Pride goalie coach boosts Lake Highland Prep girls
For Lloyd Yaxley, it sounded like a fun challenge when he was presented the opportunity two years ago to coach the Lake Highland Prep girls soccer team.
Yaxley, who is the Orlando Pride goalkeeper coach, saw the LHP offer as a nice chance to stay busy during the National Women's Soccer League offseason and carry out something he had never done before — coaching high school girls soccer.
“It's fun. You know when I'm with the Pride, I'm an assistant coach. So it's fun to kind of put my own ideas in place,” Yaxley said this week. “I set my own standards, style of play and help these girls grow [because] I feel that's really important.”
In his first season, Yaxley led the Highlanders to a 10-2-2 record, which resulted in making an appearance in the 2A region playoffs in 2019.
This season the Highlanders are taking on a more challenging schedule and have started 5-2 going into a game Thursday night at Lake Nona (8-0-2), which is the No. 1 team in the Sentinel Super Six area rankings.
Lake Highland, which is No. 5 in the Super Six, scored a 1-0 victory over No. 2 Bishop Moore on Tuesday night and also dealt perennial girls soccer power St. John's Country Day of Orange Park its only loss, 1-0, before Thanksgiving.
For Yaxley, however, this season is about taking more strides forward while staying determined to win the 3A, District 10 title.
“We sat down last year when I first came in and we said, ‘What's our goal?' And their goal was to beat Bishop Moore; that was their only goal,” Yaxley said. “I kind of went, ‘Well, how do you guys not want bigger things than this?' So our goal last year was to beat Bishop Moore; we beat them. And our goal this year is to win districts. So we're taking small steps at a time and we're keeping our feet on the ground.”
Khano Smith, then an assistant coach for the Pride and Lake Highland's boys' soccer team, connected Yaxley with the high school job two years ago.
Yaxley reached out to current Pride player Kristen Edmonds to serve as one of his assistant coaches.
“Coming in, we had no idea what to expect,” Edmonds said. “And after the first couple of training sessions we were like, ‘Oh, we have a really good team here,' and they're all really coachable and they were just a great group of girls. We just enjoy being around them and coaching them.”
Highlanders senior forward Samantha Kahn, who has scored four goals in seven games, said having Yaxley and Edmonds as coaches has brought a professional standard to the team.
“It's really good for our team because it's such a professional environment that it's made our level of play increase so dramatically within the past few years,” Kahn said. “I've been on the team for a while now, and this is the most potential we've ever had, and it starts from every day having a very professional atmosphere at practice and then going into games with the professional mindset.”