If you ask head coach Jason Kirkwood about the Wilson girls’ soccer senior class of 2010, he’ll obvioulsy sing their praises, saying, “yeah, they’ve won everything.”  And he wouldn’t be wrong.  This group of nine seniors have won everything.  CIF title.  State title.  Even a National Championship.

However, a more appropriate quote might be, “this team has been through everything.”

It all started when Emily Dillon saw Kaitlin Hellmann at freshman orientation.

“I thought Kaitlin was going to St. Joseph, and then I saw everyone else,” says Dillon.  Since most of the players had gone though local youth leagues together, obviously there was a moment where they looked around and realized what was going on.  A ‘holy molly, we’re gonna be really good’ moment.

“Yeah, that’s pretty much what happened,” says Dillon.

Dillon, Hellmann, Kristyn Benavidez, Brittny Vaughn, Krosby Pabst, Sabrina Gomez, Candace Nicholson, Karli Wiesmann and Miri Gold all graduate this year as the class of 2010, carrying with them four years full of experience.  The ups, and the downs.

As sophomores, they got through the Moore League, the CIF playoffs and the State bracket for a National Championship.

A year later, their season was flipped on it’s head in the final week when a player participated in an unsanctioned weekend league.  The infraction caused the Bruins to forfeit all of their league games and enter the playoffs as the fourth seed from the Moore League.

“I was on my recruiting trip to West Virginia when I got the text.  I just turned my phone off and didn’t want to believe it.  I thought someone was playing a joke,” says Dillon about finding out the news.

A week later Wilson won a wild card game at home, then fell in the first round when they had to travel to see the top seed Los Osos.  Every Bruin asked points to that moment as the driving force behind this season’s effort, and the timing couldn’t be more perfect.

“We were sophomores with a great group of seniors, so we just wanted to enjoy and be in every moment,” says Dillon of their National Championship.  “But I think in the back of our minds we were thinking, ‘oh man, senior year is going to be amazing’.”