After years of losses, North Hills boys finally win conference soccer game

New North Hills boys soccer coach Kyle Boggs has led the Indians to their first WPIAL AAAA victory in four seasons.

On Sept. 5, after losing their first couple of games, North Hills defeated Shaler 4-3, a result that gave many of the North Hills boys their first sweet taste of victory in their high school careers.

“It felt great. It felt amazing. Over the past two years, we didn’t really have the passion that we have this year,” junior captain Owen Mollenauer said. “A lot of the young guys really wanted it so we came out and got the W!”

Coach Boggs said his players seemed to sense a victory was coming.

“Just the first few games, they surprised themselves by how well they played and it showed them that ‘Hey, we can compete in this conference,’” Boggs said. “After that, their eyes were kind of wide open like ‘We can do this.’ They started trusting themselves and each other a little bit more. The boys knew that they could get a win, they just needed to string a full game together and work hard and that’s what they did.”

Boggs is a Detroit area native who came to Pittsburgh to take a job with an environmental consulting company and now works as a project manager for Peoples Natural Gas. He let North Hills athletic director Pat Weber know he was interested in helping the program out just as Weber was wrapping up interviews for a new head soccer coach and everything fell into place.

Boggs was a striker at Adrian College, a Division III school in Michigan, where he witnessed his own coach’s rebuilding of the soccer program.

“I went through something of a similar sort when I was a freshman in college,” Boggs said. “They brought a new coach in for my sophomore year. We lost a lot of players who didn’t want to play for the new coach. So, we were a pretty young team and I was able to watch my coach kind of completely rebuild our program, see what kind of stuff worked for us and get us to a successful position.”

Now Mollenauer says the North Hills boys expect to win more than just one game.

“I think we have a lot left in us and we’re going to keep pushing for every game. No matter who we play, we’re going to give it our all,” he said. “We’ll get three or four more wins, hopefully.”

Boggs agrees with that assessment.

“We can hang with just about every team that’s in this conference as long as we work hard and play disciplined soccer,” Boggs said. “I think it’s a bright future for these boys as they continue to work and put the time in.”