Westminster’s boys soccer team, pictured after a senior night win over Northglenn. (Courtesy photo)
Westminster’s boys soccer team started the 2013 campaign 0-5-0. They’d hired their head coach one week before the season, and won a total of five games over the previous four seasons.
Yet, Thursday night, the Wolves will play in the Class 5A playoffs for the first time in at least 20 seasons. How? Well, for starters, they found a formation to their liking. And then they started winning.
Sercan Fenerci is the head boys basketball coach at Thornton, and was actually named the coach of the year by the EMAC last season. Originally from Turkey, he played college basketball at Angelo State in Texas, and was a collegiate coach at a Division III school in the Boston area. He started with basketball there, but eventually helped start a men’s soccer program, and coached that, too.
“I grew up playing soccer,” Fenerci said. “I was like, ‘Oh, I’m really tall.’ And my dad’s like, ‘Oh, you should play basketball.’ I ended up doing that, and I played college ball here (in the U.S.), in basketball, but the soccer never left. I would always watch soccer on the weekend, the Premier League, just to keep up with it.”
In May, Westminster’s boys soccer job opened.
“I applied,” Fenerci said, “but I was like, ‘I’m not sure if I want to take on another coaching job, because I’m already coaching basketball.'”
Westminster had another coach in place, but it fell through.
“Then I got the call literally a week before and interviewed,” Fenerci said. “They hired me in the afternoon and we started the very next day. So it was a very quick transition.”
There were no time for tryouts, no time for any real preparation for the season. And the schedule wasn’t very forgiving. Westminster opened with Arvada West, the eventual Jeffco Champions, and George Washington, which won the Denver Prep League.
“It was very challenging the first couple of games, I can tell you that,” Fenerci said. “Especially the first four or five games, we told the kids those were our scrimmages — because we didn’t know about formations we could play, we didn’t know who can play what position. So basically, the first month of my job was figuring out who we have, who can play better in what position.”
The Wolves tried four different formations during the first five games, eventually settling on a 4-4-2. But, “being a basketball coach,” Fenerci said, “I was having calls during a game to change the formation. We had some names for different formations, and when I called that, they would change into that just to catch the other teams off-guard. It worked in several games.”
Westminster’s first win? Thornton, in overtime.
“That made it little more interesting,” the coach said. “I told the kids, ‘You’ve got to win this for me.'”
Westminster finished the season by going 6-3-1 to end 6-8-1. Mind you, this team had been 5-48-3 from 2009-12.
The Wolves are the No. 32 seed in the playoffs. It means they face No. 1 overall Smoky Hill on Thursday night.
“Smoky Hill is a very powerful school. They’re a powerhouse,” Fenerci said. “They have been winning a lot of games the past few years. Our thing is, we are the underdogs, we’re going to play relaxed soccer. They must beat us. They are the heavy favorites; for them, it’s a must. For us, you know what? We’re just going to go out there and give it our best and see what happens.”