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Four players come home with medals

Wednesday, Aug. 2, 2006

Only one U.S. Youth Soccer National Championship trophy has come home to Maryland this year, and it will reside in Baltimore. But four players from that team will return to Montgomery County with championship medals around their necks.

Keith Cowdrey (Silver Spring), Mark Jaskolski (Gaithersburg), Brendan Klebanoff (Bethesda) and Michael Lansing (Gaithersburg) were all part of the Casa Mia Bays (Baltimore) team that, after less than a year playing together, won the U-16 boys championship last weekend at the James W. Cownie Soccer Park in Des Moines, Iowa.

‘‘It hasn’t exactly sunken in yet,” said Cowdrey, a rising junior at DeMatha High in Hyattsville. ‘‘A couple of times, I’ve just been sitting around the house and I’ll start laughing to myself, like, ‘I just won a national championship.’”

The Bays were one of four teams in Iowa that had Montgomery County players on the roster, and the only one to make the finals. Casa Mia tied its first two games in pool play, 0-0 against the Concorde Fire Elite (Ga.⁄Region III) and 2-2 against FC Milwaukee (Wis.⁄Region II). That left them in a must-win situation going into the third-and-final round-robin game against Rampage FC (Southern Calif.⁄Region IV).

‘‘It’s a familiar situation for us; we’ve been playing a lot of win-or-go-home games lately,” said Jaskolski, a rising junior at Northwest High. ‘‘We knew we had to come out and perform.”

In its final two games, Casa Mia blew away the competition. After a slow start against Rampage, the Bays exploded for a 3-0 win to lift themselves into a championship game rematch with Concorde. For the second time against the Georgians, the Bays kept a clean sheet; but this time, they scored four goals, three in the first half, for a 4-0 title game win. Jaskolski set up Michael Rose for one goal and Lansing, coming off an ankle injury, slid in a ball at the back post for another. Former Sandy Spring Friends forward Chris Agorsor (Arundel) capped the scoring with his team-high third goal of the tournament.

‘‘[The national championship] was our first goal when we got together last summer,” Cowdrey said. ‘‘I guess everyone kind of believed in it, but it just really started coming true at the beginning of the summer, when we were putting in all the work and all the training and we began to see results. The games in State Cup and Regionals were what really convinced all of us and inspired us to go after it.”

Bethesda Soccer Club

The two Bethesda Soccer Club boys teams that advanced to nationals didn’t fare quite as well as the Bays. The Roadrunners U-14 team lost all three of its pool play games and finished at the bottom of its group. But coach Ole Sand said that after opening with a 4-1 loss to the Michigan Wolves (Region II), the team improved drastically.

‘‘Other than the first game, where we let in too many soft goals due to poor marking, we played very well,” Sand said. ‘‘We clearly showed that we can push the best teams in the country to their limit and I am very happy with the effort and play the boys showed in Des Moines. The only weak game was Game 1 against the Wolves.”

In their last two games, the Roadrunners pushed the two eventual finalists to the limit. In the second game, the Dallas Texans (Northern Tex.⁄Region III) scored the game-winner midway through the second half to beat the Roadrunners, 2-1. Bethesda went into the third game knowing it was eliminated, but trying to play spoiler against the Valley United Blast (Southern Calif.⁄Region IV). The Roadrunners took leads of 1-0 and 2-1, but two late goals lifted Valley United to a 3-2 win, and the Californians eventually went on to take the title over the Texans. For the Roadrunners, Desean Ragland finished with two goals, while Jeff Juarez (Olney) and Fabio Cardenas (Silver Spring) scored one apiece.

The Bethesda United U-17 boys were also doomed by a poor start. United was tied 1-1 in the critical opener against Scott Gallagher (Mo.⁄Region II), and Gallagher was down to 10 men. But United failed to put away several good chances, and a late defensive lapse allowed Gallagher to steal a 2-1 win.

That put United behind the eight-ball against two-time defending champion Arsenal FC (Southern Calif.⁄Region IV) and Solar 89 (Northern Tex.⁄Region III). Bethesda went 2-0 down in its game against Arsenal, which went on to win its third straight national crown, but pulled a goal back immediately, to make it 2-1. Arsenal went on to score two late goals to win 4-1, a scoreline United coach Steve Campbell didn’t feel was reflective of how close the game was.

‘‘We made it an uphill battle after the first game,” Campbell said. ‘‘Gallagher is a good side, but at the end of the day, we just didn’t play well enough. ... The other two games were much better performances.”

In their third and final game, United drew, 1-1, with eventual runners-up Solar. The team, which also reached nationals in 2004, will send five players off to college this fall, including former Watkins Mill standouts Erick Perez-Segnini and Josh Pike. But Campbell said they plan to get together again next summer for another run at a national title.

Other results

The FC Delco Crunch (Philadelphia, Pa.) U-18 boys also took a contingent of county stars to nationals last weekend. Kevin Alston (Silver Spring), Robert O’Donnel (Chevy Chase), Pat Selwood (Darnestown) and Mike Vallie (Rockville) helped the Crunch tie two of its three games, including 1-1 against the eventual champion Dallas Texans Red (Region III). But a 2-0 loss to the Chicago Magic (Ill.⁄Region II) in their second game eliminated the Crunch from a shot at the title.