As a senior, Erik Clark turned out to be the star of his high school team. That might have been difficult to imagine when he enrolled four years earlier at Wando High School.
He was a good player as a freshman. Not that big or strong, but he worked at his game.
He got better, and in time he got bigger and stronger.
As a senior he was Wando’s MVP, the Class AAA state player of the year and nominated for high school All-America.
“He physically struggled when he first joined the program,” Wando coach Shilo Tisdale told the Charleston Post & Courier when the local newspaper named him its male soccer player of the year.
“He physically struggled. He wasn’t the fastest or biggest. But it was like a blessing in disguise. He had to work hard to keep up. Once he grew, all that work put him over the top.’
Tisdale called Clark “a student of the game”, and said “every part of the game that involves thinking, he’s the best.”
Maybe Clark typifies a lot of players Tisdale had this past season.
The Warriors lost a lot of seniors the previous year, and in a season many thought would be a rebuilding year, the Warriors rolled to 22 straight wins and a #1 national ranking.
Clark was leading the charge. But it all ended suddenly in the second round of the playoffs when Dutch Fork scored a shocking 2-0 upset.
Clark had given his team a 1-0 first-half lead with a goal in the eighth minute. It would be his final high school goal.
He finished the season with 23 goals and 30 assists, but the really important numbers were the team numbers in the years Clark grew from a freshman to a senior.
Wando won an even 100 games in those four years, losing only 13. There was the 2011 state championship and the runnerup year in ’12.
While that loss to Dutch Fork ended his high school career, he has four more seasons ahead as he prepares for preseason practice as a freshman at the College of Charleston where he will play for Coach Ralph Lundy.
“We still had a great season,” Clark said about his senior year at Wando. “It was a huge accomplishment to be ranked #1 in the country for a month and a half. That’s a huge honor. We just couldn’t score in that game.”
That first day of practice four years ago in the dead of winter at Wando High seems so long ago.
Shows you what hard work will do for “a student of the game.”
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