Team Adam was unstoppable, and Oceanside’s U16/18 Boys won their year-end playdowns over the weekend.
The lads in the yellow strips played three games and won them all by shut-out, including round-robin victories over Nanaimo’s Team Portugal and Team Canada.
In the tournament final Sunday afternoon against the Ladysmith Eagles, at Merle Logan artificial turf field, Ian Whibley staked Oceanside to 1-0 lead about 15 minutes in, which is how is how it stood at the half, and Luis Estefan scored in the last minute of play to ice the win. Oceanside keeper Adam Soer was solid in net for his third straight shutout.
“I think the thing that was so amazing about our tournament was our defence played so well — they just played outstanding defensive soccer,” Oceanside coach Cliff Craven said after, pointing to the efforts of his back end of Shane Houtman, Daniel Grant, Willem Kuun, Daniel Prince, Garrett Jolicoeur and Brendan Campbell.”
The weekend was icing on the cake for Team Adam — just rewards for a team that put in a lot of effort and finished the regular season tops in their league at 12-2-1.
“It was a total team effort,” Craven said of the campaign. “Just a great group of kids that played well together and played for each other. The last game against Ladysmith wasn’t an easy game,” he said, adding “Ladysmith played very physical and they actually outplayed us in the second half, but to use a cliche, our guys bent but didn’t break.”
For a few of the kids on the team it was their final game of youth soccer, but looking ahead, Craven waded in on the issue of Harbour City Football Club pulling out of the Nanaimo & District Youth Soccer Association by saying “hopefully there will be more games against Nanaimo in the future.”