‘O’ means nothing: How Bishop O’Dowd built a defensive powerhouse that doesn’t concede
OAKLAND — Bishop O’Dowd has been almost unfathomably dominant this girls soccer season.
The Dragons have scored 89 goals and conceded one in 15 games, all wins. The lone goal came in their second-to-last regular-season game against Piedmont, when coach Mark Savvides subbed in all of his seniors and bench players for a last hurrah.
It’s a recipe for a bored goalkeeper. Not that O’Dowd minds.
“Parker (Bridgeman) hasn’t had to do too much work in the back,” center back Ana Pintard noted.
O’Dowd finally allowed a goal in the final five minutes against Piedmont on Feb. 10, breaking a shutout streak that had stretched across 1,035 minutes of action.
The milestone had been etched. It was time for a new beginning.
“The players laughed at the end, saying, ‘We just need to go on another streak,’” Dragons coach Mark Savvides told the Bay Area News Group.
Since then, O’Dowd has gone back to its stringent ways. The Dragons beat Berkeley 4-0 to close out the regular season and Amador Valley 2-0 in the North Coast Section Open Division semifinals.
Thanks to goals from super freshman Sadie Siedel and senior Chloe Keating, O’Dowd will play Carondelet for the NCS Open championship on Saturday afternoon in Oakland.
“It’s really a collective effort,” Pintard said. “Honestly, as a defender, I haven’t had to do a lot this season, because our midfield and our forwards are so good up there at counter-pressing.”
O’Dowd has been a successful program this century, winning NCS Division II championships in 2005, 2010, 2012 and 2013. But before Savvides arrived in 2023, the program had hit a low point.
The Dragons went 4-10-3 in 2022-23, prompting a change. Things rebounded under Savvides in 2023-24 as O’Dowd went 12-6-1.
But the work was just beginning.
“The first year was fixing the culture, because the culture was horrible when I came in,” Savvides said. “The culture was just not a nice place to be. So the first year was culture-changing. The second year was, ‘OK, this is my tactics. This is how I want us to play. This is the new culture.’ And then this year, we’re just taking off where we left last year.”
Last season, O’Dowd flew pretty close to the sun, coming one missed penalty kick away from facing St. Francis in the CIF NorCal Division I championship game.
That near-miss has fueled the Dragons this season as they chase NCS and NorCal titles, plus an appearance in the first-ever CIF soccer state championship game.
“Even in my first year here, we said we want to win CIF, we want to win D1 NCS,” Savvides said. “That’s the goal, regardless of the talent pool that I have. Next year, we’re going to lose a lot of seniors. The goal is still going to be to win every game. Have a shot at winning NCS.
“We speak about it a lot, every single practice. If the standards at training ever drop, or a performance in a game drops anything under what we expect of them as coaches, then we speak about it again, and we say this isn’t going to win us championships.”
O’Dowd has been so dominant this season that Savvides has been able to rotate players and keep his bench engaged while the starters stay fresh.
“I’ve been feeling really lucky that we’ve had the opportunity to play two years with the really strong team that we have right now,” defensive midfielder Katelyn Wong said. “Our mentality is to take it all at this point. This is the team that we can win everything with, so I think we should just keep going at it.”
But now comes the hard part.
Not only did the Dragons fall just short of the D-I NorCal title last season, they saw the NCS D-I title slip out of their grasp, too.
Monte Vista came back from down 2-0 at the half to slay the Dragons 3-2 in the top-flight semifinal a year ago.
This season, O’Dowd is the top seed in the new four-team NCS Open Division. And though Monte Vista is not among the foursome, once again, the East Bay Athletic League’s top teams are standing in the way.
“After playing Amador, we can see that they can capitalize on any mistakes that we make,” Wong said. “So we have to try to be clean and move it fast.”
In many games against overmatched competition in the West Alameda County Conference Foothill Division, O’Dowd didn’t even allow a shot on goal and certainly didn’t concede many threatening ones. That’s likely to change on Saturday.
Savvides knows playing EBAL teams will be a step up.
“They play tougher games throughout the year,” he admitted. “So yes, we can beat them, and our players are on the same club teams as them, so we know that we are good enough to beat them. But when we played Archbishop Mitty last year, we were 2-0 down by halftime because we weren’t used to playing at such a high speed. So our league kills us a little bit. But we’ll just have to do what we can.”
Regardless of the outcome in the Open championship, O’Dowd will move on to NorCal, where the Dragons will follow a simple mandate: be themselves. Last year’s defeat to Monte Vista came after Savvides changed his tactics to try to kill off the game.
“We should have just kept playing the way that has brought us this success,” Savvides said. “So yes, I will adapt and change a few things, but we’re primarily going to stick to what’s led to our success.”
Subscribe to our Bay Area Preps HQ newsletter for all our Bay Area high school sports coverage, including game analysis, scores, and everything you want to know about your Bay Area high school teams.