Riverside Poly Turned It Around After Loss

It was humiliating, embarrassing and disappointing.

But a 6-1 loss to Irvine Woodbridge on Dec. 11 was far from devastating to the Riverside Poly boys’ soccer team.

The loss marked a turning point for a Poly team that finished the regular season with a 22-3-1 record after a 1-0 victory over Moreno Valley Valley View on Wednesday.

“I took it very personally,” Coach Tom Tilson said of the whipping by Woodbridge. “I was in a depression for a couple of days.... But then I started to think that maybe this was the best thing that could have happened to us because Woodbridge really exposed our weaknesses.

“We had gotten away with a few things up to that point in the season, but that game showed us where we needed to improve.”

Defense was where Poly needed the most improvement.

Tilson, who began the Poly boys’ soccer program 29 years ago, said his team had some solid defenders but they were young and inexperienced.

So he moved three senior offensive players--David Adame, Diego Iriarte and Daniel Bishop--and a versatile sophomore, Alex Pitruzzello, to sweeper, stopper, left fullback and right fullback, respectively.

Poly has not lost in 18 games since, posting a 17-0-1 record while outscoring opponents, 46-4.

“I think it’s worked because we just communicate real well,” said Bishop, a starting left halfback on a Poly team that lost in a shootout to La Puente Nogales in the quarterfinals of the Southern Section Division II playoffs last year. “It wasn’t like the guys who were playing [defense] before were bad players, but there wasn’t a lot of communication between them.”

Iriarte, a four-year varsity player, said he and his teammates figured they’d turned a corner when they won their first nine games after the lineup changes. But the real proof came in a nonleague game Jan. 14 when they beat visiting Santa Margarita, 2-0.

“It was really big to come back from losing to Woodbridge to beating Santa Margarita,” he said. “It let us know that we had made some correct changes.”

Double trouble: Goalkeeper is one position that Tilson and assistant Manuel Rodriguez have not tampered with.

Taylor Neece and Adam Aaron are each talented goalies so they’ve split duties. Neece typically tends goal in the first half of games and Aaron plays in the second.

“We left it up to them about how they wanted to handle things,” Tilson said. “We said one guy could play one game and the other the next, but they liked the idea of splitting halves.”

The set-up might seem unconventional, but Tilson had a two-goalie rotation during the 1993-94 season when Poly won the Southern Section Division III title.

No regrets: Long Beach Millikan’s Southern Section-record league unbeaten streak ended at 53 games Friday in a 3-2 loss to visiting Compton, but Coach Rod Petkovic had no misgivings about sitting out all of his starters so they could be as sound as possible for the start of the Division I playoffs next week.

“We decided to give our players an opportunity to heal,” Petkovic wrote in an e-mail. “And not worry about anything except the welfare of our players.... Win or lose, this is the right decision.”

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John Ortega