On Aug. 6, the Heritage Academy girls soccer team was in the midst of its third straight scoreless half. The Patriots had just been shut out at Washington four days before, and they trailed winless Magnolia Heights 2-0 at home. The alignments head coach Tom Velek had concocted just weren’t working.
By the start of the second half, junior Sarah Curtis, confined to the sidelines with a torn quad, had assumed command of the clipboard upon which Velek had been scheming.
“She just took it,” Velek said with a laugh.
Curtis isn’t sure exactly what moves she made, but her new arrangement fueled a second-half fervor. The Pats tied the match with two goals in the second half. They won it with three more in overtime.
For more than a month and a half afterward, until Curtis’ quad healed for good, she could be found holding a clipboard on the sideline, working right alongside Velek and assistant Jonathan Tuggle.
“I got injured,” she said nonchalantly Monday, a day before scoring the Pats’ only goal in a 4-1 loss to Lamar. “So now I’m the new assistant coach.”
A foray into coaching wasn’t quite what Curtis expected when she went down early in the season with what a muscle pull in her right leg. At first, she didn’t expect to be out too long. She missed four or five matches, felt better enough to play in one match and then tore the muscle for good.
“It started to bleed out, and there was fluid in my knee, so the body had to absorb all that blood,” Curtis said.
Playing was out of the question. Curtis didn’t make her return to the field until Thursday’s game at Columbus Christian. In the interim, she did whatever she could to support her team.
She even made the trip to Senatobia, a five-hour jaunt in all, just to sit on the sidelines. Velek said he appreciated her selflessness — he knows the impact Curtis has been making outside the white lines.
She also provides a different perspective when it comes to the in-game decisions Velek and Tuggle must make. Velek said Curtis provides a “peer” angle to the game. She can tell “if someone’s had a bad day at school,” for instance, or give her input on who does better at a certain position or which players best fit together on the field. Having that knowledge, Velek said, goes beyond what he can glean from the perspective of a coach.
It also helps that Curtis has known her head coach since she was seven. Velek was around when she was playing youth soccer — Curtis said she used to play for Tupelo FC — before leaving the area for a while.
Curtis stepped away from playing soccer for a while, but she enjoyed it too much, and she just couldn’t stay away for good. While she was in ninth grade, she returned during the middle of the season.
Now “Coach Tom” and “Player Curtis,” as Velek jokingly called her in response, are reunited on the pitch for good. Velek’s back in the area and at the helm for the Patriots, and Curtis is back from the pesky quad injury that kept her out for all but five games this season.
It was hard for a soccer devotee like Curtis to stick to the sidelines while rehabbing her leg, but the experience she gained holding the clipboard has stuck with her.
While she’s got a ways to go — her junior season just ended Tuesday, after all — she’s already got plans for the future. Curtis wants to attend Mississippi State, but she’s not planning to play soccer there. In fact, she’s given coaching more consideration.
Curtis has talked to Velek about coming back and helping out with the Patriots once she’s no longer in school, and she’s done some research on other area teams, too. A former coach with Heritage Academy was employed while a student at MSU, and Curtis sees no reason she can’t be the next.
After all, she’s already got the experience.
Theo DeRosa reports on Mississippi State sports for The Dispatch. Follow him on Twitter at @Theo_DeRosa.
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