The Pinetree Timberwolves senior boys soccer team is like the Eleven Musketeers.
And their all-for-one-one-for-all approach to playing may earn the school its first place in the Fraser Valley championships in four years.
Heading into the season’s final week, the Timberwolves have four wins, a loss and a tie. That’s the same record as the defending provincial champions, the Dr. Charles Best Blue Devils, whom they defeated last Tuesday, 2-1.
That victory, coupled with an earlier win over Heritage Woods, another top shelf side in the North Zone, has Timberwolves coach Steve Jack believing in his team, and his players believing in themselves.
“We know if we can put our energies together, we can achieve anything,” Jack said.
At the beginning of the season, that self-confidence was a hope. Now it’s a rallying cry for a plucky side of underdogs, he said.
Most of the team’s core of senior players have never moved beyond league play. In fact, the prospect is so novel, some don’t even know how the Fraser Valley tournament works.
But that doesn’t mean they’re foreign to the pressures and expectations of the post-season.
Players like Mateen Nasiri, Andres Palma, Daniel Jung and Adam Lee are also teammates on their Coquitlam Metro-Ford Hammers U18 club team that two years ago won a provincial championship and they’ve carried the bond they formed to their high school team. They’re ably complemented by the scoring touch of Stuart and Liam Chernoff, twin brothers who’ve accounted for nine of the Timberwolves’ 14 goals this season.
“We play for each other,” said Nasiri, a centre midfielder.
“We’re a group of friends, we all hang out together,” said Palma. “We push each other.”
The team’s collective spirit of leadership is so strong, in fact, the captain’s armband has been shared by no fewer than four players.
“It’s hard to pick a single leader,” said Jung, a centre back who’s in his third year with the team.
Jack said it was the leadership qualities of his senior players that quickly separated them from the 60 or so prospects that initially tried out for the team, and now distinguishes them on the pitch.
“In the past, we’d just fold the tent,” Jack said. “Now we want to make the other teams earn every inch of space they get.”
Communication has been key to realizing that transformation said Jung. As most of the Timberwolves’ senior players have been together on a club team since they were in middle school, individual egos have long since diminished.
“The comfort level allows us to talk to each other and boost each other up without getting feelings hurt,” said Nasiri. “What’s said on the field stays on the field.”
And with their boots doing most of the talking, the buzz about the team is building in Pinetree’s hallways, said another senior player, John Lee.
“There’s more kids coming to watch us play,” he said.
That bodes well for the program’s continued growth even after his core of seniors graduate, Jack said.
“We don’t do a lot of sports, but the ones we do, we try to do well,” he said.
