Soccer Box FC 2015 Girls gain valuable experience at US Youth Futsal Nationals

While the Soccer Box Futbol Club 2015 Girls didn’t win a match at the U.S. Youth Futsal National Championships last weekend, they didn’t come back from Kansas City empty-handed.

The team, playing in the youngest age group at U-9, qualified by winning all its matches in the USYF South Atlantic Regional in Charlotte last winter, but ran into much steeper competition in Kansas City. Still, the experience was a valuable one for a group that fully intends to make it back to nationals.

The SBFC 2015 Girls lost 9-5 to Assassins Futsal U9G in their first game Saturday morning, July 6, before getting hammered 13-0 by Ballers Elite 2015 of Virginia Beach, Virginia, in the afternoon. Soccer Box then fell 7-3 to Sporting Wichita (Kansas) Red 15 in the consolation match Monday, July 8.

“We wanted to see where we were as far as the technique side of the futsal sport,” said Randol Mendoza, co-head coach and Soccer Box co-founder with Josh Thomas. “So from coming back and not winning the three games, we now know more that we didn’t know about ourselves.”

The eight players on SBFC 2015 Girls roster — Ava CaHill, Ellie Ellis, Belinda Jimenez Martinez, Ivory Maximiliano, Sofia Mendoza, Finley Shumate, Alexis Thomas and Aubrey Walker — are almost all from Wilson but some of the teams at the USYF Nationals were constructed with players from multiple states, Randol Mendoza said.

“It was very, very competitive,” he said. “So we saw some really good players, saw some teams with some really good offenses, with really good individual players. Saw a combination of everything and the girls got better because of those three losses.”

The SBFC 2015 Girls didn’t lose a match in the regional tournament in January, outscoring the opposition 30-7 in four matches, but struggled offensively in Kansas City.

“Yeah, 24 minutes into the first game,” Mendoza said. “It took 24 minutes to kind of get acclimated and to catch up to the speed of the game, because the speed of that level is quick and it’s fast and they’re aggressive. And then the light bulbs started turning on, and now they saw that, wait a minute, we can compete just like they can.”

That first game, a 9-5 loss, was a bit of a back-and-forth affair, Mendoza said. His daughter, Sofia Mendoza, scored twice and provided an assist to Ellie Ellis after Ellis had the helper on Mendoza’s first goal.

Alexis Thomas, whose father is the other head coach, scored off a free kick while Ava CaHill also put in an unassisted goal while assisting on Mendoza’s final goal.

While that loss was disappointing, it was the 13-0 whitewashing at the hands of eventual national runner-up Ballers Elite 2015 that Randol Mendoza said “definitely took the wind out of our sails.”

The team bounced back in the consolation match but lost 7-3 to Sporting Wichita Red. Ellis scored twice with assists from Aubrey Walker and CaHill. Finley Shumate’s unassisted goal was the final one for SBFC.

Randol Mendoza said that the team’s supporters who traveled to K.C. to watch them play were a huge inspiration. Their biggest supporter, literally, drew a crowd himself. Coby White, a star player for the Chicago Bulls of the NBA, was on hand to support the girls. His Coby White Family Foundation was the primary sponsor and the logo was featured on the front of their jerseys.

White, who played basketball at Greenfield School when Mendoza was coaching soccer, is an old friend of Ava CaHill’s father, Darian.

“So again, to have a sponsor be there to support the team and then actually attend and go to the games, it made it special,” said Mendoza. “And then he was getting stopped on the way in and on the way out too. So people were recognizing him.”

Mendoza also credited Bri Little, a member of the Wilson Youth Soccer Association 2006 Explosion girls that he led to three straight U.S. Youth Soccer National Championship Series, for inspiring and instructing the SBFC girls in Kansas City. Little played on 264 Futsal U14 team coached by Mendoza that played in the USYF Nationals in 2020.

The SBFC 2015 Girls will now go back into soccer mode as they prepare for their fall seasons, but Mendoza said that he plans to put them as well as the other SBFC team, the 2016 Boys, into a winter futsal league in Raleigh and play in some competitive tournaments to get ready for the regional next winter.

“We’re going to do a review of the season, and we’re already talking about being able to go to more events,” he said. “That way we can get around other futsal clubs. That way we can get some competition and some good games in prior to attending a national event. But we’ve got to get there first, so going back to regionals, winning regionals. The girls are hungry, they want to go back. Parents and players gave us a good reception after it, even though we didn’t win any games, but it kind of motivates us to try to make it back again.”

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