Thursday, Aug. 7, 2008
While many of their friends sit at home playing video games in air-conditioned rooms, a group of dedicated athletes are spending their summer preparing for their careers Û their high school soccer careers, that is.
The Braddock Heights Soccer Club, an elite club-level program based in the Middletown Valley, has only one team right now Û a boys' under-15 squad Û but it has already proven itself.
In the spring, the team won the Baltimore Beltway Soccer League Title. And the club is growing. Starting in fall, the club will also have a girls' under-13 team.
The team just completed its second season, but it is already establishing a reputation for developing excellent players by virtue of the unorthodox training style of its coach, 1997 Middletown High School graduate and Darren Wolf of Frederick.
The 29-year-old coach played striker on his school's varsity team and played four years at Western Maryland College (now McDaniel College in Westminster). During the school year, he doubles as an assistant coach at Middletown High. As such, he is uniquely qualified to teach the team of mostly future-Middletown High students the keys to being successful players.
What sets Wolf's program apart is his approach to the game. He trains players in a more mentally-based system than most club coaches.
"He gets us to be team players and he tells us if we need to be the boss of the team and get everyone pumped up for the team," said Middletown Middle striker Patrick Creadick, 13, as he took a break from a passing drill at a Middletown soccer field during a practice Monday night.
Coaching at the club level for eight years, he noticed that decision-making skills are often poor or undeveloped in players entering high school, which is one of the main reasons he set up the club.
"We kind of take [coaching] a step further with player decision-making, the technical, physical side of the game, and spending a lot of time teaching positional knowledge so players are able to impose their will on the game," he said. "The end result is to deliver a more complete player to the various high school systems around the county."
The Braddock Heights Soccer Club was a successful program long before Wolf and several other area residents Û including Patrick's father, Myersville Mayor Wayne S. Creadick, Jr.; team manager Wayne Nickols; and Wolf's father, Darrell Û resurrected it in 2006.
Wolf, who holds down a day job as an information technology specialist when not on the pitch, actually played for the club in 1994.
But the program died off when other clubs in the area picked up their calibers, drawing players away.
Now Wolf says he believes that the program is "the best training opportunity in the area." And the children in the program seem to agree.
"I think it's really cool. It teaches you a lot. I've improved so much in the last two years," said Middletown Middle School defender Dylan Smith, 13. "It teaches you a lot of individual skills like touching and how to strike the ball. We do a lot of technical work so it gets you good on the ball."
Once they leave his program and go off into the world, Wolf hopes that the players he coaches will have learned important lessons that apply both on and off the field.
"It's definitely going to give them that competitive drive," he explained. "They're going to meet challenges in their lives, whether or not they choose to play sports, and this will hopefully give them the drive and determination to persevere."
For more information about the Braddock Heights Soccer Club, please visit their Maryland State Youth Soccer Association Web site: http://www.msysa.org/
teams/club/5890313.html
