When Roger Fernandez was given the head-coaching job of Real Maryland’s Super-20 soccer team — the youth, ‘‘farm system” for the new United Soccer League-Second Division squad which plays its home games at Maryland SoccerPlex in Boyds — he was given roughly five months to field a competitive outfit. The aim was to not only find talented players, but to replicate the professional team’s style, mixing homegrown athletes with an international flair.
He didn’t need to go far to do so.
In all, the Under-20 Monarchs include 14 current or former Montgomery County high school products, with only one — recently-graduated Magruder striker Draymond Washington — solely of American nationality. They’ve proven their mettle immediately, and after a 2-1 victory over Parsippany F.C. (N.J.) this past Sunday, are tied for second of 19 teams in the Super-20 Mid-Atlantic Region with 10 points on the season (a 3-1-1 overall record).
‘‘I was nervous on the sidelines today,” Fernandez said after his team rallied from a one-goal, halftime deficit, ‘‘but overall things are going well. We can definitely play better, but I think the guys are learning to play with one another.”
And therein lies the key of the newly formed team: they have played together. Not only have they competed against each other for their various high schools, several have played soccer together for years. The Monarchs include four Watkins Mill, three Magruder and two Walter Johnson alums, as well as two Gaithersburg students.
Additionally, five Monarchs suit up for the four-time Maryland State Cup champion MSC Dragons, one of the premier U-18 club teams in the country. Fernandez said that while they inevitably compete with other top clubs from the county’s rich soccer scene, Dragons head coach Julio Zarate encouraged his players to join the minor-league Real Maryland outfit for additional experience against competition just as good as his team faces — the Super-20 league consists of mostly older boys, as do several other USL youth teams and academy units, such as D.C. United’s U-20 developmental squad, which feature a majority of college athletes.
‘‘With the Dragons, we practice from five to seven [p.m.] and we practice at the same place they do,” said Washington, who is reunited with six teammates from either Magruder or MSC. ‘‘So one day, a bunch of us just saw them and we were like, ‘Let’s go over and there see what it’s about.’ Once [Fernandez] saw us, he was like ‘Yeah, okay.’”
The list of Dragons include Washington, Bethesda-Chevy Chase’s Erick Gonzales, 2007 Kennedy grad Roslin Nzokou, Walter Johnson grad Lucas Szabo and Watkins Mill’s Ben Hanson.
They are now Monarchs for different reasons. Some hope to improve their games playing against largely older players. For instance, the Dragons recently lost in the 2008 State Cup final to the U-18 Potomac Cougars, while the U-20 Cougars compete in the Super-20 league.
Some just want to stay in shape.
‘‘I’m kind of experimenting — really I first started to play for the team to get the extra fitness,” said Hanson, a 2008 Watkins Mill grad who will begin his college career at Division I Loyola (Md.) this fall. ‘‘College is going to be nuts and you’ll need all the fitness you can get. I think it’s more physical, since you’re playing against college kids. Me, personally, it’s kind of bad — I think I work harder in the game here, because it’s a new team and you really want to impress the coach.”
While the Super-20 Monarchs remain most loyal to their club teams, Fernandez hopes to eventually keep his players together for various tournaments (such as a Thanksgiving-weekend competition) over the course of the upcoming year. His team consists of several players off his longtime club, Juventus FC, such as former Walter Johnson midfielder Brian Urioste. He also has plenty of young talent, like Gaithersburg’s 16-year old David Santos, though the roster mostly consists of players either in or headed off to college.
They’ve only been in competition for a month, with four of their last five games having been played after June 14. Still, it’s been a promising start to what could be a promising future.
‘‘Mostly, I wanted to do this to stay in shape for when I go back to college,” said Nzokou, a rising Towson University sophomore who started in the backfield as a freshman. ‘‘But I could come back. It depends where this takes us.”
