TUMWATER — For John Hayes, he could have scheduled cupcakes in the non-league portion of the schedule. He could have witnessed his Tumwater High School boys soccer team walk away with one-sided victories.
The Thunderbirds head coach isn’t a fan of shortcuts.
“We have a gauntlet coming,” Hayes stated.
The difficulty was raised in Thursday’s season-opener in a 4-2 setback to Class 3A Timberline at Tumwater District Stadium. It begins a stretch of playing opponents in higher classifications until the Evergreen Conference opener in less than two weeks.
Tumwater (0-1) will be greeted by Olympia and Bonney Lake at home plus travel to North Thurston and Steilacoom – the latter the only 2A school on the non-league schedule.
All five of the opponents finished in the top-half of their respective leagues in 2024.
“This time around, teams have gotten some new players and so have we, so it is a little harder to adjust,” senior captain Gavin Cuoio said. “We have a lot of things to fix and these games are great. It exploits what we need to fix.”
It is a more experienced Thunderbirds squad behind the attacking prowess of Cuoio and Dylan Stevens. After just two seniors on the state qualifying bunch last spring, there’s 10 this season.
Add in goalkeeper Davyn McGilvrey back in net plus a handful of sophomores that got plenty of varsity minutes as freshmen, there’s higher expectations. Cuoio, a captain, isn’t shying away from this team’s ceiling.
“Realistically, I think we have a (quarterfinal team),” he said. “As long as we get our heads in the right mind space, we can make it far. Hopefully we can make it to the second round. That is our goal.”
It was a 1-1 match after 40 minutes before the Blazers (1-0) flexed their speed on the wings and up top right away in the second half.
Noah Deligeannis laced a shot past McGilvrey for a 2-1 lead in the 43rd minute and Malik Alawi – after winning a game of rock, paper, scissors with a teammate – buried a free kick into the top left corner to go up two goals in the 47th minute.
“There’s some spots we got to clean up a bit,” Hayes said. “Simple stuff that shouldn’t have happened.”
Stevens was fouled on a counter-attack in the 50th minute and snuck his penalty kick shot into the back of the net after it deflected off Timberline netminder Braylon McAtee. Tumwater struggled to find an equalizer over the last 30 minutes.
And after a free kick by the Blazers, the T-Birds committed a foul in the box and Noel Fernandez fired his penalty kick shot in the 62nd minute for the dagger.
They didn’t bring in a sub until the 70th minute of the second half, a move Hayes called “strategic.”
“I wanted to see what we had as far as endurance,” he added. “How far can they go? See if they can adjust on the fly to a mistake that was made.”
Cuoio nailed a free kick goal in the first half that sent the match deadlocked into the locker room. After the final whistle, he challenged the center backs in the post-match huddle to communicate in the defensive-third.
In all three of the goals allowed in the final 40 minutes, there was very little talking.
“It was not there; we don’t have a leader with Dylan (Salapu) out,” Cuoio said. “We are a very nervous team against these higher 3A/4A teams. We let things play through us.”
After finishing as the EvCo runner-up, Tumwater is seeking to return back to the top of the standings. It still has the lingering taste of the 8-0 loss to top-seeded Sehome in the first round of state.
Even if the start is up-and-down, Hayes doesn’t care so long as the final destination in two months is reached.
“Their goal is to go deep into the state tournament,” Hayes said. “Test these boys and everything is going to start clicking.”
