Becoming a ‘good habit’ Argos girls in third straight regional
ARGOS — Four years ago, Joe Stone became the head girls’ soccer coach at Argos. After a tough loss in the initial season, his girls made it three sectional titles in a row beating Laville for the championship.
“A lot of the junior and senior girls (this year) were on that team (four years ago) and they didn’t like what that felt like,” said Stone. “Every sectional since then they’ve really gotten the job done.”
The sectional at Laville for the girls is a minefield to navigate for a title. Teams like Culver and Bremen and
Rochester have had good teams over the years and host Laville is always ready to go in sectional play.
“Their records don’t reflect how their teams play,” said Stone. “We have to fight for every single goal. Every year no matter what their record is they give us everything we want.”
“It makes the girls know how to fight for a hard game in the tournament,” said Stone. “They make us play a full 80 minutes for everything that we get.”
It’s a credit to the program at Argos that the team seems to reload with every graduation hit.
“We lost our entire defense last year,” said
Stone. “Right now we may be the only varsity soccer program that starts two freshmen and a sophomore in the back. They have had to grow up quickly and they’ve done an amazing job.
“Lauren Mcglothin is just a tenacious defender and Cailey Markley and Sam Redinger have done a great job.”
The youth movement applies to the Lady Dragon front line as well.
“We are very young. Ten of our starting 11 are underclassmen,” he said. “(Freshman)lilly (Hines) can play. Sometimes I for
get she’s not a senior because of her soccer knowledge. There are times I’ll get on her about something and have to remind myself that she’s only 14.”
“Aryanna Allen and Emma Dunlap are the same. Solid players and they are also very young they are just sophomores so I have to remind myself of that with them too.”
The feel-good story on the Dragons squad is Madisyn Barcus. Projected as a starter her freshman year she suffered an injury that almost took away her chance to play at all.
“She was going to be starting but she got hurt before the first game,” said Stone. “She blew her ACL out during practice. She missed her whole freshman year and most of her sophomore year and played sporadically last year so that we could get that knee back into shape.”
“Coming off the bench and being the second-leading scorer shows what kind of a year she had,” said Stone. “It speaks volumes about her character. She’s not a quitter. It says a lot about her and it says a lot about Argos soccer that she wanted to play for this team.”
In the time of COVID, the pandemic gave the team some other hurdles to get over early in the summer.
“We’ve had to adjust and adapt to all kinds of situations, fortunately, we haven’t had any of our girls test positive, and go through that like some other teams have gone through,” said Stone. “When we were finally able to go in July we had to make a decision early on do we get the girls in the top physical shape or do we start working on ball touches?”
“We went the ball touch route,” he said. “I don’t know if that was a right or wrong decision but early on you could tell that our girls were gassed and tired. That’s when mistakes start to be made.
“The final outcome though is that our girls’ touches are very good, we are moving the ball and I can’t be happier with where we are.”
Each year the Argos girls take the road less traveled, beefing up the early part of the non-conference schedule to provide the challenge that pays dividends later in the year.
“To be successful as a program you have to play that kind of competition with it,” said Stone. “We take our knocks a little bit at times because of that, but we are on a 10 game win streak right now because of that.”
Early season losses were to the likes of Plymouth, a local rival, Warsaw, always one of the top programs in the northern part of the state, and CGA who knocked off #1 ranked Marian in their sectional final.
“I always tell the girls just keep your head up and don’t worry about those losses,” he said. “That is education time to play against teams that are above our size and caliber and now you see the benefit of that.”
Round one opponent Covenant Christian comes in with a 14-2-1 record. Game number two features
Andrean (12-5) and Bethany Christian (12-4-2).
“We don’t want to skate by with easy games,” said Stone. “If you are fortunate enough to get to the next round you are going to be playing a really good team. You want to play the best people you can through sectional and regional.” The game plan Saturday is to stay on top.
“We have to play really good defense and not give up early goals,” said Stone. “In the two of the three sectional games, we were behind early. We have to be ready to play on the defensive side.”
“Right now we’re clicking on all cylinders on the offensive side so that’s what the girls are thinking about. We have to be thinking defensively to start the game and then push