For the Greenwich-based Shoreline Football Club, last month’s national championship feels like a dream. And if it is a dream, it’s one that head coach Danny Simpson doesn’t wish to wake up from any time soon.
“There are no words for it,” said Simpson, who is the owner and director of coaching at Shoreline FC as well as head coach of the Greenwich High School girls’ soccer team. “It was unexpected, hard-fought and deserved. I was absolutely speechless when we won.”
Competing in the Super Y League U-16 National Soccer Finals in Bradenton, Fla. against the DDYSC Wolves, it didn’t look too good for Shoreline.
Trailing, 2-0, to the team from Atlanta, Ga., Shoreline scored twice in the second half to force overtime and eventually penalty kicks. From there, Greenwich struck gold on penalty kicks to win the championship.
“It felt amazing,” said Shoreline captain Julio Ojea Quintana. “Especially having a great coach and amazing teammates, it made the experience something I’ll never forget. It took a lot of effort to win that championship. It was a group effort, as all of us contributed in our own ways. The team had great chemistry, both on and off the field.”
“It was surreal,” captain Will Marment said. “Everybody went crazy and it was pretty amazing. It an unbelievable feeling and to be from Connecticut where we weren’t well-known and in a small state, to play teams from Michigan and Georgia and beat them playing our game is awesome.”
Down two goals, Greenwich tied the contest when both Pablo Martinez and Biagio Paoletta found the back of the net. Shoreline took the 3-2 lead in overtime with Chris Sheehan’s goal, the DDYSC Wolves tied the score with three minutes on the clock to send the game to penalty kicks.
“Literally, the boys gave everything they had left during that game and in overtime,” Simpson said. “When it comes to penalties, I got the guys together and basically said that the five most confident players who are comfortable putting the ball in a certain area, they need to choose where to put it and do it with confidence. That was it.”
Before the penalty kicks, Simpson told his team that he was proud of them and that there’s nothing more that they could do.
“I left the penalty kicks in the hands of my assistants, went to the bathroom and didn’t even watch the penalties,” Simpson said. “With the last ticks, I came out and didn’t know the score. The center back stepped up, scored his penalty and went running off like Usain Bolt into the crowd. So I turned to the medic and said, ‘I guess we just won the national title.’ That’s when the mass hysteria kicked in and it was just stunning.”
Before the championship game started, Simpson told the kids that three years ago almost to the day was the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown and that Shoreline wasn’t just playing for its hometown of Greenwich or Branford.
“I told them that we were playing in the finals for you or me or the club,” Simpson said. “I said that they were going to represent the state today. I said that when they’re tired and hurting, they could think of the kids to draw inspiration and do it for them.”
And the Greenwich-based Shoreline FC squad was quite the unlikely champion. The squad first qualified into the tournament as a wild card team over the summer to get into the top 16. Out of that squad that qualified, only seven competed in the national championship tournament.
During the Florida trip, three players guest played other teams within the Shoreline FC club and five guest played from outside Shoreline FC.
“One kid played for a friend of mine in Florida, and I didn’t meet until 30 minutes before the kickoff of our first game,” Simpson said. “To say that we had a mystery squad going into the tournament would have been an honest assessment. Some of my staple players from Greenwich High School couldn’t come down to Florida because it was exam week. We really went down there with a magnificent seven, not knowing what we would have.”
To make it even more amazing, Shoreline FC played with 14 players in the title game, as several had to leave to head back to Connecticut. Out of those 14 players, one had a hamstring issue, another had a rolled ankle and a minor ankle sprain and another had tight groin muscles.
Before the first game of the Super Y national championships, Shoreline wasn’t sure if they belonged playing at the national level, especially with the amount of new faces playing in the tournament.
Throw into the mix that Shoreline didn’t arrive at their hotel in Florida until 11 p.m. and their first game was the following day at 8 a.m. at a field 40 minutes away from the hotel and it was obvious that concern was a high priority.
“Before the game we were nervous because we didn’t know what to expect,” Julio Ojea Quintana said. “But as the game went along, we got a lot of confidence and took that through the rest of the tournament. That helped us a lot.”
In the first game against defending champions Kalamazoo Kingdom from Michigan, Shoreline was up, 1-0, headed into the second half, but they scored three more times in the second half to come away with the 4-0 victory.
“We stretched the lead to 4-0 and they were stretched out trying to chase the game,” Simpson said. “After the first day, it was obvious to us that we deserved to be here because we won a game. If you win game one of the tournament, you usually win game three. So we literally took it one game at a time.”
After the game, Simpson took his team back to the hotel and after a brief rest, one of Simpson’s friends that works for the St. Pete Raiders took the team for an afternoon training session on finishing.
“That was very helpful for them,” Simpson said. “It also gave them a refocus to understand that you can’t just live off of one game.”
A game later, Simpson’s squad faced Ironbound from New Jersey and blanked them 2-0, scoring both goals in the first half.
“In the second half we were able to keep possession,” Simpson said. “That win put us in a strange position. Instead of just going down there to see how we would do, we had a situation where if we won game three, we could go through to the sesmis.”
In the quarterfinals against the ACYS Spirit United, Shoreline was trailing 2-1 with five minutes to play. With three minutes to go, Shoreline knotted the game on a penalty kick and in the last minute the right midfielder buried the shot in the back of the net for the eventual game-winning goal.
“It was mass hysteria,” Simpson said. “Five minutes earlier parents were checking their phones for flight times because most of them booked Sunday flights home, thinking we would be there for three group games and no further. It was an amazing victory.”
With the win, Shoreline FC advanced to the semis and played a familiar foe in FA Euro from New York. In order to qualify for the national championship, Shoreline had to play them at Coney Island and lost 4-0 but played them again later and beat them 4-0.
In the semifinal game in Florida, it was scoreless heading into the second half, but Shoreline FC exploded with four goals in the first 15 minutes of the second half and won that game 4-1 to set up the championship match against the DDYSC Wolves.
“The guys put in so much time over the summer and worked so hard to get to where we are now,” Marment said. “Instead of going on vacation, we stayed and put in two-hour training sessions. We put in so much work and time.”
Despite the new faces and being unfamiliar with the chemistry of the team, Simpson couldn’t be happier with how the team bonded in such a few days.
“We faced a lot of adversity along the way and the comradery was huge,” Simpson said. “The professional attitude they had throughout the tournament was amazing. The three coaches were in awe of how well with could work with these kids and how professional they handled themselves. Their attitude was phenomenal and their never-say-die attitude was off the charts.”
Quintana agreed that the chemistry was a highlight of the trip.
“We all combined really well and we all got along really well,” Quintana said. “On the field we never gave up and had a great sense of teamwork and determination.”
