Girls soccer: Oakcrest’s Jenna Sayers got a lot of value from the high school experience

By DAVE O’SULLIVAN Publisher When you are born with the type of talent Jenna Sayers has on the soccer field, it’s easy to be a top-notch goal scorer. Being a leader takes a whole different mindset, and a lot more work. Sayers burst onto the scene as a freshman at Oakcrest and instantly was viewed as the next big star in the Cape-Atlantic League. A dominant player in her early teens on the club scene, Sayers possessed the kind of physical skill with the ball on her foot that makes coaches start dreaming about league championships. But her high school career was less about her scoring prowess than it was about her maturation as a person, and a teammate. Sometimes, elite level soccer players — and Sayers falls into that category as she set the all-time scoring mark at Oakcrest and has committed to play her college ball at Rutgers University — view high school soccer as simply something to do in the fall, a way to stay in shape. Their skill level is so far beyond the average high school player that at times they seem bored with the competition. Sayers, however, craved the kind of bond a player can make with teammates at the high school level. Before her junior year, knowing she had just two more seasons of high school soccer left, Sayers said she made it a point to become the leader she knew coach Jason Hearn needed her to be. “I started to realize how much it meant to me, playing high school soccer. Club is a big deal, but this year I put a lot of focus into high school soccer and it was a great experience,” said Sayers, who scored 58 goals during her career, breaking the old mark of 50 set by current professional golfer Joanna Coe. “I know a lot of girls at the higher levels might not even do high school soccer and focus more on club, but I see now the more focus and time you put into it, the more results you get out of it. I started to realize these are memories and you have to put all you have into it. It’s the only time you are going to spend playing in your hometown, and you want to make it memorable.” “At Oakcrest, she has become the person who has now set the bar. We had Joanna Coe, who set the original career record for goals, and then Jordan Blonsky, who broke Danielle Hagel’s single-season record. And now Jenna has both of those records. That’s something that I don’t see being broken anytime soon because we play such formidable opponents. Those games in the CAL American are so close that it’s hard to accumulate a lot of goals. Jenna finished with 58 goals, and really it was her junior and senior years when she really solidified herself. Her freshman and sophomore years she kind of played more of a midfield role. She was quietly excelling her freshman and sophomore years, and her junior year she just exploded,” Hearn said. “Sometimes you get kids who play at such an elite level with their clubs teams, and when they play at the high school level they may not be happy with what’s going on or it’s just something for them to stay in shape. But that’s not the mentality that I like my girls to have.” Jenna Sayers will leave Oakcrest next spring as the school’s all-time leading scorer in girls soccer, having netted 58 goals during her remarkable career. (Glory Days Magazine photos/Dave O’Sullivan) What separated Sayers throughout her career was her incredible ability to not only create scoring opportunities for herself, but also to finish those shots with accurate strikes on net from just about anywhere on the field. Her record-setting goal, which came in October against Absegami, was a perfect example. She got the ball outside of the box on the left, juked a Braves defender, took a touch to center the ball, then lofted a shot with just the right speed and angle to allow the keeper no shot at stopping it. “When Jenna came in as a freshman she was used to scoring all the time, so there may have been a little bit of frustration,” Hearn said. “You saw a change in her during her junior year that she really wanted to score and stand out. There were games where nothing was happening and she still showed that magic. She would score from impossible angles, from far out. And that’s just Jenna. She’s always had that touch on her shot. It was crazy sometimes. One time she shot from almost the end line and it went in. You’re just like, ‘how did that happen?’ She was able to do that. She’s a goal scorer, and she always has been.” While Sayers scored 58 goals in her career, the lasting impression she will have from her days at Oakcrest will be the friendships she was able to develop, particularly this year. The team had great chemistry and won 10 games in a tough conference before falling on penalty kicks to Manchester in the first round of the playoffs. “It was really cool having the younger girls. Girls like Lindsay Bacanskas would always tell me I was their role model and they wanted to play just like me, and it’s really cool hearing people say things like that. I realized that I wasn’t just playing for myself, but I was playing for a team — and a team that I really liked. I developed a great bond with these girls. I didn’t want to give off the impression that I was cocky or anything like that. You have to be all about the team, but at the same time it’s fun to be flashy sometimes,” Sayers said. “I thought we were going to do really well. We just kept getting better throughout the season, and even though we didn’t go as far as we wanted to, we still played our best every game.” “There was some pressure on her to score all the time because she was such a talent, but once she was able to let go of that pressure we really saw her excel,” Hearn said. “The girls did feed off of her. Even if she wasn’t scoring, she was making things happen and everybody else was able to capture that intensity. If she was having a good game, other players wanted to step up and be a part of it. It was really nice to see the girls come together. All these girls are really close friends. They all hung out, went to pasta parties. And Jenna was the girl who brought the energy to the games. Her laugh is infectious, and it was good to see all the girls were having such a good time on and off the field.” Soon Sayers will be turning her attention to her upcoming college career at Rutgers, but Oakcrest will always hold a special place in her heart, she said, because she made a concentrated effort to be just one of the girls on a daily basis. “I’m going to remember being surrounded by the group of girls I was with. They made it fun, just going out to practice even if we were running tree lines and hills,” Sayers said. “There are friendships I’ve made on the Oakcrest team that are going to last for a long time. It’s cool being able to finish with each other. I’ll still check up on them when I was in college and will come back and see them play when I can.” Contact Dave O’Sullivan: sully@acglorydays.com; on Twitter @GDsullysays [adsense]