By Dave Morrison
OAK HILL — Some of the best soccer Oak Hill’s Victor Garcia has played has been witnessed by just about nobody.
Unless you go by the old football field on Central Avenue on many weekend evenings.
“(My family) owns the Rio (Grande) restaurant and when we close for the weekend we go down to the old football field and play,” Garcia said. “It’s pretty competitive. We have a good time.”
Garcia has certainly benefited from those competitive matches.
But there is more.
There is the fact that he spends summers in his native Mexico playing even more competitive matches with family and friends there.
“It’s a lot rougher there,” he said. “I try to tell them that we have pretty competitive soccer here, too. But you have to understand that over there, soccer is like football and basketball here. It’s the sport everybody loves. Everybody plays. And it’s competitive.”
Again, the benefit is obvious.
In Oak Hill’s 4-3 Class AA-A Region 3 win over James Monroe, Garcia scored his 100th career goal, roughly the equivalent of a high school basketball player scoring 1,500 points.
It just doesn’t happen every day.
“It was a pretty big honor, but I wasn’t really thinking about it much, we just wanted to win,” Garcia said. “The biggest thing is getting to the state tournament. It’s the first time for us and that was a big thing because we’ve played together for a long time.”
The Red Devils face Weir at 6:30 p.m. Friday in a Class AA-A state semifinal at the Carter Family Stadium at the YMCA Youth Soccer Complex in Beckley.
“Victor is a team player,” Oak Hill coach Laura Sedlock said. “He is our leader. He offers constructive criticism to our younger players and is a solid player for us.”
Garcia moved to Oak Hill when he was 3 years old.
Soccer wasn’t his first choice as a sport, though.
“Baseball was my first sport, but I didn’t really like it,” he said. “I went to a couple of practices. But it wasn’t what I wanted to do.”
That very same week, Garcia tried soccer, which happens to be a family tradition. His younger brother plays defense for the Oak Hill soccer team.
“When I first started, I wasn’t very good and our team never won a game,” Garcia said. “I could run, but I wasn’t really good.”
That didn’t last long.
He joined a travel team the next year and pretty soon the goals started coming. In bunches.
And it never stopped on the prep level.
He scored 22 goals as a freshman, 32 as a sophomore, 26 as a junior and this year he has 20.
His production dropped because of nagging ankle and shoulder injuries and he has played midfield on most occasions where he used to be a striker, offering him closer opportunities around the goal.
“Moving to midfield helps me direct the offense and get other people involved and set them up for goals,” Garcia said.
It also took away the constant double teams he saw as a striker.
Garcia intends to keep playing the evening games at the old football field. And going to Mexico for some inspired, competitive play. But he also hopes to play in college, potentially for Concord.
“Wherever Victor goes, he will be successful,” Sedlock said. “He works hard at it.”
— E-mail: demorrison@
register-herald.com
