Pahrump girls help club soccer teams win Nevada titles

The thought of Hawaii brings a colorful array of images to mind: beaches, volcanoes, luaus … girls soccer.

For five Pahrump Valley High School players, the 50th state now means girls soccer after their club teams won Nevada National Championship Series State Cup titles April 21-22 at the Bettye Wilson Soccer Complex in Las Vegas.

Four of them — Kaitlyn Carrington, Kathy Niles, Vaniah Vitto and Beatrice Favella — play for Downtown Las Vegas Soccer Club’s ‘00 Academy Girls team, made up of players born in 2000, while Sydney Dennis plays for Players Soccer Club’s 1999 Girls Elite team. Their teams will move on to represent Nevada in the Far West regionals beginning June 17 in Honolulu.

“Not one of the girls who played for me for 12 years of club soccer has ever won a state championship,” said Downtown LVSC ‘00 girls coach Samuel Barnett. “Once every five years it’s in Hawaii, so this is a big year for them.”

The regionals will feature champions and wild-card entries from Alaska, Arizona, California North, California South, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming as well as Nevada. More than 220 teams ranging from 13-and-under to 19-and-under will participate in what officially is called the U.S. Youth Soccer Region IV Championships.

The teams are guaranteed three games and will play more pending the outcomes of the first three.

It took a bit of luck for Downtown LVSC’s team to make the field. It did not originally qualify after playing every team in the seeding tournament to a draw and apparently being eliminated by a 1-1 tie against rival Players’ 00 squad. But one of the four qualifying clubs, Heat, withdrew and, as the next-best team, Downtown LVSC took its place and took full advantage of the chance.

Although they sort of backed their way into the tournament, those hard-fought draws showed Downtown’s players they could compete with every team in the field.

“We dominated everybody but just couldn’t put the ball in the back of the net,” said Niles. “Then we played in another tournament and finally broke our inability to score and scored a ton of goals, so it kind of gave us a huge confidence boost.”

“We were put into the fourth seed … but in the back of our heads we knew we had a chance at winning because we had played all of the teams tough,” said right wing Vitto. “We were really excited that we were given the opportunity, so going into the games we practiced finishing, and our team finally clicked.”

“I knew we were all very prepared, and we just had the mindset that we were just going to take that win,” added Carrington, the center midfielder. “We worked so hard for it, and we didn’t have a doubt in our mind. I think we finally all realized that we had the chance to take it all, and when we were offered a second chance we couldn’t pass it up.”

The Albion and Players teams quickly learned that Downtown LVSC getting into the field would be a problem for them. The semifinal win over top-seeded Albion was 2-0, and the victory over No. 2 seed Players, a team Barnett described as a “blood rival” as he used to coach with that club and brought some players, including Vitto, with him when he moved to Downtown, was 4-0.

“To me, it was very intense,” Carrington said of the final. “At first it was very even. I don’t recall them taking shots at all, and we had multiple opportunities. We were just pressuring them and pressuring them. From our side, it was just an equal challenge at first, then they just gave up.

“Their girls, once they get all mad that they’re losing, they just get all pushy about it, trying to foul and what not.”

“We just trusted in ourselves more than we ever had been before and worked as a team,” Niles said. “When we got the opportunity to get back in it, there was nobody who was going to stop us.”

“The teams we played in the finals, we had not beaten either of them, so coming into the semifinals we were the underdog,” Barnett said. But, as the defeated coach told Downtown’s players afterward, they played like they wanted it more.

That was no surprise to Barnett, who is impressed not only by the soccer skills of his Pahrump players but by the dedication required simply to get to practice.

“They drive 90 minutes one way three times, four times, five times a week,” said Barnett, who has been coaching since 2009. “When I do my recruiting and I do my tryouts, I look for a good, passionate kid rather than a good, talented kid instantly. When I heard about the traveling these girls would be doing, that was 95 percent of it for me.”

“It’s the love of the game,” Vitto said. “You have to do what you have to do. It’s not that bad. The drive at this point after playing club for four years literally feels like 15 minutes. With the drive, too, it’s cool, because me and my dad have pretty much an unbreakable bond because we have time to talk for hours.”

Their teammates are also impressed they make the trip from Pahrump multiple times each week.

“Our team is so supportive of us,” Carrington said. “They think that’s a great amount of dedication. And they tease us. Samuel says our town smells of donkeys, and he always laughs at the fact we have donkey basketball.”

Donkey basketball is not what brought Favella, an exchange student from Italy, to Pahrump. She was not eligible to play in the tournament because she was not on the roster originally, and she will be returning to Italy before the team heads to Hawaii. But Favella enjoyed her time playing for Pahrump Valley and for Downtown LVSC.

“I liked it, because it’s very different from my team in Italy,” Favella said. “It’s more professional and serious because girls soccer in Italy is not as serious as men’s soccer.”

But her main reason for coming to the United States wasn’t sports, it was language.

“It was basically for English,” said Favalla, who also played volleyball in Italy. “I would think about my future, and I think English is fundamental to learn. I like travel, and when you want to travel, you want to find a job, you have to know it. I actually understood it, but I couldn’t speak it very well. So I think the experience of full immersion was the only option to actually learn English.”

While Favella is scheduled to go home June 1, her teammates will be preparing for the trip to Hawaii, which will be a first for each of the players from Pahrump.

“I think I’ll stay focused just because I’m still in shock that we won, so the fact we’re going to Hawaii hasn’t hit me yet,” Vitto said. “So right now it’s just a dream come true, and I’m not thinking about it in that way.”

“I’m pretty stoked,” Carrington said. “I just can’t wait.”

Dennis wins with Players SC

Dennis, meanwhile, didn’t have to face her high school teammates in the tournament because she plays in a different age group for Players SC.

“I play with girls that are older,” she explained. “We play an age group up. The past two or three years we’ve been 99s.”

Dennis has been with Players since the summer before she started eighth grade, and she agrees the travel between Pahrump and Las Vegas isn’t much of an obstacle.

“I think it was just one of those things where we didn’t really have a choice, so it didn’t faze me,” Dennis said. “I wanted to do this, so we had to do this. The drive gives me time to relax and unwind after a busy day.”

Players has won a state cup before. That was in 2016, when the regionals were in Boise, Idaho. Having Hawaii host the regionals served as extra motivation for all of the clubs, Dennis said.

“It was definitely like an extra push,” she said. “All season we kept saying, ‘We want to go to Hawaii, we want to go to Hawaii.’ “

Dennis said her team didn’t enter the championship weekend on a wave of confidence, but Players won a shootout against Albion 5-3 before avenging a defeat in last year’s tournament with a 2-1 win over Heat, the same club whose ‘00 team withdrew to open a spot for Downtown LVSC.

”We played teams that are kind of like our rivals,” she said. “It’s always been back and forth with us. Earlier this season, we had lost to both of those teams pretty badly.

“Honestly, I think a lot of people were pretty skeptical about how we were going to do. We have the ability to play with almost any team that we would need to compete with, but sometimes we let the other teams get in our heads. I think we were trying to stay confident, but we were still trying to be realistic.”

Contact Sports Editor Tom Rysinski at trysinski@pvtimes.com On Twitter:@pvtimes