Wednesday, Oct. 3, 2007
Since the turn of the millenium, the Sandy Spring Friends boys soccer team has established a tradition of excellence that can only be explained through sheer numbers: seven regular-season and eight postseason Potomac Valley Athletic Conference championship banners in eight years, and more recently, a 37-game home win streak.
As is to be expected, such feats required highly decorated players. Since 2000, 14 Wildebeest players have gone on to play collegiate soccer. But maybe no alum in school history has had the soccer success that senior midfielder Aaron Lewis already has.
A four-year starter in the Sandy Spring midfield, Lewis has already been named to the Potomac Valley Athletic Conference All-Star team in each of his three previous years on the squad. But this past summer, his reputation went beyond anything he had previously accomplished — Lewis was named to the U.S. Virgin Islands Under-23 National Team for a 2008 Olympics qualifying match against the Bahamas. At 17, he was not only one of just two high-schoolers on the roster, but he played all 90 minutes of the game. To those that know him, none of it was surprising.
‘‘From the beginning, he was a man-child as a freshman — in fact, as an eighth-grader, we brought him into preseason scrimmages to participate,” said Sandy Spring Friends head coach Eduardo Polon. ‘‘It’s just the centurion way in which he creates space behind creators in midfield. He is just an absolutely prototypical, Division-I all-the-way, holding midfielder.”
Postgraduate soccer prospective aside, Lewis has already been a key cog in several great teams. He has a chance to do something unprecedented with the Wildebeest; win the postseason banner in all four of his years at the school. And he, along with teammate and junior goalkeeper Sam Scheider, is a club soccer player with the Bethesda Mavericks, who won the Region I Colonial League.
But it was his seven-day trip this summer that makes him unique. Lewis’ father, Warren, is a U.S. Virgin Islands native, which qualified the rising senior for the team. So he sent video clips and his soccer résumé to the coaching brass, and that was enough to get him included on the 18-man roster for the Bahamas game.
Though several years younger than most of his teammates, Lewis adjusted quite easily. In fact, after the game, his coach singled him out, telling him that he was ‘‘the future of the team.”
‘‘To be honest, I was really nervous going into the tournament, because I had never played with these guys before,” Lewis said. ‘‘I just kept in mind that I needed to just go out there and do my thing. It’s definitely a different kind of soccer than I had ever played, speed-wise, but I guess I proved myself because coach kept me in.”
The national team is very much still a part of his future. With a 29-player roster pool, the Virgin Islands squad has several options from which to choose for its qualifying tournaments, which Lewis describes as ‘‘randomly scheduled.” But the staff also assured him that he would be one of the first players called up each time.
Additionally, because of his wealth of experience, Lewis has received attention from several Division I programs, including Georgetown, Lafayette (Pa.) and Old Dominion (Va.) Universities.
Soccer has taken, and should continue to take, Lewis well beyond his tiny, 236-student high school. But whether he’s playing in front of thousands in college or even in The Olympics, Lewis’ time at Sandy Spring Friends will be an everlasting memory.
‘‘It’s been playing with my friends and having that real sense of brotherhood that Coach [Polon] likes to impose upon us,” Lewis said. ‘‘Just being there together, winning when you win, losing when you lose, it’s been so memorable.”
