After playing four games in 24 hours, heart and hustle put the Cochrane Rangers U18 team in position to procure the provincial soccer gold medal last weekend, said their longtime coach and leader.
“We’ve got a bunch of great boys on the team – we’re very proud of them,” coach Zsolt Ulisnyak said this week. “The boys deserve this because we’ve been playing in Cochrane for many years.
“We were just really eager to win and we pulled it off.”
The Rangers travelled to Edmonton for the Alberta Soccer Association Youth Indoor Boys Tier 3 championships from March 17 to 19. Ulisnyak said their first game against the Red Deer Renegades was a 2-2 tie – forcing the team into a tough position for their second match against the South West Edmonton Sting.
“We had to win by five goals in order to move on to the semi-finals,” said the coach, adding the challenge was daunting, but not one they couldn’t overcome – the Rangers scored nine goals to take the game with a final score of 9-3.
“The boys were really pumped,” Ulisnyak said. “We had a lot of faith in the boys.”
Fresh off the win, Cochrane’s U18 team cleared the decks with a shutout in the semis against the Sherwood Park Phoenix, putting them in the gold medal match against the Edmonton Warriors.
There, Ulisnyak said veteran players relied on both their relationships and their soccer skills to secure the championship win at 2-0.
“The boys have known each other, they’ve grown up together here in Cochrane – and they just really jelled this year,” he said. “They pretty much knew how to connect with each other.”
That same familiarity on the field produced top marks in the Rangers’ Calgary Minor Soccer Association league as well, where they went undefeated the entire season. The Grade 11s and 12s will now move on to outdoor league, and once finished, Ulisnyak said many will move on from the youth Rangers to hopefully the Rangers’ adult team.
“This is it,” he said.
Other Cochrane Minor Soccer teams also toughed it out in provincial tournaments around the province this weekend. The girls U14 Tier 2 Wolfpack earned the Fair Play Award for the third year in a row for a style of play that coach John Rovere described as “class and sportsmanship … just a determined, clean game until the final buzzer every time.”
The Tier 4 boys Attacking Wolves went into the ASA provincials first in their league and brought home a silver medal, along with the girls Tier 3 U18 Thunder Wolves, who earned a bronze in their provincial run in Edmonton.
