OXFORD – Winning a state championship was apparently far less stressful for Lafayette’s players than it was for their coach.
When the Commodores beat South Jones 2-0 in the Class 5A state title game, coach Gene Anderson experienced one overarching feeling: “It was a relief.”
This championship, the program’s first, had been a long time coming. Anderson – the 2024-25 Daily Journal Boys Soccer Coach of the Year – has led Lafayette for 18 seasons, and building it into a winner was a long and arduous process. The Commodores reached the state title match in both 2023 and ’24, only to come up short, but those appearances were major milestones for the program.
But perhaps the biggest sign of how far the Commodores had come was the robust self-confidence possessed by this year’s squad.
“For the guys, I don’t know how much pressure was really on them,” Anderson said, “because every time I would talk to them or somebody else in the school would come and talk to me and said they were talking with the guys, the guys were always like, ‘Oh, we’re winning.’”
When Anderson became head coach at his alma mater, soccer was almost an afterthought. His initial challenge was getting enough bodies to field a varsity team. Three or four years in, Anderson had a large group of seventh graders coming up, and he would work them into varsity games whenever he could – usually after Lafayette had fallen a few goals behind.
By 2014, the Commodores were a contender. They reached the North half title game that season, losing by a goal. They finally reached the state final in 2023 and lost 1-0 to Long Beach. Then last year, Lafayette went back only to fall 2-1 to Florence.
“Last year we all felt like we should’ve won, and that’s all we’ve thought about since last year,” Anderson said. “We should not have lost that game. So this year, it was kind of a relief for me that we won, because the pressure was on. We need to do it this year.”
The Dores were led by veterans like Wesley Kilpatrick and Porter Lindsay, who scored a combined 32 goals on the season. They each scored a goal in the title game.
Players like Kilpatrick and Lindsay dot Lafayette’s roster every year, which is a testament to the work Anderson has put in to develop the program.
“At first it was just getting numbers and getting this to the point where kids wanted to come play, where it was starting to become not necessarily a soccer school, but a thing kids wanted to do,” he said. “You get more and more of them every year, and then finally it got the point where instead of quantity we started looking for quality. Once we were able to do that, we’ve been a lot more successful.”
