Building from the ground up
Winless last year, Pojoaque’s new coach aims to change school’s culture
Raised in the public-school system and polished with an Ivy League education, Steve Baca is smart enough to know that there’s no such thing as a sure thing. Even when the odds are overwhelming in one direction, there’s always a chance to go the opposite way when doing a little soul searching.
That’s why he was willing to listen when his friend, Pojoaque Valley Schools Superintendent Melville Morgan, called him two weeks ago with a job opportunity.
Already employed as a middle school math teacher in Morgan’s school district, Baca was hand-picked by the superintendent to take over as the girls soccer coach at Pojoaque Valley High School.
“I was 99 percent certain I wasn’t going to take it,” Baca said. “But that 1 percent, well, let’s just say Mel’s a great person and a great superintendent. If he was asking, that 1 percent was enough.”
Hired just two days before the Elkettes were scheduled to begin preseason workouts, Baca immediately went to work doing what few other coaches have managed to do over the years.
“Soccer has been, how can I say this, not the cool sport around here,” said senior Dominique Martinez. “For a long time.”
At a school where girls have traditionally gravitated to more popular fall sports like volleyball (six state championships) and cross-country (three), soccer is literally an afterthought to almost everyone. That includes players from the football team.
“And we usually win more games than them, too,” said senior Mariposa Gonzales.
If Baca has his way, that will change soon enough. A star athlete in his day at Santa Fe High, he raised a pair of daughters and a stepson, each of whom played soccer. His approach is simple: build with fun, fitness and basic strategy.
It started slowly. Baca called for 6:30 a.m. practices — “Because some of us have jobs we have to get to,” he said — and began workouts by breaking things down to a fundamental level, like simple passing drills and fitness routines. That quickly led to hands-on experience in simulated game conditions in 6-on-6 drills.
“It’s different from the coach we had before,” Gonzales said. “More of the little things, you know, like scrimmaging and playing games in practice instead of running around like we did last year. It makes you learn faster because we’re really playing.”
A core group of five players that included Martinez and Gonzales grew to seven, then nine and now 12 as of this week. Baca expects a couple more girls to come out now that school is underway and word begins to spread.
“If you’ve got 11 dedicated friends who can stick together and tell other people about this, we’ll be OK,” he said.
With numbers so low, Baca routinely joins in on team drills by doubling as a player-coach in nearly every
situation. One of his first bits of advice was having the players go home and research last year’s Euro 2016 match in which massive underdog Iceland claimed a 1-1 draw against world power Portugal.
His message? The team with less talent, virtually no history and hardly any chance pulled off one of the most memorable performances in recent memory. They did so playing a 5-4-1 defensive scheme that sacrificed fireworks for suffocating play at the other end.
“Most teams only have one or two really good ballhandlers, so if you have five people in there eliminating passing lanes and playing good defense, you’re going to have a chance,” Baca said.
While it might not be a 99-1 kind of thing, it’s certainly enough to get the players under his charge excited about what’s just ahead.
“I think it could take a while to get us there, but we’re on a good start now,” Gonzales said. “It’s going to take some time. People just have to start thinking differently about soccer, that’s all. There are a lot of people at this school who don’t even know we have a soccer team.”
For a team that finished 0-19-1 a year ago, any step in the opposite direction will be a positive one. While the players don’t hold an grand illusions about a playoff run, they do see the tide slowly starting to change.
“My uncle played on the last championship team here a long time ago,” Gonzales said. “They can win at soccer here. It’s just going to take some time. A lot of time.”