The boy’s soccer team is off to a great start to the 24-25 season with the league just getting underway; their record stands at a very impressive 13-2-1 overall and 7-0 in league at the time of this article.
Junior Saul Avalos, has been playing soccer since he was five years old. His experience playing soccer for ridgeview has been, “really good, really intense.” He says this season, “Has gone good with having won pretty much every game so far.” The toughest school they faced to him was Clovis because of their defense. Some strengths he sees in the team is their passion and strong mentality. A weakness is that they argue sometimes but not all the time. Some goals Avalos has is to be able to help his team the best he can to win the Valley final. Avalos contributes a lot defensively to the team. Though Avalos says that he needs to be more vocal. Clovis North and Sanger are really tough teams they might see in the playoffs. He definitely feels they can win the valley this year and that it’s looking really good.
Senior Andrew Orozco has been playing soccer since he was six years old. He feels the season has gone pretty good but can definitely be better. “We made some mistakes at the beginning of the season and lost a couple of games, but I think we’re doing pretty good so far,” Orozco says. According to him the toughest school they faced was also Clovis due to them always being one of the best programs. He says one strength the team has is attacking, but one weakness is their defense being shaky sometimes. Going into the playoffs Orozco believes they can bring it home and go all the way. Having playoff experience is important because “It’s a coin toss and always 50/50 and whoever plays a better game that day.” His biggest strength is distributing and helping get to the net and going forward.
Varsity head coach Isai Cruz has been coaching for ten seasons. He feels the season has gone good so far, but believes they haven’t hit their full stride yet, and haven’t reached their ceiling. “There are a lot of things we need to work on and we believe we can get to our best,” Cruz says. We are not at our best but are still playing well. The team’s strengths are having, “A strong brotherhood, they all want to win, they want to win together, they love being out there, love the game, and are ready to work hard.” A weakness they have is sometimes, “They go into games overconfident and start off on their heels and end up getting stunned. They have to go into each game level-headed and not think they are better than the opponent but show it on the field minute by minute,” Cruz states.
With playoffs coming up real soon Cruz believes having playoff experience is huge. “It’s super important, I have some players that are well seasoned in playoffs and a few who have lost two valley championships so they made it to the end more than once, playoff games are not easy it doesn’t matter who you playing against every game it’s like expect the unexpected and you have to be ready for battle no matter who your playing against. You don’t have to be the better team and you can end up winning and you can be the better team and end up losing and if you know what to expect it will help you.”
We look forward to rooting for our boys’ soccer team in bringing home the Valley championship.
