Paul VI soccer coaches are happy to be home

Soccer success at Paul VI High School, Haddonfield, is easy to trace if you have a few yearbooks handy.

Prior to the 2020 season, the boys and girls soccer programs were turned over to former standout players, who were anxious to return home and revive their former teams. Homecoming held a new meaning for head coaches Karen Anderson and Bob Stocklin.

“I was honestly actually looking for coaching jobs in and around where I live in Montgomery County,” said Stocklin, a 2010 Paul VI grad who now lives in Glenside, Pennsylvania. “But when the position opened at PVI, I knew this is something I always wanted to go back and take this job. I always wanted to return to coaching, and to be able to do it at my alma mater was just super exciting.”

After starring in both soccer and basketball at Paul VI, Stocklin played soccer for four years at Chestnut Hill College and jumped into coaching immediately as an assistant there while earning his master’s degree from Temple University.

Karen Anderson (Patruno) also went the assistant coaching route, joining the staff at Rutgers University-Camden two years ago after a storied playing career. The 2003 Paul VI grad was an All-Olympic Conference and All-State South performer for the Eagles before continuing her success at Rowan University, playing four seasons and racking up 16 goals and eight assists before competing for the Philadelphia Pirates of the former Women’s Professional Soccer League.

Anderson is now happy to be home coaching at the high school where her playing career blossomed.

“I was extremely happy when I saw there was an opening,” Anderson said. “I talked to my coach at Rutgers and he said to go for it. I’m excited to be back here and I’m excited to lead a good program for the school.”

Both have put the work in during a year that was not easy one to begin building new traditions and strategies. Anderson and Stocklin were both hired as coaches in February and figured they would have normal circumstances to prepare for a normal soccer season for the fall. The year 2020 turned out to be anything but normal as COVID-19 pushed traditional preparations to the wayside.

“I started to have player meetings in the spring and meet guys at school,” Stocklin said. “But within two weeks, it all went virtual. The things we wanted to do for a summer program got completely shoved to the side and it was tough trying to figure out how to evaluate players and see what we have when we can’t even run a scrimmage. It was frustrating, but I always tried to keep the perspective that there’s a lot of people with COVID in quarantines that are dealing with a lot worse than a soccer coach not being able to evaluate some players.”

Anderson had a similar experience on the girls’ side.

“I was hired in February so it was like ‘hey, here’s your first year and you get to deal with COVID on top of it,’ so I learned a lot of new things and it was definitely quite a change,” Anderson said. “Most coaches can go into the next season with some notes on the past, but unfortunately nothing was working because everything had changed. We just had to think outside the box and figure out a way to be creative.”

Anderson took over a successful girls program but was a victim of the schedule makers during the COVID-crazy season. The Eagles bumped up to a schedule most Group 4 teams would struggle with, facing much larger schools like Eastern, Lenape, Rancocas Valley and Washington Township. The team finished a respectable 6-7-1 and were knocked out by eventual sectional champ Holy Cross in the semifinal round of the South West E playoff bracket. The Eagles graduated All-Star selections Abby Lutz and Natalie Schooley, but will return with plenty of talent with juniors Hannah Exley and Sophia Errichetti, along with sophomore Oliva Brocious. Anderson said she’d love for her players to experience the playoff success she remembers as an Eagle.

“I’m hoping we’re able to get back to our state tournament and postseason success so that these girls can have that experience, because I think it’s great for them to remember their high school playing time,” Anderson said.

Prior to this fall, the boys program had struggled in recent years, experiencing just one winning season in the last decade and a half. Stocklin flipped the switch in 2020 with a 9-4 record, including a pair of playoff wins. Although he’ll watch a couple of his main scorers in Anthony Carpinella and Matt Guerrero receive diplomas in the spring, he will have juniors Nick Anselmi and Brad Maslowski and sophomore goalkeeper Jonathan Leary among a talented squad returning next year to continue the momentum. They will return nine starters next season.

“While I think we did a lot of good things as a coaching staff this year, the big difference was the level of talent we had across the program,” Stocklin said. “I think one of the reasons we won a lot more games was we were able to run a lot more players off our bench and that speaks to the quantity of talent we had. So we have a lot of high hopes. We do not expect this to be a one-and-done season.”