Macon Middle School men’s soccer are conference champs for the third straight year.
When former head coach Sam Vargas took over Franklin High School’s women’s team last spring, the MMS boys were forced to take on a new look. With an unbeaten season under new head coach Bryan Wilkinson, the Panthers didn’t skip a beat.
“I helped [Vargas] the last three years, and then when he stepped into the girls program at the high school, I stepped up to coach the middle school,” said Wilkinson. “I’ve been doing it a long time, but this team just had absolutely perfect chemistry. It was a bunch of kids that worked together, and everything just went right this season for them.”
In a three-decade coaching career at both the college and high school levels, Wilkinson has learned more than enough to lead a team. When Vargas moved up to the high school however, the former Sun Belt Player of the Year at Jacksonville University was skeptical at first.
“When [Vargas] stepped into the girls program and [MMS athletic director Zach Tallent] talked to me about taking the job, my initial [answer] was no, because I didn’t ever want to coach a program again because of what it required,” said Wilkinson. “To run a program correctly, it’s to build relationships with the kids, it’s long-term, it’s player development all year round. It’s not just that you pick them up on the first day of tryouts and leave them after the season, it really is a development. But then when I really started to contemplate all the impact that you can have – I’ve been teaching, I think this is my 27th or 28th year – the opportunity that coaches and teachers have is the most powerful job, to me, in the world.”
Upon taking over, Wilkinson set about molding the team in his own image, returning the core of last year’s Blue Ridge Athletic Conference Champion roster. From the start of the regular season, Macon was once again the team to beat.
“We had 10 different players score goals, we had the same goalkeeper play all our games … everybody participated. They were great at the back, and they were great everywhere,” said Wilkinson. “There wasn’t any weak link. The hardest part about coaching a team that’s as successful as this is the balance, because you’ve also got to balance the time to prepare kids for next year to come and play, and as your eighth grade move on into JV, you’ve got to develop those players and still perform at your best.”
With their second unbeaten regular season in three years, Macon ran roughshod over their BRAC rivals, accruing an 11-0 record and an eye-popping 81-4 goal differential. In two rounds of the conference playoffs, a third-straight title was nearly a foregone conclusion.
“We played a team out of Polk in the semifinal and won 4-0, and then beat Rugby in the final 2-0,” said Wilkinson. “Those scores, I don’t think, reflected how much these kids kind of dominated those two games. You would think of that being a closer final, but sometimes things go wrong finishing-wise. We didn’t finish as well as we probably could have in the final, but the game was never in doubt.”
With their third-straight BRAC title, MMS entered rarified air, having lost just a single match in the past three years. Wilkinson credits the entire program and parents especially for Macon’s success, but says he has a higher goal in mind.
“I was actually just talking to a kid recently that wasn’t in trouble in sixth grade, but he probably wasn’t the most studious kid that MVI [Mountain View Intermediate] has ever seen,” he said. “But, he’s totally turned around this year, and when I said, ‘OK, why? What happened?’ he said, ‘It’s because of soccer – because I want to please the team, I want to please the coaches, I want my parents to be proud of me.’ Ultimately, that’s all that we do. We do all of this to change the destiny of these kids – to give them their option, to give them a choice, teach them hard work, teach them responsibility and hopefully to continue in the game, but in all the aspects that we teach them to continue that in their life and everything that they do.”