Taylor Bennett has powered Dryden girls into sectionals

Ithaca Journal

DRYDEN – It makes absolutely no sense that a varsity soccer team with one eighth-grader, 11 freshmen and just one senior would have its sights set on the program’s first state championship.
But at 16-0 heading into Saturday’s Section 4 Class B semifinal at top-seeded Seton Catholic Central (12-1), Dryden’s girls’ team is in that exact position.
How can that be, you ask? One name: Taylor Bennett.
One of three Purple Lion juniors, Bennett is the gold standard in the girls’ game in this part of the state — maybe in the entire state. She has pushed this year’s youthful squad to greatness with a combination of consistent goal-scoring and tenacious, fierce defending from her center back position.
The former is nothing new for Bennett, who’s scored 175 goals in a career that started when she was in seventh grade. Last season, as a sophomore, she broke the school’s single-season scoring mark with 43 goals, eclipsing the old record of 34 set three years earlier by Leighann Bennett, her older sister and now a sophomore at Binghamton University.
But the defensive stance is a change for the powerful 5-foot-9 converted striker, who’s benefited from an increased strength training regimen. Her move to the back was born both of necessity, due to the make-up of this year’s young squad, and of thoughts to her soccer future. Taylor is among the top prep soccer players in the nation, and already has caught the eyes of national-team scouts, who see her as a back-line player as her career unfolds.
She has also verbally committed to attending Syracuse University after graduation in 2016, and the coaches there see her as a defender at the Division I level.
“No matter where I put her, she’s effective and she’s a threat,” Coach Janine Bennett, her mother, said earlier this week. “She can produce whatever I need her to produce.”
Never was that more evident than on Sept. 29 in an Interscholastic Athletic Conference match against rival Lansing, the defending Section 4 Class C champion. With about 12 minutes left in a scoreless game, Bennett took the ball from inside her own penalty area and bolted straight up the middle of the field, shrugging off defender after would-be defender before slipping the ball past Bobcats keeper Sarah Gisler.
The 80-yard, highlight-reel goal gave Dryden a 1-0 victory, and wowed everyone in attendance.
“That might have been the best individual goal that I’ve seen in the 10 years that I’ve lived in New York,” said former Lansing girls coach LaMarr Peters, who played at the college and professional levels and runs the Lansing-based WAZA Flo soccer club. “It was an absolute display of power, speed, technique and single-minded focus. She wasn’t going to be stopped. She got halfway through the run, and I knew she was going to score.
“And that’s doing it against a quality team, with a quality goaltender, and she did it like they weren’t even on the field,” Peters said. “It was magical.”
It was one of 24 goals she’s scored this season, down significantly from last year and from her freshman year, when she notched 33. But her strength on defense has made up for her decreased scoring, as Dryden has allowed just four goals all season while scoring a total of 54.
A soccer life
Bennett’s life, and that of her mother, basically revolves around soccer. In fact, high school soccer season is a time when the two can actually take a breath and relax a little.
“High school season is our down time,” said Coach Bennett, an All-American at SUNY Cortland and Division III player of the year in 1990. “Everything happens right after school, we don’t have to travel a lot. If it’s a home game, we’re home by 6, and if it’s away, we’re home by 7:30. But in the offseason, it’s much different.”
If her three-year-old vehicle could talk, it would agree — Janine has already put 160,000 miles on that 2011 Ford Flex, between at least three trips a week to Syracuse for club training sessions and games, and trips up and down the East Coast for tournaments with her National Premier League Region 1 squad.
Even with a seemingly never-ending series of soccer trips, she’s an honor student at Dryden High. It’s all about time management, something most kids don’t seriously deal with until college.
“I struggle with it because I want to just sit down at times and not do anything, but I still have to do my work,” Taylor said. “Keeping myself caught up is tough ... but my mom is a big help with that part. She pushes me, she holds me to higher expectations than most kids my age would be held to, and she treats me like she would if I wasn’t doing all the soccer stuff and was just in school.”
Should the Purple Lions continue to win and find themselves in the state final four, this year at SUNY Cortland, the Bennetts would have little time to rest before embarking on their next soccer journey. That will occur in late November, when she will travel to the rest of her Syracuse Development Academy teammates — and Janine, an assistant coach with the program — to Wilson, N.C., for the 80-team National League showcase tournament.
From there, 32 teams will head to Orlando, Fla., for the Disney Soccer Showcase, with the rest going to Las Vegas for the Players College Showcase.
In between, the Bennetts will be in Boca Raton, Fla., with the Syracuse-based Empire Revolution of the Olympic Development Program for a showcase tournament in front of national-team scouts. Bennett and Dryden teammate Abigail Barr have both played for the Revolution for several years and have traveled to national tournaments the last two summers.
Barr, also a junior, has played with Bennett since they were 4-year-olds in Dryden’s Sertoma league.
“We’re basically like sisters — we love each other, we hate each other, we’re stuck together, basically,” she said. “And she’s going to play D1 (at Syracuse) and I’m really proud of her, she definitely deserves every bit of it.”
Taylor has lots on her soccer plate, with her ultimate goal being a spot on the U.S. National team. It’s not just a pipe dream, according to Peters.
“The sky’s the limit,” he said. “She could be that local story that turns out beyond anybody’s wildest dreams, except for her own. She’s done everything, since she was 13, to be in a position to make a national team,”
For now, Bennett is focused on the tournaments at hand — sectionals, and perhaps states.
“The state championship is my big thing right now,” she said. “That’s the one thing my mom hasn’t gotten as a coach and I’d like get that for her before I graduate.”