Notre Dame girls soccer reaches new heights with boost from stats, analytics and humor
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Notre Dame High School girls soccer coach Marcus Meakin halted a group of players mid-drill during an afternoon practice.
“You hear that?” he asked them, bending to the turf. “The crickets want to know why you’re not talking.”
He urges the players to communicate more, and after light laughter, they resume the drill. On the surface, the Knights are smiling and genuinely having fun.
But under the hood of the program, inner workings of stat-keeping and player analysis have led to steady improvement by Notre Dame.
Notre Dame finished second in the league’s final standings behind Harvard-Westlake after moving up from the Sunshine League this season. The goal is always to be a league champion, but the Knights are still celebrating.
“We’re getting a lot more recognition than we have been,” junior Emerson Chasko said. “People have kind of overlooked us since we were in the (Sunshine League), but now that we have stepped up, I think us and basketball, we’re two of the biggest-talk sports of the school right now.”
The Mission League is one of the most difficult leagues in the area in multiple sports. And sometimes, consistently dominant teams can make it seem like the biggest competition is for second place rather than first.
In girls soccer, particularly, nearly all players come from high-level club soccer programs and are on course to play in college.
“You have to win and then you’ve got to win the ones where you shouldn’t win,” Meakin said. “So it’s basically, you’ve got to be perfect to win the Mission League.”
Intricate stat keeping has helped the coaching staff keep track of the Mission League’s talented players and how their own team can best play against them.
Assistant coach Eric Colvin has developed a system over the last 10 years. A trace camera follows Notre Dame players through a monitor placed on their calves during games and he physically keeps track of total shots, fouls, corner kicks and more on his phone.
“We compile all that data at the end of the year, and everybody can see what we’re good at, what we’re deficient at,” said Colvin, whose daughter played for Notre Dame. “It’s been an invaluable tool for me for a long time.”
Having a deep bench is critical, but otherwise it’s hard to pinpoint one trick that’ll give a team an edge.
For the Knights, though, speed has helped them play at a fast pace in every third of the field this season. Meakin said his players can run a 40-yard dash in 5.1 seconds, on average.
Jerome Millet is both an assistant coach for Notre Dame as well as a track coach for the school. He’s engineered speed training that involves competition between the players and lots of hills.
A soccer ball is involved every once in a while to keep the players from getting bored.
Notre Dame girls soccer is anything but boring. Meakin is 64 years old but still gets involved in drills at practice, as does JV coach Christian Welsh.
Meakin can keep up, even if it’s only for a few minutes at a time. He cracks jokes, and there’s music selected by the players thumping in the background. The way the coach sees it, club soccer is serious. Prep soccer can be fun, and that’s a reason why many elite players choose to join a high school program.
“You want to come to practice and you want to be at the games,” senior Ines Owens said. “You want to spend time with all your teammates because you’re just having so much fun. Whenever I miss a practice, I feel like I’m missing out on something.”
Meakin played professional soccer in England and grew up within the Southampton F.C. and Crystal Palace F.C. programs. He says that his coaches were hard on him, but he’s able to use his experiences to give insight to players.
He makes a point to use the sport as a means of happiness at Notre Dame and with his LA Surf Sherman Oaks club team, but especially with the former.
“Hard work, having a passion and having fun. If you can get those three things, then everything else becomes a lot easier,” Meakin said, pointing to the photos of smiling players on the cover of his statistic binders.
Meakin achieved his 100th win with the program this season and took its record from 5-6-3 when he first arrived to 15-4-4. Over 90 players showed up for this season’s tryouts, most of them with elite club experience. Four freshmen who made the team cracked the starting lineup on varsity.
The only thing more certain than success in Notre Dame’s future is joy.
“It’s some of the most fun years of soccer that I’ve ever played,” Chasko said. “We’re trying to prove that Notre Dame soccer is a big deal and we should be respected.”