Idaho has just one co-ed high school soccer team in the state; Orofino Junior Senior High School.
“We’ve had a lot of girls playing throughout the years, and they’ve been going head to head with all the boys that we’ve been playing with,” said senior Matthew McGrath, one of the team captains.
“We also play a league up, so we’re playing against harder teams,” he said last Friday during a practice at the local field.
Some of the girls said the boys can push their patience.
“They’re really stubborn,” said Fatima Santos-Lopez, one of the junior girls on the team.
“We argue sometimes, but eventually we get around it,” said Virginia May, another junior girl on the team.
“Our girls are tough, they are aggressive,” said Sarah Hill, the team’s assistant coach. “They can compete with the boys.”
The other team captain, senior Caden Robinson, said they always have a few girls who are instrumental to the team.
“We got Virginia and Fatima this year on defense,” he said. “It’s been good. It’s helped us out a lot.”
In addition to playing in a bigger league, the team exclusively plays boys-only teams.
Most of the time, the boys teams they play don’t say anything about the mixed gender roster. But Santos-Lopez said it sometimes shocks them when one of the girls gets the ball.
“It’s more like, they make fun of themselves for us kind of beating them, in a sense,” she said.
The team wouldn’t have enough players for either a girls or a boys team if it wasn’t co-ed, said Jim Hill, the head coach. He tries to hold the whole team to the same standards.
“Guys are a little more individualistic and I think girls are a lot more team-oriented, which is a big deal,” he said. “You kind of have to play to both sides a little bit.”
Aside from coaching a co-ed team, he said one of the challenges of living in the rural panhandle of Idaho is having to play a league up, because Orofino is too far away from other small communities with soccer teams.
Hill has tried asking nearby schools with varsity girl’s teams to play the co-ed team.
The answer he usually gets is, “Absolutely not, because the boys will potentially hurt the girls physically.” said Hill. “But I’m going, ‘Wait a minute, our girls day in and day out have to play two divisions up,’ and so the logic is really skewed.”
At practice last week, players pushed themselves during drills and scrimmaging. They were getting ready for a big game to close the regular season — the homecoming game against Bonner’s Ferry, a bigger school, and one of the teams Coach Hill said is expected to go to state.
McGrath cracked a smile when asked how he thinks the team will do after the last heartbreaker against Bonner’s Ferry.
“We lost five to zero last time, so we’ll see how it goes,” he said.
At the soccer homecoming game on Saturday, October 11, the senior players took the field with their families to celebrate. They were gifted framed photos of them playing soccer, and balloons in royal blue and white, the school colors.
The team played hard and the defense was solid. Orofino shut out Bonner's Ferry, winning the game four to zero.
“It’s at least been more than eight years since we’ve beat this team, and to, like, beat them resoundingly, keep a clean sheet, it feels great,” co-captain Robinson said.
“I think if we bring the heat to districts like that, I think we can really do well and we can totally just blow ‘em out of the water again,” said co-captain McGrath.
The Orofino Maniacs are now competing in the district tournament in Post Falls. On Wednesday, they won their first game against St. Maries, giving them a 9-2 season so far.
“We play Bonner’s Ferry on Friday at 1 p.m.,” said assistant coach Sarah Hill in an email Wednesday night. “If we win, we will go to state.”
This story was produced with assistance with journalism student Jake Scott.
