varsity.roanoke.com

PEARISBURG -- The players all but shrug when asked about it. This is how it's always been at Giles, Narrows and Auburn high schools.

No boys' soccer team. No girls' soccer team. Just one team open to both genders.

While fellow Group A schools Radford and Floyd County have started girls' teams in recent years, the pools of potential players and the athletics budgets at Giles, Narrows and Auburn remain too small to have two teams.

For the most part, the players and coaches are unfazed. For them, soccer has always been a coed sport.

"I've always played with boys," said Dara Sevy, a sophomore who plays fullback for Narrows.

Sevy is among eight girls on the 24-player Narrows roster, while Giles has four girls and Auburn has three.

Brittany McElwee of Auburn and Amanda Breeding, Sydney Lindsey and Nikki Kidd of Narrows are the lone starters in the bunch, but several other female players have played well off the bench, their coaches said.

Girls can be equals on the soccer field "if they play within their abilities," said Giles coach Neil Schmidt, who coached both the men's and women's soccer teams at the University of Notre Dame before coming to Giles in 1990.

Schmidt has coached girls nearly every season with the Spartans and has had a handful of standouts, including all-district selection Sarah "Pippi" Miller a few years ago and Kristine Bronnencant last year. But in most cases, he said, a female player is at a strength and speed disadvantage.

"They just have to realize: OK, I can't outrun this guy. The ball moves faster than he can run, too, so I'll just pass," Schmidt said. "When they develop that, then they become just as good a player."

Schmidt, Narrows coach Dennis Kidd and Auburn coach Ty Dobbs said they try to have the same expectations of performance for all their players, regardless of gender.

"They're not girls on the soccer field; they're female soccer players," said Christian Harry, a senior captain at Giles. "Some of the girls we've had on this team will ... beat a lot of guys."

"From the beginning," Narrows senior Phillip Fillinger said, "I've seen that we're a better team with the girls."

Fillinger's younger sister, eighth-grader Lindsey Fillinger, is an up-and-coming talent, Kidd said, although she's too young to play on the team this year. Breeding, Lindsey, Sevy, Nikki Kidd, Kristen Frazier, Caitlin McWilliams, Paige Neely and Jessica Stafford are the eight girls on the Narrows roster.

"I enjoy playing on teams with other people besides girls," Frazier said. "I think it's tougher and you have to be more aggressive."

Annette Devereaux, a sophomore midfielder at Giles, said she was impressed by what she saw from her female counterparts at Narrows and Auburn when the Spartans played them earlier this season. Some, though not all, of the opponents the teams play are also coed.

"They're pretty good. They're tough. And they seem just to be the same way we are," said Devereaux, who counts Katina Boutis, Lindsey Piland and Jessica Midkiff among her Giles teammates. "And it's kind of funny because when you get matched up with a girl in the game, it's a little easier. You're just not used to it."

On occasion, the subject of gender will come up in a game -- Devereaux remembers hearing "You're not going to let a girl beat you to the ball, are you?" from an opponent earlier this season -- but their male teammates are always quick with support.

"They're actually really protective of them," said Dobbs, who has McElwee, Brittany Wickline and Mary Biltz on his team at Auburn. "You can tell on the field. If a girl gets knocked down, they go over and they're the first ones to help them up."

"We're all basically like a little family," said Harry, the Giles captain.

More common, it seems, are episodes like the one Schmidt recalled from a practice more than a decade ago. A male player pulled up from a collision with a female teammate and got deposited on his backside for his troubles. The sideline erupted in laughter, Schmidt said -- not because the player had been knocked down by a girl, but because he had cut her slack and gotten burned.

"There's nothing like 20 other players laughing and whooping and hollering ... to make you realize, hey, they're not going to back down at all," Schmidt said.

That's not to say there aren't some differences. The girls, of course, have their own locker room. And though the teams consider themselves family, it's not like it would be for a single-sex team.

"Here it's just a different kind of close, I guess," Devereaux said. "The girls definitely bond and we have that same girl bonding. We bond with the other guys, just I guess not the same way they bond with each other."

Yet for most of the players, gender issues, if not out of sight, are usually out of mind.

"I'm sure from the outside it would seem more like a boys' team, but altogether it seems like it's not really a boys' team or a girls' team," Piland said of a Giles roster that is 82 percent male. "It's just a team."