The Durango High School boys soccer team started strong and finished strong on Saturday during its season opener at home against Mitchell.
The Demons jumped out to a quick 3-0 lead, but Mitchell made things interesting to start the second half when it cut Durango’s lead to 3-2. Durango, however, answered with five goals in the final 16 minutes to finish on top 8-2 and start its season 1-0.
“We’ll work on putting together a complete game, but I’m super proud of the way we started the season,” said head coach Danny Suits.
Six different Demons scored in the win, led by Charles “Chuck” Gleason with a hat trick.
Owen Carozza helped steer the team’s offense early and assisted Sam Persing with a nice centering pass just over four minutes in.
Gleason then intercepted a pass off the foot of Mitchell’s goalie and calmly buried a shot to put DHS up 2-0.
The Demons kept attacking, but had a few shots miss wide and others saved. Mavrick Rodriguez hit the post with one shot, but he got another chance right away and didn’t miss again, beating the goalie to give DHS a 3-0 advantage.
Mitchell struck in the final few minutes of the first half and then again to open the second half.
“Those two goals made us realize it’s not a sit-back-and-cruise game, we had to actually work for it,” Carozza said.
“That was just a wake-up call that we had to lock in,” Gleason said.
Gleason’s second goal of the game, assisted by Davis Cameron, with 16:03 remaining gave the Demons a little breathing room.
In the final eight minutes, however, DHS found the back of the net four more times.
Mitchell’s goalie made a pair of good saves in one sequence, but the Marauders were unable to clear the ball. The ball then bounced to Gleason and he scored his third goal.
Cameron scored to put DHS up 6-2 with 3:30 left and then Orlando Palacios assisted Clayton Ward to make it 7-2 with 2:17 remaining.
As the final whistle sounded, Dylan Burns scored once more for DHS.
“It feels great to be back in our home stadium, playing with the people we’ve been playing with for four years,” Carozza said.
Carozza is one of 12 seniors on Durango’s roster. Suits is also back at the helm for a second year.
“I think we’re more comfortable with each other, and there’s more trust,” Suits said.
“Going 15-0 (in the regular season last year) really brought is together, and this summer we continued to build,” Gleason said.
The team also has some new players in different roles, but Carozza said their filling those roles as they should.
“We have such a deep team,” Gleason said. “We were really successful last year and lost some big pieces, but we’ve been able to fill those holes.”
In the end, the Demons would like to go further than last season when they were upset by Coronado in the first round of the state playoffs, but the Demons have a lot of soccer to play before then, including back-to-back road contests Sept. 1-2 against Pueblo West and Mead, games against Farmington and Piedra Vista and then its Southwestern League schedule.
“We’ll just take it one game at a time,” Suits said.
