By Jack DaSilva
The P.K. Yonge girls’ soccer team is heading back to the postseason.
Despite a 4-1 loss to district rival Santa Fe (Alachua) in the 2A-District 5 championship on Friday, the Blue Wave (13-6) clinched a postseason berth as district runners-up and will travel to Montverde Academy on Thursday for an FHSAA regional quarterfinal.
First-year coach Jon Doles and assistant coach Julian Palechor, as well as several members of the team, joined The Prep Zone show on Monday night to discuss their season to date.
“We started out a young team and, picking up from last year, we lost probably six key players,” said Doles, when talking about the experience and depth of this team.
This season, led by junior forward Lee Ducharme, P.K. Yonge “has exceeded expectations.”
While the team is young, Coach Doles believes they have many quality players who are coachable, which has allowed Doles to help them grow as a team and it has transitioned into success on the field.
Despite the fact that Doles is in his first season with the Lady Blue Wave, assistant Julian Palechor has been with the program for the past few years, which has helped the girls have some consistency in coaching.
Ducharme, who scored five goals in a 7-2 win against Keystone Heights in the district semifinals, has led the team with an impressive 86 goals this season alone. That’s an astonishing average of 4.53 goals per game.
Freshmen Dariannie Merced-Calderon believes that Ducharme has as much success as she does “because she’s very strong, and fast, and knows the game very well.”
Ducharme broke her incredible season down to a simple statement: she loves the game of soccer.
“I love playing the game,” she said. “I love being on the field, it makes me happy.”
Scoring 86 goals in 19 games doesn’t happen because of one player.
“We have a lot of younger players and I feel like they’re growing and becoming better and we definitely have some high schoolers that I’ve been playing with since I was younger so I’ve seen them all,” she said. “I really appreciate having them on the field because if we didn’t have them then we’d probably lose every game.”
Junior defender Annette Herring was another member of the P.K. Yonge girls’ soccer team who joined the show and analyzed the team’s defense.
“Well this is my first year playing defense,” she explained. “It was kind of rough at the beginning because me and Grace both played midfield last year and communication is a lot different in the defense.”
Annette and the other defenders have created a code to help them communicate during the games which has allowed them to perform at a higher level and allow their team more opportunities to score on offense.
P.K. Yonge hopes to seek revenge against Santa Fe and star Kim Melton, who was recognized as The Trophy Shop Athlete-of-the-Week following 13 goals in last week’s 2A-District 5 tournament, including all four goals in the championship, but first the Lady Blue Wave will have to beat a 21-2 Montverde Academy team on the road.
The Lady Blue Wave are certainly a young team, with only one senior, but the talent is there. You can teach and develop players to become better at the game but one thing you can’t teach that this team definitely has is chemistry.
