Sara Wilson’s a captain with drive
The air around Central Valley High was filled with a cadence — drummers keeping time to an electronic metronome, vibraphones adding a metallic melody with football players offering a counter melody in the music of crunching pads.
Still, with all that rhythm swirling around her, Sara Wilson dances to her own beat. A good thing in a team captain.
Wilson sets the tone for a team in the thick of the Greater Spokane League girls soccer race, a team that already has posted wins over Mead and Lewis and Clark, carrying a 7-1 record into Wednesday’s showdown with Mt. Spokane at Central Valley.
“I really wanted to be the captain this year,” Wilson admitted. “I didn’t realize just how much I wanted it, but I’m really glad my teammates put their faith in me.”
Wilson is the lone returning senior starter, which gives her a captain’s cache with her teammates, but it’s her drive that makes the forward stand out.
“I think the teams we play are saying to each other ‘Wow, she yells too much,’ ” Wilson said, smiling sheepishly. “But you have to be vocal. You have to be the holler guy.
“The good thing is that this is a tight team. We all get along, and we’re all friends, and that’s great. It also helps that we’ve all played club soccer and a lot of us have played together. We have players from three different club teams but we’ve played together, and that helps us come together as a team.”
Wilson doesn’t just holler. Through the first eight games she has five goals and three assists.
Wilson’s drive kicked in after Central Valley got spanked in its season opener, 5-2 at Gonzaga Prep.
“That was a wake-up call,” she said. “We were not ready to play that game. We weren’t in condition, we weren’t mentally prepared.
“Fortunately, we had a few games where we could get back into it. We got into shape fast and got our act together.”
Wilson wasn’t in top shape coming into the season.
“I got sick over the summer and got out of shape in a hurry,” she said. “I went to a soccer tournament and caught strep throat. I had it for three days before we even knew what it was. I was sick for a week and wound up losing about 10 pounds. In soccer, you can get out of shape pretty fast.”
To back up the hollering, Wilson kicked up her game to match her rhetoric. She scored the Bears’ first goal in a 3-1 win over Lake City, and the second goal in a 2-0 win over Sandpoint that got the team back on track at 2-1. She set up junior midfielder Jennifer McKinsey’s goal in a 1-0 win over North Central, and had a pair of goals in a 5-1 win over West Valley.
The team got a big boost out of a 2-0 win over Mead. Kelli Johns scored a minute into that game and Wilson added an insurance goal late in the first half.
“That win was so big for us,” Wilson said. “They’ve always beaten up on us. It was especially big for us to score early in that game.
“One of the things we’ve been working on is to play hard right from the beginning of the game. It seems like it takes us a while to really get up to speed. We need to play hard right from the beginning, especially in the games we have coming up.”
The Bears have had flashes where they’ve played the way Wilson knows they can — the way they will have to play down the stretch.
On Friday, the Bears play at Clarkston. East Valley and Shadle Park await next week, and a showdown with cross-district rival University and league-leading Ferris are still ahead.
“I know we can play so much better,” she said. “And we have played that way. We just have to be able to sustain it.
“The cool thing is that this team is really interchangeable. We can move players around in different positions so we can do different things. When we start passing the ball around the way we can, we can be really, really good.”
That’s Wilson’s intermediate goal: to find the on switch to the team’s “A” game. The No. 1 goal is to reach the postseason.
“I really want to get into the playoffs so bad,” she said. “We came so close my sophomore year, and we came close again last year.”