One coach made a triumphant return to the state final four. The other guided his team to a dozen wins for the second consecutive season, this time through considerably bad injury luck.
Longtime Fillmore coach Jamie Mullen won the Doug Burke Award as the Big 30 Boys Soccer Coach of the Year, his second such honor after winning it in 2007. Portville’s Jesse Archer, meanwhile, collected his first Judy Bliven Award for Big 30 Girls Soccer Coach of the Year.
Just looking at the plaque for the Boys Soccer Coach of the Year brings back memories for Mullen. He played for Burke at Houghton College.
“Every time I step on Doug Burke Field at Houghton and every time I see that award,” Mullen said, “it obviously means a great deal to me because he was certainly a soccer father to me and I have great appreciation. In fact I saw him (earlier this month( and thanked him again for the 100th time for getting me involved in soccer and the legacy that he passed on to me. So it’s a big deal.”
The 29th year coach (433-94-41) considered it an honor just to be mentioned alongside some of the Big 30’s top boys soccer coaches, naming Allegany-Limestone’s Jon Luce and Belfast’s Mark Sullivan.
Mullen’s Eagles (19-2-1) returned to the NYSPHSAA Championship, the final four Class D schools in the state, for the first time since 2007, the same year he was last named Big 30 Coach of the Year.
His future is a bit uncertain as he’s set to retire from his teaching job in January. But as for coaching again, he can’t say for sure.
“I think the safest thing to say is that I still enjoy coaching and I haven’t ruled out the possibility of doing it in the future,” he said.
Regardless of what his future holds, the occasion of his team’s latest trip to the state championship and his retirement from teaching has had Mullen in a reflective mood. Mullen, who teaches English and directs musicals, considers himself an educator and a parent more than just a coach, for as important as soccer has been to him.
“My heart is exploding with gratitude to God, to Doug Burke for getting me into soccer in college, to the Fillmore community, to the players that I’ve coached,” he said. “What can I say? Soccer has given me back truly infinitely more than I have ever given it. I started out as a ball boy in Fillmore in fifth grade. I went to school there, I came back, 51 years of my life have been spent at Fillmore Central School. Obviously it’s my home. When I was a starry-eyed fifth grader, I was ballboying for the great 70s teams at Fillmore, which arguably were every bit as good or better than the teams we have today.
“I wanted to be like them. They were my heroes, so the honor of coming back and representing Fillmore Central School, it sounds just incredibly cheesy to say, but it’s been the glory of my life.”
Archer, who recently finished his seventh year as varsity coach, previously worked four years as a JV coach and four years as a modified coach prior to his current role. He said he’s learned from both his varsity girls coaching predecessor and his counterpart with the Portville boys program.
The Panthers started the year 2-2-1, for which Archer cited several factors. They had a number of new starters adjusting to their roles, while some key players including Karly Welty and Ainslie Gardner dealt with injuries in the offseason or during the first weeks of the season. Plus, he credited assistant coach Mark Bossert with suggesting a crucial personnel change, moving sophomore Kendall Artlip from forward to midfield.
“We all need help and to have a guy who kind of reminds you of the things you’re not thinking about or makes suggestions,” Archer said. “He’s the one who suggested we’ve got to try to get her in the midfield just to see. The first time we put her back there, we had another person who could control the ball, slow the game down a bit, see the field. So she maybe sacrificed a bit of the scoring opportunities that we kind of hoped she would get to play the role of helping to control the game for the midfield some more.”
Portville (12-4-2) advanced to the Section 6 Class C semifinals after making the sectional championship last year. Considering Portville’s injuries, including four players missing the entire season due to torn ACLs in other sports, the Panthers exceeded most expectations. The Panthers graduated three key seniors last year, but Archer thinks they helped make this season’s success possible.
“You know, the injuries are one thing,” Archer said, “and yes the kids that were injured really would have seen a lot of minutes and I think we all know it would have been a different team with them. But I would have to say that particularly from last season, the success that we experienced last year, the culture of the program really changed with some of the seniors that we lost last year. So as Carley Williams and Bryn Milne and Hunter DeYoe, as they’re coming up and coming through, we just became a lot more aggressive, a lot more refined, a lot more skilled, a lot more team-first and we just became fighters. We really became fighters.”
But led by Welty, a Big 30 All-Star senior, the Panthers finished above .500 again, only losing to league champion Ellicottville and Olean (once in non-league play) in the regular season.
Archer (68-51-5 career), an art teacher, said the biggest wishes he knew before starting coaching, was just to have more fun with the job.
“I think when I first started to coach, I’m a little younger and I was kind of a competitive kid,” he said. “I played on some pretty good teams when I was younger. I think I used to get a lot more upset and I think it took me a while to kind of navigate that, trying to reach a kid where they are and knowing that everybody, I think it makes sense to treat everybody differently because they’re all different people. There’s a standard that we all have to shoot for as well, but at the same time I think I just learned to kind of have more fun.”
(Sam Wilson, sports editor of the Salamanca Press, can be reached at sports@oleantimesherald.com)
