve generally had the depth to deal with it. We are a pretty athletic group.”
Playing well together and having a sense of togetherness has also helped the Cardinals this season.
“I feel like on top of just acquiring players who mesh well together, we’re just bonding on and off the field,” sophomore forward Isaiah Van Voorhis said. “Last year everyone had their own little groups. This year everyone’s coming together.”
Sophomore midfielder Christian Botuli also thought the team is a close-knit group.
“I think it just comes down to team chemistry,” Botuli said. “We have sophomores and freshmen and all of us are friends… We all respect what each one of us brings to the table and we just work for one another.”
The Cardinals are trying to achieve team goals that they set at the beginning of the season. They’ve accomplished some of them so far.
“We’ve talked about a lot of things,” Ray said. “At the beginning of the year, we had some team dinners and as a team we went over what we wanted to accomplish as a team. So we set some common goals and I think that’s really a good idea for any team to have.”
As mentioned earlier, one of their goals is to make it to regionals early. Ray said another one of their goals that the team wanted to achieve is to go undefeated at Eisenwinter Field, their home pitch. So far, so good. The Cardinals are 6-0-1 at home this season. Their next and last home game is Friday against 15th-ranked Dakota County Technical College.
Botuli, Van Voorhis and Ray all agreed that leadership was important for team success.
“The reason we’re all communicating out there is because we’re all leaders and you need that (leadership) on a team,” Ray said. “You need everybody to be a leader. You need to have somebody that’s going to pick a player up and not let him get down.”
NIC still has three scheduled games to play, including Friday against Dakota County Technical College, Oct. 16 at Edmonds Community College and Oct. 17 at Highline Community College.
“We got to continue what we’re doing off the field and we got to continue what we’re doing on the field,” Ray said. “Sometimes there’s adversity and things you got to fight through. You can’t get complacent and you got to fight through adversity so we can’t be happy with where we’re at. We have to always want more.”
