Santa Margarita girls soccer coach Chuck Morales will tell you he has had more talented teams, more skilled ones than the squad he had this season.
This Eagles team had willpower, though.
With that inner strength and Morales’ coaching, Santa Margarita won the CIF-SS Division 1 championship, the program’s first title since 2002.
It was a season to remember for Morales, who is the Register’s Coach of the Year.
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“There’s always a lot of work, a lot of angst, and a lot of sacrifice and a lot of disagreements with the players,” Morales said. “But they came together at the right time. There’s a saying, ‘You have to roll around in the dirt before you get clean,’ and that’s what we did.”
The Eagles survived a couple of nail-biting postseason games. In the quarterfinals, they beat Villa Park in a shootout. Then, in the game Morales called the most difficult of his coaching career, the Eagles survived another shootout in the semifinals, beating top-seeded Harvard-Westlake of Studio City.
The players gave credit to their coach for helping them persevere in those uneasy circumstances.
“He’s the one who has helped us through all of it,” said Taylor Klawunder. “I don’t think I could have done it without him. So it was basically all him that got us there.”
There were 10 seniors on the Eagles’ roster, including Klawunder and her twin sister, Kaitlin, who have signed National Letters of Intent to play at four-year universities when they graduate in a few months.
“I’m going to miss them tremendously. We’ve graduated a tremendous senior class,” Morales said. “We are now officially in the rebuild, not reload, phase of the season.”
But as this season’s Coach of the Year showed many times, he knows how to deal with big challenges.
Contact the writer: amorales@ocregister.com
