One of the WHS fall sports season’s most energetic athletes is Lancer Boys Soccer Captain Alex Casper.
As a lifelong soccer player, Casper enjoys being on the same team as a lot of the same people he’s grown up playing with. His fellow captains, Jonathan Dorunda and Ian Rush, have been on his same Waterford recreational teams for as long as he can remember. Casper recalls, “A lot of us have been playing together for a long time, so we already have that team chemisty where we have fun together and we just like playing with each other.”
Casper is well-practiced in his captain position, as well. He was selected as a Junior Captain for last year’s fall season, which was a beneficial learning experience for Casper’s final high school season: “There were only two seniors, and everyone knew there was an opportunity to be a third captain as a junior . . . I stepped up, and people voted for me.”
Having those learning moments as a junior set Casper up for future success. He believes that his most valuable asset as a captain is his “calming presence both on the field and off the field.” Casper also aims to be someone for the younger players to “look to for support both in positive and negative times rather than being someone who . . . gets overly focused on one specific thing and can’t move on.”
Casper has been able to lead a strong and resilient team. He attributes, “No matter what the adversity is or how the game is seeming to go, we’re able to work together and overcome that.” Casper has been proud of the fact that “everyone can go out there and just keep working, even through the difficult times in games.”
After losing Griffin Neal, a top scorer for the Lancers during the 2023 fall season, the boys had to figure out how to make up for his lost goals this season. However, Casper acknowledges that his team has been able to “adapt to that pretty well and overcome it,” leading to their regular season record of 9-3-4.
Casper feels “fully confident with anybody coming off the bench that they will have a beneficial impact in a game,” which has been a valuable asset for his team. “We’ve been putting together pretty consistent results against every team we’re playing, so I think there’s a good chance that we can really take any team.”
As far as his future goes, Casper predicts that he’ll end up playing soccer at the club level for his future college. Once he goes, he hopes that his team will “remember that it’s still just a sport . . . while you need to be competitive . . . it’s still the game that we’ve all loved and played forever, and we wouldn’t still be playing it if we didn’t enjoy it.”
Throughout the season, Lancer Nation has been amping up their soccer spirit and attending the boys’ home games. Casper believes that “when Lancer Nation shows up and we have that support, it really helps us because we have people to play for other than just ourselves.”
As the Lancers finish their postseason, it is more important than ever that next season, they have the support of their friends and their school. Let’s go, Lancer Nation!
