Many veterans back for GFS girls soccer

Posted 9/12/16

Hill resident Celia Meyer is back on the soccer field for Germantown Friends as a junior this fall. (Photo by Tom Utescher) by Tom Utescher As they began preparing for the 2015 soccer season at the …

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Many veterans back for GFS girls soccer

Posted

Hill resident Celia Meyer is back on the soccer field for Germantown Friends as a junior this fall. (Photo by Tom Utescher) Hill resident Celia Meyer is back on the soccer field for Germantown Friends as a junior this fall. (Photo by Tom Utescher)

by Tom Utescher

As they began preparing for the 2015 soccer season at the end of last summer, the girls of Germantown Friends were working without 11 members of the previous year's varsity team.

The personnel situation is quite different this time around. While four-year starter Lizzie Becker left GFS with her diploma earlier this year, she is just one of three players who have departed from the squad the Tigers fielded last fall.

Senior Hannah Hanson and junior Riley Knowles are the co-captains of the current GFS team, and Lilly Dupuis and Lila Sternberg-Sher join Hanson as seasoned seniors.

Sternberg-Sher will be spending more time in the goal cage this fall, as the primary keeper from 2015, Teasha McKoy, will play out on the pitch. Both McKoy and her 11th-grade twin Portia are sprinters on the GFS track team, and in soccer, having their combined speed turned loose in the open field will create problems for opponents.

The other 11th-graders, Corin Grady, Maya Keren, Celia Meyer, Olivia Trotto, and Lia Weil, are all returning varsity players, as is sophomore Sophie Henisz, who was already starting from day one as a freshman last fall. Gigi Guida also made the varsity squad as a freshman in 2015, and moving up to join her this season are fellow 10th graders Andy Regli and Gabby Schwartz.

The rising freshman class consists of Maribel Carpenter, Curran McLaughlin, Lauryn Milbourne, Lola Osborne, Erin Schott, Lily Seldin, and Jillian Yum.

Osborne gives the Tigers another option in goal, while Milbourne is the younger sister of Taryn Milbourne (GFS '15), a track team sprinter who played soccer in the fall.

New Germantown Friends head coach Cailin DiGiacomo, a Germantown Academy grad who went on to play for Gettysburg College (see the 8/18 Local), is settling into her new role with the help of two returning GFS assistant coaches, Rachel Bradburd and Samantha Swerdloff. A new addition to the staff is Upper Dublin High School product Morgan Simms, who played at Stony Brook University ('11) and then was an assistant coach at Ursinus College.

"I feel we're an up-and-coming team," DiGiacomo commented. "There's been a little period of adjustment since I'm a new coach; we've made some position changes and we're introducing some new formations. The players are adapting to those changes as we get into more of a regular routine, and we're going to keep moving forward."

There's a lot of room for improvement coming off of the 2015 season; after the mass exodus from the 2014 GFS squad, the Tigers finished sixth within the Friends Schools League last fall. Germantown was the FSL champion in 2014, and had finished as league runner-up in each of the three previous seasons.

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