WARREN — Fresh cement is being poured on Common Road, causing headaches for motorists hoping to find easy access to Warren De La Salle High School while the main street in front of it is being reconstructed.
Steps away, the Pilots are gearing up for another season of championship soccer — and in contrast to Common Road, there’s not a lot of rebuilding needed. Thaier Mukhtar’s program seems to be rock-solid already.
The Pilots graduated 10 seniors off last year’s state champion team, but still return a lot of talent.
“Obviously last year was an amazing year. Toward the end of the year we were playing as good as anybody in the state,” Mukhtar said. “At this point compared to last year, we’re ahead of schedule, we really are. Kids are hungry, they want back-to-back, they’re pushing themselves together to try to win a seventh state championship. We’ve got six now, and they’re hungry, they want more.”
Mukhtar was in the stands, taking notes, as the temperatures hit 90 degrees on the first day of De La Salle’s summer soccer camp. The fruits of summer conditioning were already showing, as very few kids appeared run down toward the end of the six-hour session.
“There’s 76 high school kids here, the majority obviously De La Salle, but we’ve got kids from other schools too, trying to prepare for their high school year,” he said. “It’s a lot of fun. It gives us an edge, six hours a day where we can legally work with the kids before August starts, and then we’re off to tryouts.”
About 60 De La Salle students are expected to vie for spots on the school’s varsity or junior varsity, and possibly, a JV-B squad.
“The kids have handled the heat very well. We’ve given them a lot of rest breaks; our coaches know exactly what we’re looking for. I think it’s gone very well,” Mukhtar said. “I’m not always sure that the talent is there, but hopefully our work rate and our mental aptitude is there where we’re champs, and we’re going to play like we’re champs.”
Yes, the Pilots are Division 2 defending state champs, but it’s also safe to say the talent is there for this upcoming season.
While multiple-year all-state players Joshua Ross and Danny Makara are among 10 seniors who graduated last year, forward Andrew Corder and goalkeeper Dominic Baldarotta return for their junior season, already having been all-state twice.
“He was first-team all-state as a freshman, first-team as a sophomore, and now he’s going into his junior year, and in my opinion, he’s a Mr. Soccer candidate. He really is that good,” Mukhtar said of Corder.
And that’s just the first team all-staters who sported purple and gold. Senior midfielder Nikolai Zacharko was a second-team honoree last fall, and senior defender Max Wyszcelski was named to the third team.
“We’ve got a bunch of guys with accolades that are going to be moving up and have had a taste of it, and they know what winning feels like,” the coach said, “and they’ve become great leaders, and won’t be satisfied until they bring their team up.”
“We’re losing a decent amount of seniors (who graduated), but I don’t think it’s going to slow us down one bit,” said team captain Joshua Wilson, a senior who plays center-back. “We’ve got some pretty good seniors, and we’ve also got some pretty good players from JV that are ready to make a big mark. They’ve been getting in the weight room, getting faster, getting more touches on the ball. Some of them are going to get a lot of playing time, and they deserve it, because the off-season is where championships are made, and our guys are ready to step up more than the other teams.”
“It all starts with conditioning and working hard in the summer, so we can get to that moment and not come up short. I think we accomplished that, pretty fair,” said Makara, who is playing with the Vardar soccer club while taking a gap year and chasing a college scholarship.
Both players agree that it was the 2023 season that set the stage for last year’s state title. Two seasons ago, De La Salle reached the state semifinals — falling to Mason on penalty kicks — but got that far without a single senior in their lineup.
“When you make a run to the final four like that and you come up short, it’s not just devastating that you lost the game, but the season’s over. All that work and all those games to get up there are just done,” Wilson said. “You wouldn’t get to go to the state championship unless you buy a ticket. We did not want that to happen again.”
Someone printed out a large picture showing how dejected the team looked after the semi-final loss, and it acted as a motivating factor throughout 2024.
“Once we got to the semi-finals, and had the same team, Mason, we could not lose. It was almost impossible for us to lose,” Wilson said. “We really just pushed through, worked as a brotherhood and brought it home.”
Although the Pilots didn’t win the Catholic League championship last fall — they haven’t for the past four years — they say the tough regular-season slate prepared them for glory at the 2024 state championship, where they beat Grand Rapids Forest Hills Northern, 4-1.
“Obviously we play a hard schedule,” Makara said. “Competing in the Catholic League challenges us as a team as well. I think we did pretty well; we only lost to one team in Michigan and two Catholic League teams. We learned from our losses. I think the mistakes we made in each loss allowed us to develop as the season continued, so that when it comes to playoffs and it matters, we didn’t have those mistakes.”
Toledo St. Francis de Sales, the eventual Catholic League Bishop Division champion, finished atop the competitive Central Division last season with a 5-1-0 mark. But four other schools, De La Salle included, were within two and a half games of the top spot.
Mukhtar expects to be contending for league honors again this fall.
“St. Francis, Catholic Central and us are going to be the top three teams looking to win the Catholic League,” he said. “We had our way a little bit with Catholic Central last year, beating them, and then we beat Brother Rice. We only lost to one Michigan school last year, that was to Notre Dame (Prep, the eventual Division 3 state champ). We beat Oxford, we beat Lake Orion, we beat all the teams we needed to beat.
“One of our goals is to win the Catholic League. I told our guys I’m tired of going to the Catholic League (championship) without being in it.”
Mukhtar, who has completed 36 seasons as a head coach, has the most victories (687) of any head coach in state history, 27 ahead of East Lansing’s Nick Archer, who retired in 2017. And the Pilots are poised to add several more victories this fall.
“What I’ve noticed in my coaching career is that when the kids have high-level success the year before, they’re not coming back satisfied — they’re coming back hungry,” he said. “They love that feeling. Realistically, they start putting a string of seasons together where they’re dominant.”
Wilson said he and his potential teammates are motivated to remain at a high level.
“Yes, we had that experience, with the returning varsity players winning that state championship, but those JV guys — they weren’t on the varsity team. They want that, they’re hungry for that. They’ve said that. And the seniors don’t want to go out with a loss,” he said. “We want to go back-to-back, 100 percent, and we don’t want it to end any other way.
“Watch out for De La Salle. We’ve trained hard and we’re going to play hard.”
