Photo by Erin Nelson.
Hoover’s Britton Slifka (4) passes the ball guarded by Hewitt-Trussville’s Reece Rutland (26) in a game held at Hoover High School on Feb. 26.
It’s been a season of learning and growing for the Hoover High School girls soccer team.
The team is having to adjust to a younger group of players this year after it saw 10 seniors graduate last year. This year’s team is mostly freshman and sophomores, with a handful of seniors.
Britton Slifka, a center back who transferred to Hoover last year from James Clemens, is one of the few seniors on the team.
“It’s been going well, but it’s challenging for all of us to jel and step out of our comfort zone to try and lead by example,” she said. “Being the older kids on the team, we’re trying to help the younger kids build so they’ll be able to keep building in the future.”
When the Hoover Sun spoke with Slifka in March, the team had won about the same amount of games as it had lost. Slifka described a particularly challenging game from the night before.
The game was against Vestavia Hills, a program which is known as a powerhouse, she said.
“Coming into a game like that, knowing you’re going against a team that was nationally ranked for the past two years, it can put so much on a player — especially if it’s her first year on varsity,” she said. “I think it was a game where we all needed to step up and lead by example in our play. We needed to try to let our younger teammates calm their nerves and come together as a whole instead of playing individually.”
Hoover lost to Vestavia 3-0 in that game, but Slifka and her team were able to reflect and learn from that loss.
“I learned that when you’re an older person on that team, you need to use your actions as motivation for our other teammates to feed off of and play well too,” she said. “You might not need to be vocal about it. Your actions will show like, ‘Oh, she’s really trying. She’s in this. I need to step it up.’”
On the flip side, there have been times when the team felt effortlessly cohesive.
“When we played Altamont, I feel like we clicked in every aspect of the field,” she said. “We all were talking and moving the ball around fluently. We were playing collectively, as a whole. And we were having fun because we were scoring. It was just like clockwork.”
One of the things the team does best is foster a welcoming environment, Slifka said. As someone who moved into a new soccer program her junior year, she said she never felt left out.
“We do everything together,” she said about her team. “Everyone is a person, and just because you might not start or play all 80 minutes of the game, we all still impact the team in so many ways. Even if you’re on the bench cheering on, you’re still impacting the game. The team environment has been so impactful.”
The team’s goal for the remainder of the season is to come together and believe in themselves, she said. Consistency is another goal.
“Whether that’s winning or losing, it’s being able to know we played the best we can and consistently being able to say, ‘We played good that game, and here’s what we can fix, and here’s how we can get better.’”
**This story appeared in the May edition of Hoover Sun. The Lady Bucs' season ended in the first round of the Class 7A playoffs.
