Chance to show their strength

Already they’ve gone where no Central Valley boys soccer team has gone before.

How they got there – to the quarterfinal round of the State 4A high school tournament, where they play perennial power Pasco today at 1 p.m. in Edgar Brown Stadium – is a testament to the Bears’ commitment to team and to one another.

“We’re a young team, but we came together right from the beginning,” senior co-captain Blake Trimmer said. “CV has never been here, and it’s great that we’ve been able to.”

“My dad keeps telling me to savor the moment, to enjoy being in the playoffs,” senior co-captain Brady Coyle said. “But I can’t do that. I have to treat this as just another soccer game.”

The Bears’ strength is in its team play. There is no single superstar to carry the team. Rather, Central Valley finds its strength in numbers.

In fact, for a team that earned the Greater Spokane League’s No. 1 playoff seed, only two players received All-GSL honors: Coyle and junior forward Jay Vela.

“To be honest, that kind of gives us a little extra motivation,” Trimmer said. “It’s unusual for a championship team to not be better represented.”

The Bears opened the state playoffs by blanking Wenatchee 4-0 Saturday at Central Valley – shutting out a team that twice knocked off Pasco in Big Nine Conference play and lost to the Bulldogs in a shootout to determine the league’s No. 1 seed.

“That was a strange game,” Trimmer said. “Wenatchee lost its composure very early. They got a yellow card and then a red card and had to play a man short. They were taking the game to us the last five minutes of the first half. But when we came out to play the second half, we just knew we were going to win it. Once we scored, they gave up.”

While the purple-clad Panthers lost their composure, Central Valley maintained its cool.

“That’s something coach (Brandon) Deyarmin talks to us about all the time,” Coyle said. “He keeps telling us to not say a single word – he doesn’t want us getting the referee down on us.”

It took just 30 seconds of the second half for the Bears to break open the scoreless deadlock.

Vela, collecting the ball at the midfield stripe, dribbled through the Wenatchee defense, drove down the left side of the 20-yard box and fired a hard cross to a streaking Trimmer, who knocked the ball past the stunned Panther goalkeeper.

“That was pretty typical of the way we play,” Trimmer said. “Jay made a great play. I think he saw me out of the corner of his eye. I held up making my run while he set it up and just got my head on a great cross.”

The goal was Trimmer’s third of the season and reversed a potent scoring combination that has worked for the Bears all season.

“Usually it’s Blake passing the ball to me on that play,” Vela said.

Vela then added three more insurance goals to advance to play Pasco, a team that beat Central Valley early in the season.

“We weren’t ready to play Pasco that first time,” Vela said. “We played Lewis and Clark, and no offense, but they weren’t the same LC team of the past couple years. Then we played Deer Park before heading down to play Pasco.

“Pasco is a great program. They’re in the playoffs every year and they play on artificial turf. They’ve got a lot of speed and playing on the turf makes them that much faster.”

Coyle said the team is better equipped to play the Bulldogs now.

“We’re a different team than the one that played them the first time,” he said. “We have to go down there and take our game to another level, but I know we can do that.”

Central Valley came into the season with a young squad and some versatile upper classmen. Trimmer, for example, has played three sports as a senior.

“The thing is, though, all of our juniors have been playing together on the same club team for a long, long time,” Vela said. “We all play together on the Falcons. When you’ve played that much together, you really get to know one another. I think that carries over to this team.”

Matching that club experience with the high school varsity was helped by the fact that so many players were just plain outstanding athletes.

“I think that helps,” Trimmer said. “We’re all athletes and we know what it takes to be able to compete. We get on each other when we need to, but we also know how to be a team and we support one another.”