After having played soccer through high school as well as on the collegiate level Ed Meyer was looking to continue playing the sport he loved. At one point in 1999, he felt that he was getting a little too old to continue to lace up the cleats to compete so he began helping the Olympic Developmental Program as an assistant coach. He would continue to coach on a variety of levels until his son was old enough to get involved with sports.

“I had continued to coach soccer until my son was about 8 years old. I was at the height of my coaching career, but I needed to step back,” he said. “So I basically took a 10 plus year hiatus to be a father. Unfortunately, my son was interested in hockey instead of soccer.”

A few years after Meyers’ son graduated from high school he started to contemplate returning to coaching when Ric Carrero, the Bay Path Athletic Director came to him asking him to coach the junior varsity program. A year after taking on the position, the varsity coach put in his resignation and it was obvious that Meyer apply for the opening, especially now that his son had completed his collegiate career at Penn State where he played hockey.

Historically, Bay Path soccer teams have been good on a regular basis, but over the past few years, the Indians have found themselves to be around a .500 team, and the new coach wants to change that.

“Coming into this season I knew we had some good talent with the upperclassmen (15 seniors tried out and the team kept 10 of them),” Meyer said. “I also knew that we had a lot of talented younger kids, but our biggest issue was going to be to get the senior captains to buy into my specific program’s style of play so they could pass it along to the other players.”

Meyer was looking to reevaluate what this team was and what it was going to become. During the tryouts, when 15 freshmen took to the field looking to earn a spot, the new coach kept them all to play on the JV team.

When Meyer was the JV coach, he always connected with the varsity coach about the style of soccer that his team was playing so that he could develop his players for the varsity team in the future. Now, as the varsity coach, he is having both programs work out together in all facets of play.

“We need to develop the younger players for the future and they are playing a similar style of skill sets, so that they can move up to the varsity team without an issue,” the coach said. “This year, we are looking to move forward with what we are doing with both programs, especially since we have 10 schools to feed from.”

First and foremost Meyer is looking for his senior captains to take the reins and run with them to get this team ready to move forward. The two captains this fall are Cody Dombroski and Sebastian Moniz, both starting strikers who will be also looked upon to provide some goal scoring. At the time of this writing, the Indians were currently 3-1 with their only loss coming at the hands of Diman Regional Vocational High School (3-1) and Dombroski had notched three goals and six assists, while Moniz also had three goals and a single assist.

This fall Sebastian Vargas, a 6’4” club soccer player who plays the game at a high level, was moved to the center back position. Bay Path lost their center back and the coach was scrambling to find a replacement.

“Sebastian stepped up and asked to fill the void moving from his forward position,” Meyer said. “He’s athletic, smart, aggressive and bought into the system, so I knew that he’d be able to handle what we were about to throw at him.”

Another big part of what the team will be doing this year is junior center mid Josh McLaughlin, a dynamic soccer player according to his coach. Sophomore Arlind Aliu “All Defense” will be paired with Cameron Barry in the back end. 

All 10 of the seniors will contribute in their own way this season, but it’s the junior class that has been giving the team its edge as well as the fantastic group of youth players coming up.

Coming into the season Meyers’ goal, playing in the new conference with all new teams, is just looking for the program to get going and become successful with all their hard work. 

“Of our 11 losses last year, we had five games that we lost by three or more goals. We are not looking for a championship or a Conference Title – we just want to reduce our goals against average,” the coach said. “Last year, at times our offense was anemic and we couldn’t score. We need to produce a positive goal differential while committing to our defense.”

Meyers knows that his squad will be able to bet the bad teams and stay in the games against the better teams, while making sure they play competitive soccer. If Bay Path can follow Meyers’ plan the team should be able to accomplish an above average record in addition to improving their goals against average.