Sebastian Kupis is an ASU Cronkite School of Journalism student assigned to cover Mountain Ridge High School for AZPreps365.com 

It has been more than 10 years since Tiger Woods and Nike teamed up to deliver the message that, “Winning takes care of everything.” Weirdly enough, it applies to just about everything, including Mountain Ridge and its girls’ soccer team. 

The soccer team won nine regular season games and a play-in game this season, two feats that have not been accomplished in over 20 years at the school. 

“I know that’s not the way we wanted to finish it, but you guys still did great this season, still hit our goals, and still won a postseason game,” said head coach Ryne Jakubos after their 8-2 playoff loss at Pinnacle High School. 

Culture has been a part of sports for as long as it’s been around, people are focused on creating a comfortable environment that fosters greatness. That sort of culture can be achieved through many successful avenues; the military or a grocery store are two contrasting but viable examples. Feel free to add “Ridge Culture” to the list after what the team did this season. 

“I think the fun environment comes from the girls, I think it’s formed from us knowing that win or lose we’re all still growing. You’re not going to go play the game and hate someone for messing up, you’d rather at least have fun with it,” said senior captain Emily Leon.

Ridge went undefeated on the road this regular season and started off on an eight game winning streak, it should shock nobody to find out neither have been accomplished in a Ridge girls’ soccer season before. 

Coaches and players on the team can attest to the culture of bringing and keeping one another up, and even in a blowout loss the same sentiment could be seen throughout the team. 

“I think coming this far was a good accomplishment, it wasn’t the result we wanted but we were still bringing each other up and weren't too hard on each other,” said senior captain Bella Cavalari. 

Fellow senior captain Cora Cooper echoed the same idea of sticking together, saying, “I really think it comes from bringing each other up in practice, and just taking the time that we have and really doing what we can with it, putting all of our effort in.”

This is Ryne Jakubos’ second full season at Mountain Ridge, now sitting on a career record of 15-7-2 in the regular season, with one play-in win and two playoff losses. The success the team reached this season and the collaborative mindset they were able to instill lends some of its gratitude toward him. 

“We like to keep up the positivity, games like this are hard, we don’t like to get hard on ourselves because we already know we’re struggling, getting down won’t help anyone and I think he (Coach Jakubos) instilled that in us pretty well.”

The team set the playoffs as a goal before the season, and key players like Aryanna and Alyssa Peregrino, Kaylee McInerney, and Bailey Fetter will be returning to take the goal up a notch, and watch out 6A soccer because according to Cavalari, “I’d say this isn’t the last of Ridge.”