Benefield: Sonoma County Sol ready to make deep playoff push

At one goal down, the Sonoma County Sol had ’em exactly where they wanted them.

Well at least that’s the story they are telling this week. But there might be some truth in it.

The Sol, the semiprofessional soccer team in the National Premier Soccer League made up of familiar names from area high schools as well as Santa Rosa Junior College and Sonoma State, are winners of three of the past four Golden Gate Conference titles. But after one half of play Saturday night against the visiting East Bay Stompers, when they fell behind 1-0, the Sol were 45 minutes from getting bounced from the playoffs after one game for the second time in as many seasons.

But being down might just have been the ticket.

“That goal they scored? I think it kind of helped us out,” said the Sol’s leading scorer, Diego “Toluca” Lopez.

The thinking goes like this: The Sol had played the Stompers three times coming into Saturday night’s game and three times the Sol had blown early leads, eventually coming away with one tie and two losses.

So perhaps conceding a goal would shake the Sol out of their tentative play?

“When they scored first, it was like, ‘OK, now it’s our turn to score on them,’” said Angel Acevedo, a five-year Sol veteran who played at Healdsburg High and for Santa Rosa Junior College.

And score they did. The Sol finished off the Stompers 3-1 to advance to the second round of the NPSL playoffs. They host the North County Battalion from San Diego at Santa Rosa High School Saturday night.

“The win Saturday against East Bay was kind of a monkey-off-the-back thing because we didn’t have a lot of success against them this year,” said coach Vinnie Cortezzo.

“We didn’t want to be bounced back-to-back years after winning the conference back-to-back years,” he said.

The young Sol squad improved to 9-4-2 with the win, but the team isn’t complaining about a season record that is not as sterling as last year’s. Instead, the team looks at conference play as merely a primer for what comes next.

“We’ve been in competitive games all season long,” Acevedo said. “We are used to having such intense games; it’s been playoff games for the past four weeks because it was such a tight race for conference.”

And that can give a team that is considerably younger than in years past some poise going into the postseason.

“Sometimes being down a goal, being tied late in the game, it’s given us experience that we can take into the playoffs,” said Sol veteran Chris Daly.

Daly, who played his high school soccer at Sonoma Valley High and was on Sonoma State’s Division II national championship team in 2002, said an influx of new players has given the Sol a deep bench that it hasn’t had in recent years.

“Every night we are getting 25 to 30 guys at practice and we are not missing a beat,” he said.

And the practice environment is fierce. All the better to determine a starting 11.

“As a whole, it’s really good for the team,” Acevedo said. “It makes all the practices really intense.”

“That’s when we win our spot,” said Lopez, a first-year Sol player who was The Press Democrat’s All-Empire Large School Player of the Year in 2011 and 2012 while playing for Montgomery High. “The level is really competitive right now. I’ve heard that before, it wasn’t like that. We have subs that can either play at the same level or above.

“I think it’s good because it’s up for grabs,” he said. “Nobody can take their spot for granted and you never know, somebody can come along and take it and you are on the bench.”

The Sol won the NPSL national championship in 2009 and were runners-up in 2005 and 2013, but many on the team don’t have that history with the squad. But what they lack in institutional memory, they insist they make up for in raw talent.

“I think we have the players to make a run to the national title,” Acevedo said.

Lopez agreed.

“I think that’s realistic,” he said. “We’ve got the team. We’ve got the talent.”

But the Sol certainly can’t take a playoff run for granted.

Nobody, not even the new guys, has forgotten the sting of last year. Winners of the Golden Gate Conference, the Sol earned a first-round bye. Then they hosted CD Aguiluchos, an Oakland-based team they had beaten three times previously.

But Aguiluchos stunned their hosts in penalties, ending the season. And what became of Aguiluchos, the team they had handled three times that season? They made it all the way to the NPSL championship game.

“I sort of feel like if we got through that game, we might be the team that goes to the national championship game also,” Cortezzo said.

But that was last year. The next order of business for the Sol is Saturday.

And they must get through the Battalion, a first-year outfit that downed Deportivo Coras USA of Riverside 5-3 last weekend.

The good news? After conference play in which the Sol saw the same five teams multiple times, they will get to take on relative strangers in the Battalion.

That suits the Sol, said Acevedo.

“Personally, it’s kind of nice because we don’t have to go with a game plan; just play our game, our style,” he said.

You can reach staff columnist Kerry Benefield at 526-8671 or kerry.benefield@pressdemocrat.com, on Twitter @benefield and on Instagram at kerry.benefield. Podcasting on iTunes “Overtime with Kerry Benefield.”