Mastor of LC’s destiny
The Lewis and Clark and University soccer teams meet Friday for the District 8 soccer championship and a trip to the State 4A tournament. A state trip would be a first for the current players. For all that is except Tigers senior midfielder Michael Mastor.
Mastor, a freshman reserve in 2004 on LC’s state fourth-place team, is the only player on either team with high school state experience. The next year the Tigers were shut out of district and last year lost in the second round
U-Hi’s last district title appearance and state berth was in 2001. Since then the Titans have exited in the first round of district competition.
The winner of Friday’s 7 p.m. match at Albi Stadium will qualify for the state round of 16. Mastor is hopeful his team is the one in this, his senior year.
“It was cool to have been a part of that (2004) team,” he said. “Now that I’m a captain and starting player I feel a lot more weight is on my shoulders to get it done.”
His coach, Casey Curtis, is confident that his senior leader is up to the task, calling his outside midfielder the vocal leader on a veteran team.
“He’s our fire,” said Curtis, an assistant with LC’s last state qualifier. “We’re not very vocal as a group, and he lets the team know when what they’re doing is not enough. He’s not afraid to get under their skins.”
Mastor has played soccer most of his life, beginning when he was “4 or 5” in Colorado. His one break from the organized sport came during a year in Indonesia, where his father worked as a mining engineer.
“It was really different,” he said of the experience, citing language barriers, impossible traffic and attending an international school with students from Australia and New Zealand.
The family came to Spokane where he resumed playing soccer on various club teams. His plans are to attend the University of Washington and study engineering.
But first there’s this matter of state qualifying. LC and U-Hi are similar teams, whose seniors stepped up to the plate in their final years. Both were 8-2 in league, the Titans finishing second overall, a point ahead of the Tigers (because of the latter’s shootout win) despite losing to them 2-1 during the season. They are the first- and second-place 4A teams for district purposes in a six-team tournament that began with two loser-out matches Wednesday.
“I knew we’d be good,” said Curtis. “We have 10 seniors and had what we needed to be good. The biggest challenge was to be able to get them to work together.”
U-Hi coach Kevin Houston echoed his friend’s assessment while talking about the Titans’ breakthrough season after years of sixth-place finishes.
“I think the biggest key has been our seniors,” he said. “This is a group that has been with me three or four years on varsity.”
At the beginning of each year, he said, he’d give his spiel about the seniors providing leadership. This year they took it to heart.
He pointed to the recent clutch goal scoring of Billy McElroy, the versatility of Bryce Burchak and defensive leadership from Trent Hemingway as examples.
“They embraced the younger kids and challenged them,” said Houston. “We were able to focus on the things we needed to get better.”
With two such even teams, the outcome will be decided by who executes better, Houston said.
That is where senior experience comes in handy. Mastor figures heavily in LC’s plans, even though his name hasn’t appeared often in scoring statistics.
“My role is to find someone else’s feet or take it to them and lay it off or make a cross,” he said, adding that scoring isn’t a big deal to him. “A win is a win to me.”