Duluth East’s Darby Henderson’s record year ended with state tournament berth
Going into Section 7AA high school boys soccer playoffs, Duluth East senior forward Darby Henderson was on the scoring runs of all scoring runs, posting 12 goals in six consecutive wins for the Greyhounds to cap the regular season.
At 16 goals, Henderson was taking aim at a Greyhounds single-season record of 18 (or at least the most since records began to be kept in 2009).
Then Henderson’s focus changed with a simple request from his coach, Nic Bacigalupo. He moved the scorer from an attacking position at forward to midfielder.
“Darby sees the field very well, is extremely gritty and one of the quickest players around,” Bacigalupo said. “The combination of his vision, toughness and speed make him hard to predict and stop. Darby was a key factor to our success. He was able to create chances and score goals at key times.
“Darby was very coachable, too. We asked him to play on the inside mid during the section championship, which meant less scoring opportunities for him. He did this without question.”
Henderson finished the postseason with just one goal, tying him atop the East record books with Mike Sorenson’s 17-goal season in 2009, but the News Tribune All-Area Player of the Year did accomplish something Sorenson didn’t and that was taking the Greyhounds to the Minnesota Class AA state tournament.
And the Greyhounds did it as underdogs. East upset the top seed, Andover, by a convincing 4-2 margin in the semifinals and then prevailed 2-1 over No. 2 Centennial for the section title. They lost in overtime to No. 1 East Ridge in the state quarterfinals.
Henderson’s lone playoff goal came in the section quarterfinals against Forest Lake.
“It was pretty exciting because I knew Mike Sorenson had the record and he and I talked previously about it. It was pretty fun to go after it and compete with him. He’s a great scorer,” Henderson said. “It was more in the back of my mind, though. It wasn’t the most important thing to me. We were on a run to go to state and that was pretty much what I was thinking about then.”
Henderson, who had 10 goals as a junior, is a year-round soccer player. He goes from the fall high school season into the winter indoor season. Gitchi Gummi Soccer Club practices begin indoors in the spring before moving outdoors and he plays for the club all summer. Then the high schools season begins again in the fall.
He said he tried hockey for a year and was a baseball player, too, until he broke his elbow.
“It was probably my best sport so I stuck with it,” Henderson said about soccer. “My dad would always coach and I’d play with my teammates who were my friends.”
Henderson’s father, Bob, may have been his coach, but it was his sisters - Courtney, who played for Duluth Central, and Caroline, who played for East - who originally got him involved in soccer.
“We always played out in the front yard and we always had scrimmages one-on-one,” Henderson said. “I kind of grew up playing with them and had a competitive edge with them.”
The younger brother hopes to follow in his sister Caroline’s footsteps and play at the college level. She just finished her junior season at Wisconsin-Eau Claire, and he also hopes to play at the NCAA Division III level for St. Scholastica of the UMAC or Augsburg, Hamline or St. Thomas of the Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference.
Cloquet-Carlton’s Kayla Baker scored 20 goals to lead area
Cloquet-Carlton junior forward Kayla Baker couldn’t quite pinpoint the exact reason she jumped from scoring eight goals as a sophomore to scoring a Northland-best 20 this season as a junior for the Lumberjacks high school girls soccer team.
Her coach, Dustin Randall, knew exactly why. He said he saw this coming for some time.
“Kayla has been a special player and has been with me for several years now, with both high school and summer soccer,” Randall said. “She really came on the scene her freshman year scoring several important goals in a section tournament winning run in 2012.
“I have been waiting for this ‘jump.’ ”
And Randall believes Baker isn’t landing from her leap anytime soon. The 2014 season was just the start for Baker, who will have the chance to repeat as News Tribune All-Area Player of the Year as a senior captain.
Randall said Baker has the talent to score 30 goals next fall.
“She is just flat-out faster than anyone else on the field. Along with the physical gifts, Kayla is someone who loves winning and pushes herself when things aren’t going well,” Randall said.
“I’ve known what she can do with the pace she has, but was very pleased this year when she was able to be productive with goals against some high-level teams, not just lower-end competition. I still think that she could polish her game more and improve for next year.”
Baker is much more modest about her success. First, she credits her teammates for getting her the ball at the right place at the right time, every time.
“Anna Fossen, she assisted on almost all of my goals,” Baker said about the junior midfielder who tallied 12 assists. “She always knew how to find me. She had a really good leg. A lot of times she would just kick the ball over the defense and I would just run to it. She was really good at that.”
Baker also credited her coach for letting her play a more offensive style of play. It gave her more of a “striker’s mindset,” she said.
But Randall said there was no change in style or tactics. What Randall did do, though, was put more pressure on Baker to win the ball back from the opposition in the attacking third of the field, he said.
“I really just think that she is seeing the game a little better now and has been able to get scoring chances more consistently,” he said. “Even in games where we are getting pinned back in our end a lot, she can create something out of nowhere.”
Baker doesn’t stick to the pitch year-round. She already has transitioned into hockey season and will follow that up by running sprints in track and field come spring. She said transitioning from soccer to hockey is hard because different muscles are used running compared to skating, but the move from hockey to track is the most difficult.
Ask Baker today what her favorite sport is, and she’ll say hockey. If asked back in October before the Lumberjacks were eliminated in the Section 7A quarterfinals, she would have said soccer.
“I got involved (with soccer) when I was 4 because I lived near Esko at the time and my parents knew the coach,” Baker said. “They needed players and it was a 5 and 6-year-old team. I was just a 4-year-old but they asked my parents if I could play.
“I had a lot of friends in soccer so that kept me with it. I had a lot of good coaching. My parents were always pushing me. They helped me practice. I fell in love with it. They always helped me when I was little, just passing the ball back and forth. They would teach me moves that I could try and do on them.”
