Although Alliance High School has a lot of competitive sports, they do not have soccer. Two Alliance High School sophomore boys, Dylan Sward and Alec Garcia, are bound and determined to start a soccer team. Sward and Garcia sent out an email to all Alliance High School students asking, “Would you play Soccer if Alliance High had it?”

In order to have a soccer team, Sward said that they would need 13 players including subs for varsity and 13 players for junior varsity. According to their poll, they have exceeded that number: 35 girls and 29 boys said yes.

All teams need a coach and Dylan and Alec already have that one figured out. Pierce Sanchez, who coaches little league soccer, would be the boys coach, and one of his close friends would be the girls coach. Sanchez has coached Sward for years, and Sward thinks he would do great.

Alec said, “Sanchez is the one that is trying to get it into the school…  and this is the farthest we’ve ever gotten, you could say, to get a soccer team.” The boys have done a lot of planning. They have thought of a bracket on who they would play. They have thought about funding, and where they would play. Dylan said, “We already have some sort of bracket. It’s Sidney, Scottsbluff, Gering… North Platte. There’s definitely teams we could play; Rapid City has two teams.”

Now finding somewhere to play and practice has been pretty difficult for the boys. Alec has played soccer for 10 years, and at his old school, they just did one simple thing. Garcia said, “We would take one of the football practice fields, or just put nets up at the football stadium, because that’s what we did at my old school, because they had a soccer team and we played on the football field.”

Funding is another issue. Their budget was $6,000, but now it has raised since so many kids want to join. They would need uniforms, warm ups, soccer balls, nets, and more. To pay for all this, Sward said, “We have quite a few things. We could have donations… And we have already came up with fundraisers.”

If the boys can pull this off, then a lot of new athletes can come to the light and play soccer. Garcia’s reasoning behind starting a soccer team is, “because I’ve been playing for 10 years, and there’s a lot of kids in this high school that have the talent to play soccer, but we just don’t have the team.” He also said, “There’s kids out there that have the talent, but they’re not good at basketball or track or all the other sports we have, and soccer is the only one we don’t have and what if they’re good at that.”

The boys are having a meeting with Ms. James, the athletic director, to talk about whether or not it’s doable. Having a soccer team could benefit Alliance High School and its students, but it may be hard to achieve.