WEST BRANCH — Ogemaw Heights boys soccer team won its second straight district title before seeing its tournament run end with a 5-2 loss to Muskegon Orchard View in the regional at Clare.
The Falcons also finished second in the Northern Michigan Soccer League after winning their division. Ogemaw Heights went 15-6-2 this season.
Not a bad debut as head coach for Tom Zaske.
Ogemaw Heights loses six seniors and one foreign exchange student, but will have five juniors coming back to form the nucleus of the team as seniors next year. Four sophomores were also on the varsity.
Included among the departures will be leading scorer Dylan Finkbeiner who had 46 goals including districts and regionals. He also had 29 assists. Also gone will be Nick Marentette, who contributed 20 goals and 19 assists.
Zaske will be tasked with finding a way to pick up those goals somewhere.
Although he didn’t produce the flashy kind of stats the other two did with 10 goals and 10 assists, center midfielder Jason Wood was just as valuable to the Falcons. Wood didn’t come off the field a lot during matches.
Zaske also started sophomore Jack Juarez and junior Ben Walby on the wings, and the pair combined to score 10 goals and add 15 assists between them.
Gone, too, will be senior four-year varsity starting keeper Trevor Likavec, who started every game in net for the Falcons and ended up with an impressive 76.63 save percentage for the season.
That’s a lot of talent to lose, but the Eagles graduated nine seniors a year ago and didn’t lose a step this season. With a roster that will have five seniors and 11 juniors next year, the Eagles anticipate keeping its string of successful seasons going.
No talk of rebuilding, or even retooling, on this team. The Eagles just pick up from where they leave off each season and move forward.
“We just fill those positions, and it’s like a next man up kind of thing,” Zaske said. “We prefer to continue at the same pace but with different personnel.”
Ogemaw Heights’ projected starting keeper for next year right now is a junior who has played two years on the junior varsity, starting 11 games last year and nine or 10 this year. A freshman split some time with him in net as well this year.
“It’s always tough when you lose a senior keeper, but I don’t know that we’re going to miss too much,” Zaske said. “I think that experience on junior varsity is going to help. We’re going to have three senior defensemen who have been together for the last three years.
“So he (the keeper) is going to have some support in front of him, obviously. We’ll also have a senior defensive mid and a junior defensive mid in front of him, so we’ll be pretty solid in the back end.”
