For any number of reasons, Drew Yates’s body hurts.
Maybe it’s the fact that the midfielder has played in all of the 86 games the Terrapin men’s soccer team has played in his career. Perhaps it’s because of the offense he’s had to help carry all season. It could be that a mid-game water break has been as rare as a haircut for Yates this year.
Whatever the cause, Yates said the pain’s there. But, somehow, he’s embraced it.
After three long years of reserve duty, Yates is now starting and starring for the No. 6 Terps, who wrap up their regular season tonight against the College of Charleston.
“We’ve always joked, ‘You’re my sculpture, and it’s one chip at a time,'” coach Sasho Cirovski said of his relationship with one of his five seniors.
When Yates came to College Park in 2006, he had a long head of hair and an even longer résumé. At the prep level, he’d done it all. He won two National Championships with his club team and a league title at DeMatha. He was a three-time NSCAA All-American and The Washington Post’s Player of the Year his senior season. He even spent his junior season training with the U.S. Soccer Residency Program in Bradenton, Fla.
For so long, Yates had been free to roam wherever he desired and do whatever he pleased on the field. Under Cirovski, that didn’t happening. There were better players that needed the ball at their feet, and there was a system in place that had just helped the Terps win a National Championship. Yates couldn’t — and wouldn’t — shake up either.
“Growing up, he’d always been better than most of the other players he’d been playing with, so he could do what he wanted,” said defender Kwame Darko, who played club soccer with Yates since middle school. “It made it a little bit more difficult.”
After a freshman season in which he saw time in every match and started four, Yates embarked on what was one of the longest summers of his life. It was his first true preseason in the program, and the work alone — the non-stop conditioning, weightlifting and playing — frustrated Yates.
Then, the season arrived. He played regularly, but the role he’d wanted on the team wasn’t his. After a taxing summer gone unrewarded, practices seemed pointless. The program hadn’t given him what he expected, so Yates wondered why he should buy into it.
“I think some of my assistants wanted to take him in the back and give him a whooping,” Cirovski said. “He wasn’t always the most respectful guy, but not in a really bad way. He was just being Drew.”
Yates acknowledged his struggles.
“It was just tough to fall back into that supporting role again,” Yates said. “I’m like, ‘I worked my ass off all summer, I came in and had a good preseason. I’m playing really well, yet I’m still the first one off the bench. I still can’t break the starting lineup.'”
Over time, he began to understand why he couldn’t. Whenever Yates questioned his supporting role on the team, Cirovski would answer with another question: Are you better than the player in front of you? In Yates’ case, Stephen King and Jeremy Hall were the measuring sticks. King was an All-American in the making. Hall was the reigning ACC Freshman of the Year.
“He wanted to play and have a bigger role on the field,” Cirovski said. “Every time I sat him down and explained why he wasn’t either starting or playing, he would come to the same conclusion as myself.”
Gradually, the role that he had once perceived as a slight to his skills became second nature. Yates embraced his job as the team’s sparkplug off the bench last season, fully aware it might be his best chance to be a part of a championship team.
After a trying sophomore campaign that seemed like it might never end, Yates was finally content on a team whose season he thought might not end in defeat — and eventually didn’t.
“You knew that something special was happening,” Yates said of last year’s National Championship squad. “There was just a feeling that we couldn’t lose. … We all understood that. I definitely saw that.”
This season, Yates has become the face of a midfield depleted by graduation and injuries. He’s second on the team in points, and he and defender Kevin Tangney are the only Terps to have started all 17 games this year.
Ironically, Yates said it’s been a demanding transition to the starting role he has coveted for so long. But it’s all that he wants and has always wanted — even if he didn’t necessarily show it before.
“The light was either on or off,” said Cirovski. “There was no in-between. As his career went on, the light started to flicker more. Now, the light’s on.”
shaffer@umdbk.com
