It’s senior night for boys soccer at Southeast Polk, and more than a dozen players in bumble-striped jerseys – along with their family members – stretch across the field.
There are future pilots and plumbers and pre-med students among the group, but tonight they are recognized for their athletic accomplishments.
The Rams roster boasts the second-leading scorer and a goalie with one of the best save percentages in Class 4A, and Southeast Polk is in the midst of its best season in over a decade.
And that winning record is the result of years of work, something that began just before the current Rams seniors started their high school careers.
Southeast Polk graduate returns to coach at alma mater
Jacob Lucy graduated from Southeast Polk in 2014.
He did not play soccer during his time in Altoona, competing in football and focusing on track and field during the spring sports season. It wasn’t until college that he really discovered his love for the game.
He got his youth coaching license while studying abroad; he signed on as a student coach under Rick Isaacson at Simpson College. He jumped into assistant coaching positions after graduation, at Ankeny Centennial under Brian Duax and on the women’s side at Northwestern College.
When the pandemic hit and cancelled the 2020 spring soccer season in Iowa, Lucy picked up and moved to North Carolina, where he landed his first high school head coaching job at East Henderson High School.
But then – a couple of years after he moved across the country – the head coach position opened at Southeast Polk, and the opportunity was too good for Lucy to pass on.
He was hired in January of 2022, and Lucy wasted no time implementing his five-year plan.
“The first step, we had to build a culture,” said Lucy. “Trying to make soccer – rather than a bunch of guys that get together and kind of see what happens once a year or three months – into a destination. Building that culture of kids wanting to be here.”
Culture and talent come together in Southeast Polk’s successful season
In his first year as head coach, Lucy inherited a program – junior varsity and varsity – that included about 50 players, and his starting lineup featured mostly sophomores and juniors, with only five seniors on the roster.
The Rams posted an 8-11 record that season.
The next year, a group of eight freshmen who would become instrumental in Southeast Polk’s best win percentage in more than a decade joined the squad.
Samer Arafa spent more than 1,000 minutes in goal during his freshman year. Jacob Luna started all but one game – the only first-year player to do so. Pete Green, Charlie Hintz and Sam Wilson appeared in all 19 games. Sawyer Smithhart and Tyler Hegg each made it into more than a dozen contests.
The Rams went 9-10, a marginal improvement in Lucy’s second year at the helm.
Fast forward nearly three years, and all of those players are still making an impact.
Arafa, Hegg, Hintz, Luna, Smithhart and Wilson either earned spots in the starting lineup or play significant minutes. Green started three games before an injury brought an early end to his senior season.
Even the Rams’ current leading scorer – senior Cole Skinner – has been around since his freshman year, even though that’s not obvious in the online statistics. He missed his first year of high school soccer recovering from an injury, but he has more than bounced back – contributing 21 goals and eight assists this season.
“For four years, we’ve been saying the same kind of stuff, and now they’re turning around and saying it to the other guys,” Lucy said when asked about the senior class’ impact on Southeast Polk’s turnaround.
“The thing I’m proudest of is thinking, ‘Wow, they’re so talented, but it means nothing if we don’t buy into what we’re doing as a program.’ And now, the way they speak is so mature, they’re taking things on, and they’re embracing this culture.”
It was a head coach’s dream to have the amount of talent that Lucy experienced with that class. But he understood that talent without culture breeds individual success, and culture without talent can create a lot of fun but not much winning.
The Rams’ coaching staff focused on finding a balance between the two elements.
And with talented athletes who put Southeast Polk soccer’s success first, Lucy struck gold. His players followed their head coach’s lead, and the Rams (10-3-4 record) have experienced their best season since 2015.
“That group of young men buying in for four years, that has been the difference,” Lucy shared. “It has been the difference, because their first thought is now, ‘Is what I’m doing right for the team? Is what I’m doing building people up?’”
That team-first, selfless mentality paid off. Southeast Polk has a substate semifinal game against Ankeny scheduled for May 27.
And the Rams are on the verge of program history.
Is this the year Southeast Polk makes an appearance in the state tournament?
The Central Iowa Metropolitan League (CIML) is usually well-represented come June.
Valley leads the way with two dozen trips to the state tournament. Ankeny, Dowling and Johnston each boast 10-plus appearances. Waukee Northwest – which opened in 2021 – is a two-time postseason participant.
But there is one team – just one – in the CIML that has never made it to the state tournament: Southeast Polk.
There are still a couple of games between the Rams and the state tournament. This is the closest that Southeast Polk has been in a decade-plus, though, and it’s tempting to look ahead at what could happen.
Making history – even just school history – would prove that Lucy’s focus on culture and his players’ commitment to that has paid off. And this was one of the goals included in the five-year plan that Lucy put together when he first took over the team.
Winning games was never the focus. It’s just something that came naturally, while trying to turn Southeast Polk into a place where kids want to play soccer.
“The winning is fantastic, it’s a lot of fun,” said Lucy. “These boys will be remembered in our record books. We’re really proud of these young men. But we would give up every single win in a heartbeat if it meant we could have boys like this going on to be contributors in their community, like we know they will be.
“We hope the life lessons we’re trying to teach carry over, and that is the most rewarding thing for us.”
Alyssa Hertel is the college sports recruiting reporter for the Des Moines Register. Contact Alyssa at ahertel@dmreg.com or on Twitter @AlyssaHertel.
This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Southeast Polk boys soccer enjoying best season in over a decade
Reporting by Alyssa Hertel, Des Moines Register / Des Moines Register
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