For nearly a decade, the boys varsity soccer team couldn’t escape Division 3. Season after season they finished in the middle of the pack, watching other teams advance while they stayed stuck. But this year something changed.

The boys Varsity soccer team moved up from Division 3 last season, finding out merely a day after their final league game.

For 15 years, the team has been led by Coach Jose Castro, who started as an assistant coach in 2006 and became the head coach in 2010. He has pushed the soccer team towards success, but his ultimate goal is to make it to the open division.

“My main goal as a coach is to teach the fundamentals of soccer,” Coach Castro said. “Yes, we always care about winning, but I think through the sport itself, students walk away with the basic fundamentals and the technical skills.”

However, this is a process that has taken years to properly cultivate.

“In the past five years, we didn’t have a culture in terms of preparing students to meet certain expectations,” Coach Castro said. “We started with six students believing in the system and the following year we had ten students believing in the system, then about ten or eleven students who consistently met the commitment and responsibilities on and off. The results of those three years changed the team performance as we changed our routine.”

Captain Leelen Castro, a senior and Coach Castro’s son, agrees that discipline has helped the team improve.

“I think the level of discipline has helped a lot,” Leelen said. “We used to mess around a lot but now we have more discipline and are aiming for something greater, which helps us set our mindset.”

Beyond routine, players on the team have also developed stronger bonds and communication, improving performance on the field.

“We always try to do an annual holiday party where students bring gifts, exchange the gifts and just have a good time and say thank you for what has happened from here until December,” Coach Castro said. “Also, whenever we all want to communicate, we sit down and set a goal, whether it’s to make it to the playoffs or be top three.”

Coach Castro built that culture deliberately.

Throughout his time on the team, starting freshman year, senior Jonathan Aguinon has firsthand witnessed the evolution the team has undergone.

“The first year I joined we were at division three, but I feel like over the years we gained chemistry and created a great bond and felt more comfortable around each other,” Aguinon said. “I feel like those small baby steps helped us.”

Castro also attributes this shift to mindset.

“The development was crazy,” Castro said. “I feel like the whole team are pretty fast learners and once everybody sets their mind to something, they just get it done quickly and I feel like that helped the team a lot.”

Beyond team bonding, Coach Castro has also collaborated with coaches of other sports to train his athletes year round.

“I often speak with the head coach of track and field and cross country and bring players to him so that they develop their skills,” he said. “The first two years were a challenge because there were players who wouldn’t show up, but as time passed there were more players who were committed.”

The team’s climb out of Division 3 took five years of building culture and commitment. Now the program that Coach Castro has built gives future players something to aim for: proof that patient rebuilding works.

“We also ended up winning a lot of games and played against top teams, which helped us get to a higher division,” Leelen said.

This article originally appeared in the Fall 2025 print edition.