Sabedra unloads on coaches for dropping Trojans in poll




Sabedra unloads on coaches for dropping Trojans in poll. PROVIDED/photo

Sabedra unloads on coaches for dropping Trojans in poll. PROVIDED/photo

When the IHSAA boys soccer top 20 coaches poll was released Monday morning, Chesterton had a 5-0 record with 44 goals for and 0 goals against.

As reward for that, the coaches who vote dropped the Trojans from No. 2 in the 3A state poll, their position since the preseason, to No. 3.

Huh?

Very puzzling, although Chesterton coach Lucas Sabedra wasn’t mystified by it. Livid? Yes. At a loss to explain it? Not at all.

“We went down one. You’d think it would be principle that we would be No. 1 after winning a state championship, but that’s the way Indy works against us Northwest Indiana teams,” Sabedra said. “They hate us, and they definitely don’t like me since I’ve come in there and I’ve made a stink about which of my players should be on the all-state team. For instance, Zack Bowser, they didn’t want him to be player of the year last year, so I made a big fuss about it in a meeting.” Sabedra’s lobbying efforts, although not delivered with the smile lobbyists tend to sport, were successful. Bowser was named Mr. Soccer.

“They probably don’t like our school and they don’t respect Northwest Indiana soccer, even though we (the Region) have a team that’s been down there every year,” said Sabedra, whose team emerged from Monday night’s 1-1 tie with No. 10 Penn with a 5-0-1 record. “It’s us or Lake Central that’s been down there, Crown Point.”

Coaches to the south might not like Sabedra, but they showed they respect his coaching ability by naming him coach of the year last season. Then again, to do otherwise would have been to lend major credibility to his argument that the Region is a victim of soccer bias. After all, it was Sabedra’s second state title in his third season as coach of the Trojans.

Sabedra has found a way to turn what he considers to be a slight to his advantage.

“It fuels the anger a little bit. It gives you a reason to kind of stay motivated and when you play them you play with that motivation,” Sabedra said. “When those polls come out, it just makes you angry and you want to win more. You want to get better results for that reason alone.”

Sabedra has not been asked to become one of the coaches with a vote in the poll. If asked, he said he would participate.

“Yeah, I think I should,” he said. “Out of straight ignorance alone I should do it. They’re pretty ignorant about how they do it.”

Sabedra pointed to poll history to back up his case.

“Zionsville won a state championship (in 2019). You better believe they were No. 1 in the preseason poll the next year, even though they lost 13 seniors,” Sabedra said. “Here we have a better team than we had last year, and we have 14 seniors, and yet we’re still not getting the respect that I think we deserve.”

And then to be dropped from No. 2 to No. 3, swapping places with Fisher after starting the season with a 44-0 goal margin? Suspicious minds might suggest that another factor was at play in that maneuver. One-and-a-half days after the release of the poll, Noblesville and Fisher were scheduled to play a match. Nothing hypes a game in sports quite like No. 1 vs. No. 2.

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