In this week's edition of This Hits Different, Shelby Cassesse tells the Fan Morning Show about the Jeannette boys soccer team's remarkable turnaround from a winless season to the postseason.
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Jeannette soccer writing memorable turnaround story
"Jeannette it was, to me, an open book, because these players were still moldable because they didn't know a lot," Cicero said.
At the time, the team was coming off a 1-16-1 season. But the issues stretched much further than that. Jeannette boys soccer had never qualified for the playoffs and some years struggled to find enough players.
To make matters worse, Cicero's first day on the job was just two weeks before the 2019 season started.
"It wasn't really realistic on how they are expected to play, how to build a relationship with players, how to have players build a relationship with other," he said. "So we pretty much just sent a season learning that."
The Jayhawks went 0-18 that year. Junior Mitchell Steele, a freshman at the time, remembers it well.
"There was like no joking around," he said. "We would argue on the field."
And for Cicero, it led to some soul searching.
"It was just demoralizing," he said. "Some people thought I was crazy, like 'you can coach a better team than Jeannette.' And sad to myself, no, no, I'm sticking with cheese guys. I see the talent there, I see what they can become and what they can do."
So Cicero gave it another go in 2020 with another young team in the middle of a pandemic.
Said Cicero: "I told them last year in the beginning of the season, 'this is a marathon and not a sprint. It will comes. It will come, I promise you. Stay with me.'"
Slowly, things started to change.
The Jayhawks began beating teams who beat them in close games the previous year. They were in competitive games with teams who typically blew them out.
Not only was the team getting better at soccer, there was a noticeable improvement in team culture.
"It's fun," Mitchell said. "You have people joking with each other. We've taken people in as family now instead of being mad at each other throughout the season."
Those changes carried the Jayhawks into this season, which has made an 0-18 record two years ago seem like a distant memory.
This season, the team set a program record for most wins in a season and for the first time in program history, they're going to the playoffs.
"To see that is sort of a mixture of awe, pride and surrealness," Cicero said.
"We want to keep winning," Mitchell added. "Yeah, we made the playoffs, but we don't just want to make playoffs. We want to do more than that."
Jeannette High School has a competitive boys soccer program for the first time ever.
It's a story of what can happen when a coach can see past a losing record and a team buys into his message and each other.
"If they don't have to it deep down to want to improve and want to turn this program around… I mean, you can't do it without the kids. I'm proud of them, most of all. They've put their all into this and they're really, really proud of this team."
