The boys’ varsity soccer team won the North Coast Section title on November 10, defeating Maria Carrillo 3-1 to cap off an exceptional season.
“It’s especially nice this year because we made it all the way to the championship last year, and to lose there is bittersweet,” Coach Dustin Nygaard said. “It is quite an accomplishment to get that far, but to get that far and not win that last game is pretty tough.”
“[The] team was very motivated to win it this year,” senior Tesfaye Paine said. “Everyone brought their A-game. When we played Maria Carrillo at the beginning of the season, it was a 1-1 draw. That’s when we knew we would see them at a big game again.”
Maria Carrillo scored the first goal of the match, but Tam soon countered, tying the game and following up with two more goals. “That’s when we knew we had it,” Paine said.
At the start of the season, “we thought we were going to have a chance to do some damage in the MCAL,” Nygaard said. He was right. The team won the regular season and playoff MCAL titles, loosely referred to as the double-up, this year and last year.
Junior Teddy Mauze won MCAL Player of the Year. “I was honored to win such an award. I have never won such a personal award like that, but I know [that] without my teammates, it wouldn’t be possible,” he said.
Mauze transferred to Tam from Cate School in Santa Barbara early in his sophomore year. “My Cate team had a total of four soccer players; most of the other kids played other sports like football, lacrosse, etc.,” Mauze said. “At Tam, our team this past year was made up of almost all soccer players that play year-round for the local club team in Marin.”
Typically, when a sports team wins NCS, they proceed to compete at the state level. However, for soccer that isn’t the case, because not all regional leagues play during the same season. “There have been talks about moving everything up to winter, but that has come up [every couple of years] since the mid-eighties,” Nygaard said.
Nygaard attributes the team’s success to both talent and chemistry. “I think every team learns throughout the year how important [chemistry] is. It’s something that takes conscious work, but by season’s end our chemistry was really, really good and I think that showed in the final few games. To make it to NCS championship twice in a row, a lot of really high quality kids have come through here and put in a lot of work,” he said. “It’s something this school should be very proud of.”