By Jeremy McDonald
Jeremymcdonald73@gmail.com
KEIZER, Ore.– The McNary Girls Soccer team set the foundation last season in Bianca Andrade-Torres.
A relatively young team, with four freshman and five sophomores on their roster to four seniors for the first-year Head Coach, it was a good starting step going into Year 2 of the Andrade-Torres Era.
“Last year, we had a really good amount of younger incoming freshmen and established their role on the team. Going this year, having a lot of returning players has been really great and already hitting the ground running with those players returning. I’m excited to see what’s ahead.” starts Andrade-Torres. ” I think (last year) gave us a lot of perspective moving into this year in the sense of capability and actually approaching preseason with the mentality that maybe we found it a little bit late last year and I think we’ll do really great this year.
“We’re taking advantage of as much time as we can get. We’re making sure that we’re taking care of our conditioning. That’s priority right now. Just taking advantage of every minute, especially with field availability, we just want to make sure to get as much as we can in practice when we can.”
Andrade-Torres spoke highly of Bella Garcia, pointing towards the incoming sophomore’s leadership traits going back to when she was named Team Captian as a freshman and is excited to she how Garcia, and the rest of the Celtic Girls Soccer team develops going into the season. McNary’s first game of the year is on September 4 at Glencoe.
The McNary Girls Soccer team took part in Saturday’s Blue Day, moved up to the morning because of the heat, the annual event featured the Youth Football team, the Girls Soccer team, Cross Country and the Volleyball team. All are preparing for the season ahead.
For the Celtics Football team, they held a short practice prior to the Blue Day festivities as they prepared for their first game of the year against Redmond 29. The first part of the festivities supporting the Youth Football teams, some of the youth players were at McNary’s recent Kids Camp earlier this month.
“When we had the schedule change that’s what I built this schedule around was coming out here, get a nice hour practice in and then for the next hour getting a chance to support our youth team and hopefully seeing some familiar faces they saw at (Kid’s) Camp and cheering them on and that’s the big deal.,” said McNary Head Coach Josh Riddell.
“It’s going fast,” Riddell continues about the first week. “It doesn’t seem like it’s a lot of time in the day as you get going here because we got Special Teams, we got offense, we got defense, we’re all installing all those things and it’s been good though. The kids are responding well, we’re learning a lot, we’re learning on the fly, and we’re improving.”
The Cross Country team kicks off the season August 29 at the Wilsonville Night Meet at Wilsonville High School. The McNary Volleyball team opens up the season, September 2 at home against McDaniel.
Photos By Jeremy McDonald
