Winona High School has hired new girls and boys soccer coaches, both coming from within the school system.
Matthew Gardner, who is starting his second year at Winona, will replace Mark Austin as the boys soccer coach. Lexie Flowers, who will be in her fifth year teaching in the Winona-Montgomery Consolidated School District, will take over for Mikel Sykes as the girls coach.
Gardner coached junior high boys basketball and was the assistant track coach last year. He previously worked at Grenada High School, where he assisted with boys soccer for seven years and was the cross country coach and assistant volleyball coach for two years. He spent one season at J.Z. George as the head girls volleyball coach.
“I am excited about getting started and getting rolling. We have 21 players on the team, with a large number of them being 10th grade and below,” said Gardner, who attended Cruger-Tchula Academy and Carroll Academy in high school. “With the success of Winona football, I expect the younger players will get an opportunity to step up and get some good work in until the football players can join the rest of us. This is something I am used to dealing with soccer season, so I expect that my young players will come in ready to grind through the first few weeks of the season.
“Coach Austin has done a wonderful job with the team, and I plan to keep that success rolling right out of the gate and build from there. It’s hard to say what playing style we will go with, but in the past we have stressed defensive play. Once we get to work in October, I will see a better picture of our strengths as a team and build off of that to make us as competitive as possible.”
Gardner admits developing schools in the Delta into soccer powers takes time.
“At Grenada, we went from winning one or two games to consistently playing deep in the playoffs and played for North State two of those years,” Gardner added. “Like most schools in the Delta area, soccer is not something they grow up playing, so we wanted athletic people on the team who want to learn. I know it sounds cliché, but we built a family dynamic within the team, and when you have a great group of kids like I have at Winona, I see the same going forward with my first season. I hope to bring this mentality and the will to give everything we have for each other to be successful.
“I truly believe if I can get the players to buy in and trust that we can achieve amazing things, we can build on that by getting the best athletes at Winona to be a part of something fun and achieve anything they set their mind on. If we can work consistently to make this happen, there is no doubt in my mind we can turn Winona into a soccer school that people will know they are in for a dogfight when we are on the schedule.”
Flowers, a graduate of Winona High School, says getting the opportunity to coach is something she has wanted to do for a long time.
“I have dreamed of coaching high school soccer since I became a teacher, but I never pushed the idea because I knew there was already a successful coach for girls soccer,” Flowers said. “I knew the opportunity would arise for me in God’s timing. When the opportunity was given to me last spring, it actually caught me off guard because I didn’t expect it.
“It is pretty special to come back and be able to coach in the same school district /community that helped build me as a soccer player. I grew up playing soccer in the local little league, at Winona High School and at Northwest
