Congratulations to PASC 97B
Impressive College-Bound Student Athletes Finish 3rd in the Nation
PASC would like to congratulate our graduating team. The team finished with a #3 national ranking and has an impressive group of college-bound student athletes. The team had two players accepted to play soccer at MIT (one accepted and the second is headed UCSB and not planning to play soccer), one at Carnegie Melon, one at Puget Sound, one at Swarthmore, one at Chapman, one at Foothill, one at Harvard for Sailing, and one at Wash U St. Louis for Basketball. Good luck wherever the journey takes you next. We are proud of each of you.
PASC 97B JourneyPASC 97B Blue started 10 years ago, when the boys were in 3rd grade.
Almost all of the players have been on the team since middle school and 4 have played for 97B Blue since 3rd grade. The team started off strong in elementary school with a bunch of good athletes who loved to play. Tough times hit in middle school when they were smaller than all the other teams and a little too nice and polite. But they continued to play together and improve and at the end of 8th grade they qualified for, and then won US Club Nationals in Boise, Idaho!
By high school they were no longer small, and no longer the nice polite Palo Alto boys.
They started playing in the NPL during its inaugural year and this 2014-2015 NPL season, they placed second by only one point in the top NPL division. This past May, in the semi-finals of Norcal State Cup, they came back from a 2-0 deficit with 4 minutes left in regulation, sent the game to OT and then won in PKs! They had an ability to pull out victories when other teams would have given up. They lost in the State Cup championship game, but everything combined was enough to finish with a #3 national ranking! 97B Blue was a true team – they were better than the sum of their parts. The boys and families all stuck it out through the difficult seasons and always knew that they had something special. The team’s coaches were Ian Drury, Armando Luna, Gregg Olson, John Smith and Drew Hutchins and through it all, a dedicated manager in Carol Mullin.
