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The Northwood men’s soccer team — in the midst of a 6-7 season — is finding its identity. Having won three of the last four games after snapping a five-game losing skid, the Chargers are scoring more, allowing fewer goals and settling into a conference schedule in which they’re 3-1 so far.
While the Chargers are still technically a sub-.500 team, many of their losses can be credited to its tough-as-nails schedule, having played some of the top competition in the 2A and 3A classifications — including both Jordan-Matthews (2A, 10-0-1) and Asheboro (3A, 7-0-1), both of which remain unbeaten this season.
With Northwood’s season in full swing, the News + Record sat down with second-year head coach Kevin Forster to discuss his team’s roller-coaster season, his time playing varsity as a goalkeeper in Michigan and the standout players on Northwood’s team 13 games into the season. The interview has been edited for clarity.
KEVIN FORSTER: This season, we have a lot more games, so you have to think about how you’re going to manage your depth and your bench and how you’re going to make sure that you’re not playing guys too much, I guess, because it’s a long season and we want to make a playoff run. So trying to balance that a little bit more than last season, where we were just hoping to play a game. That’s been a big difference.
And I would say, shifting our mindset from being a good team and trying to compete with a lot of great teams, toughening up our schedule. We were in a good conference (the Big Eight 3A) in the past and we’re still in a good conference now (the Central 3A). We’re trying to compete with some of the best teams in the state. So we definitely gave ourselves a tough schedule this season and are taking some lumps from that, but I think we’re learning a lot through it.
It’s pretty early to say too much about it, I would say, but anytime you switch out of a conference that has Chapel Hill and East Chapel Hill in it, you have to think that the competition level might go down a little bit because they’re two extremely good programs, extremely well-run and the coaches have been there for a really, really long time. But then this new conference, we have teams like Williams and Western Alamance and their coaches have been there for quite a while, too. They have pretty strong programs, so it’s give-and-take. You give up some really good teams, but then you also add some really good in a new conference. You never really know quite what you’re going to get until the season plays out.
The biggest one that comes to mind is confidence. You have to have the confidence to know when to come out and when to stay in your goal, to stick with your decision and do it boldly when you do it. And that’s, I think, the hardest thing to teach, but also the most important. And then you have to be a great communicator. You are always the one that needs to be setting up the defense, making sure everyone’s marked, making sure your guys are in good positions to provide opportunities. And then also preventing opportunities by your positioning, how you position yourself in the box or in front of your box, trying to prevent through-balls and things like that. I’d say that communication and confidence are really the biggest things and then the shot-stopping and that sort of thing kind of comes along from there, usually athleticism helps a lot with that, but those are kind of the big areas.
I would say that I actually have seen differences. I think there’s a lot more focus on — at least in the Chapel Hill area, and probably Raleigh too — having a very strong possession-oriented system, especially in this area. Maybe as you move over to the west, more mountainous parts of the state, maybe it’s not as much like that, but in this area, I’ve definitely seen that. That style is pretty pervasive, whereas, where I grew up, it was maybe a little bit more direct, and a little bit more about looking for quick transitions and counter-attacking and finding through-balls.
We have the opportunity to have more wins than any Northwood team has had in the last decade, so that’s exciting to me. It’s a long season and we’ve got plenty of games to go. I think we challenged ourselves a lot early and time will tell what the results of that will be. We played, I would argue, six or seven of the top teams in the state in our non-conference schedule. We lost to teams that are in the top five. I mean, Jordan-Matthews is a very, very good team this year, they should have a good run to maybe a 2A state championship. Then the other teams we played are at the 4A level and 3A level kind of in similar situations. We just had a few knicks and knacks that maybe kept us from really competing how we wanted to in some of those games, I think, and we’ll come back stronger. I’m looking forward to the rest of the season.
Walker Johnson has been a really stable rock. He was an all-conference player last year and you can always count on him to give excellent effort, intensity and attitude, and he gives great minutes. Then one that’s a newcomer is Logan Wooten. He’s really stepped up for us defensively and really shined in every game this season. He’s just a great player in the back.
Last season was obviously very shortened. We had an excellent defensive season, I would say. We didn’t give up very many goals, but at the same time, we didn’t score a ton of goals. We scored just enough to have a solid record and compete well. And then this season, we’re really trying to take a step forward with our goal scoring and that hasn’t completely happened yet. We’ll have outbursts in certain games, but in the big games, we’re looking to find our goal-scoring touch. That’s the area I’d say we’re growing most right now. Defensively, we’re rounding into a very strong team, which is what I expected, but now we’re just trying to find our goal-scoring touch in key games.
