After Branham fell to Prospect -- the team closest to them in the Mount Hamilton league all season long -- by a 4-1 margin in mid-January, it would have been easy for the Bruins to settle for second and rest for a CCS Division II run. It seemed especially inevitable after following that result with a 0-0 draw against mid-league Overfelt.
Instead, the Branham boys soccer team ripped off seven wins in eight games, winning the Mount Hamilton league with a 2-1 win over Prospect in the season finale and earning a berth in the CCS Open Division tournament. They would earn successive 1-0 wins against heavily favored St. Ignatius and Soledad before falling in the final to Bellarmine, and subsequently losing to Jesuit in the first round of the NorCal Division I Regional Championships.
The Bruins thrived with a never-say-die mentality, overcoming adversities that they faced in the regular- and postseason.
“Being a lower seed [in the playoffs] wasn’t a problem at all because we just saw it as a number,” said senior co-captain Aaron Lenz. “We forgot about the seedings in the first few minutes of the game as soon as we saw what the other team was doing. We knew as we got into the games that it didn’t matter.”
Lenz also said that his confidence in the team grew during their preseason tournament, where they played a Santa Maria team ranked over 70 places above them in the state standings and held them to a 0-0 draw, at times looking like the better team in the game.
“When we played Santa Maria, a higher ranked team, we didn’t think that we were that much worse than them,” said Lenz. “I thought then that this team has what it takes to win the league.”
After winning the Mount Hamilton league with a 9-2-3 record, the Bruins were drawn into the CCS Open Division tournament, moving up from Division II. Senior Matin Faghany said that the jump to the Open Division was a deserved placement, even with other deserving private school teams from bigger leagues in the mix for their spot.
“When I found out we got into Open Division, I wasn’t nervous because that’s where I expected us to be after winning our league,” Faghany said. “When we saw that we were matched with St. Ignatius, the two-time defending Open Division champions, I was nervous and I didn’t know how that would go for us, but I knew we had what it took to win.
“When we got there and we scored a goal early, I knew that if we defended like we had during the season that we would hold on, and we did. That was exciting.”
Faghany also said that after shutting out St. Ignatius, he saw that they had the ability to beat the teams known for being in higher competitions that the Bruins were just getting used to.
“It was clear that we had the right personnel to go out and beat the other teams in the competition,” Faghany said. “If we would have beaten Bellarmine in the final, we could have won NorCals like they ended up doing. It just showed how good of a season we had.”
Head coach Danny Kadah also recognized that his team had the talent that they needed to be successful in the more competitive postseason tournaments. Kadah said that the talent on his roster certainly helped the Bruins get through a tough league schedule, and the confidence gained from earning a league championship aided their postseason run even more.
“Going through league only losing two games gave us a lot of confidence,” Kadah said. “Our league is tough, and after beating out Prospect, another really good team, for the league championship, gave us a lot of confidence. Obviously St. Ignatius was the king of the hill in CCS, and once we beat those guys we thought ‘why not just go for it?’”
The head coach also believes that after the run to Open Division CCS and the NorCal Championships this season, his team will be better prepared for another go at it next season, this time with a better understanding of what it will take to get back to that stage again.
“We know that we’ve done this before and we can compete with anybody now,” said Kadah. “Even though it’s always a new season with a new set of players, we still know that we can compete at the highest level and that gives you a lot of confidence. That should carry over to next season and beyond.”
