Every year, men’s soccer takes their annual team bonding and performance enhancing trip up to the mountains of Angelus Oaks in Big Bear County. While other teams and programs do team bonding and training all from the comfort of their own schools, our Ylhs Men’s soccer team allows for a more naturalistic approach to be taken to this aging concept of bonding and training. Going up just before the season begins, the goal of this trip is to not only improve the teams endurance and speed, but to bring players closer to not only each other but to the coaching staff and themselves as well.

Perhaps, one of the most inspiring traits to this trip, is the man who runs it all and puts it together. Kino Oaxaca, head soccer coach, makes sure that every year the varsity team and some JV and Frosh Soph players get to make the trip up to Big Bear. From accounting for every student athlete to making up different training methods and drills, Kino brings his love for soccer beyond the soccer field and into the more personal side of each and every athlete.

This trip to Big Bear isn’t just a regular snow trip that involves skiing, snowboarding, or even sledding; However, it is one that accumulates high altitude running with that of rigorous trials, and endurance tests, to test every athletes abilities and push them to their absolute limits. Along with all the running and continuous incline stretches, that of pushing each other to make it over that hill or to get past that stretch is a more secretive bonding approach that brings the team closer together. Cole Smith (12), one of the varsity captains, describes the trip as one “that is super close to [his] heart, and is a time where [he] can get closer to his teammates that [he] may have not known before the season even started.”

Being there for two days may seem like not a lot of time, but it is just enough to tire every athlete and formulate new bonds and relationships that go beyond surface level with each and every student. All the talks about our family and our story that makes each person who they are, brings forth a more personal and family oriented bond that is now unbreakable. Not just on the soccer field, but in life as well. Ylhs Men’s soccer kicks off their season on November 19, and are hoping for a healthy and successful season for all levels of the program.