The Allegany soccer team has a chance Saturday to achieve something that hasn’t been done in this area in 99 years.
No squad since Barton in 1924 has won every single game on its schedule in a state championship season. Allegany, 18-0 entering the Class 1A title game against Harford Tech, can enter its name among that fabled group with one last triumph at Loyola University.
Barton was a powerhouse soccer program during the golden era of sports, winning three straight state titles from 1923-25 under the tutelage of Benny Artigiani.
From 1920-25, Barton played 80 games and lost just once.
Those teams were powered by the “Four Horsemen,” as they were known then: Ernie, Paul, Karl and Harrison Schramm, a quartet of brothers that brought glory to the small Allegany County school.
The former Schramm, Ernie, is somewhat of an urban legend in the lore of area athletics, making the varsity teams at Barton as a seventh-grader and establishing many early records.
The four-sport athlete set a Western Maryland Interscholastic League scoring mark in basketball in 1925 that stood for 28 years when he tallied 225 points in 10 games.
Some guy named Bob Kirk, also of Barton, finally broke the record.
Schramm was perhaps an even better soccer player, as the Baltimore Evening Sun declared him to be the best center forward in Maryland when he was a junior.
Schramm was such an athlete he moved to Baltimore his senior year to play four sports at Calvert Hall.
After Barton’s 16-0 1924 season, capped by a 3-0 win over Federalsburg for the title (there was just one classification then), the Braves again won every game in 1925 — finishing it off with a 14-0 romp of Easton.
However, Barton played one final game against powerhouse Baltimore Polytechnic, then a private school, to determine who the top team in the state was. The Braves lost, 3-1.
There have been 12 undefeated and untied regular seasons in boys soccer since then, but none have finished the year with a state championship.
Other than Allegany, the only one to advance to the state championship game was George Bishield’s 1989 Mount Savage squad.
Led by midfielder Scott DeHaven and fullback Denny Skidmore, the Indians won their first 15 games before falling to Easton, 1-0, in the title game on a goal in the final minutes.
The state tournament berth was Mount Savage’s fifth in a row. Savage won championships in 1978 (15-2) and 1987 (12-2-2).
Flintstone in 1982, coached by Bob Rinker, and Westmar in 1992, headed by Dave Hobel, both won their first 14 games before being eliminated in the state semifinals.
Six other teams went unbeaten and untied until the region playoffs: 1971 Flintstone (Stoney Jackson, 11-0), 1984 Mount Savage (Bishields, 13-0), 1989 Fort Hill (Chris Carney, 12-0), 2000 Beall (Ray Kiddy, 14-0), 2008 Mountain Ridge (Tim Nightengale, 15-0) and 2014 Mountain Ridge (Nightengale, 15-0).
And two other squads — Central in 1949 and Valley in 1954, both coached by John Meyers — went a perfect 8-0 in an All-WMIL schedule, though there were no playoffs then.
Between 1953 and ‘59, Valley had a 52-game unbeaten streak (42 wins, 10 ties) that was reported at the time to be a national record.
None of Myers’ great soccer teams ended with a championship, however, as state playoffs were discontinued following the 1948 season.
District playoffs for Western Maryland resumed in 1963, and the state postseason was revived in 1969 under the direction of the MPSSAA.
Ebbie Finzel, who won two state championships and 10 WMIL titles at Beall, headed the committee that helped bring back state championships for soccer. Finzel was an All-American soccer player at Penn State in 1934.
There have been three undefeated state champions to come out of this area that had a tie.
Finzel coached Beall to the Class A (now Class 4A) title in 1947 and the Class B (Class 3A) crown in 1948 with matching 11-0-1 records.
Nightengale’s 2004 Beall squad defeated Pocomoke, 1-0, in overtime to cap off an 18-0-1 season. That squad’s 18 wins are tied with the 2011 Mountain Ridge team (which ended 18-1 and won the Class 1A title) and this year’s Allegany squad for the area record in a 19-game season.
Tim Rowan’s Bishop Walsh in 2001 finished 17-0-2, but a loss in qualifying pool play during the Maryland Private School State Tournament prevented it from ending with a second straight state title.
Those round-robin qualifiers were of unofficial game length and didn’t count towards Bishop Walsh’s undefeated record.
Then there’s this year’s Allegany, which has the capability of becoming the first since 1924 to win every last game on its schedule and become a state champion.
Blake Geatz’s Campers haven’t just won every game so far this season, they’ve done so in dominant fashion.
They’ve yet to trail and have run through each of their first 18 games — scoring 112 goals and allowing just eight — with the exception of a 2-1 victory over Mountain Ridge on Sept. 19 that required overtime.
There is no greater right of passage for a young coach than besting a Nightengale-coached squad.
Between every iteration of conferences in Western Maryland (WMIL, AMAC, WestMAC), Nightengale has captured the most championships of any boys soccer coach with 15.
Bishields (14), Meyers (12), Finzel (10) and John “Chip” Grindle, of Bruce (eight), are the next closest.
Geatz, who is 32-2-1 in his second season at the helm, captured his first WestMAC title this season.
Allegany has defeated 14 opponents by five goals or more and 17 of 18 by at least two goals — the 3-1 win over the Miners in the region championship and 2-0 defeat of Perryville in the state semifinals were its other closest contests.
Reporting on Allegany routs in person this season has mostly been a pointless exercise. In most games, the Campers methodically construct possessions to build to a shot, and the other team just watches the Campers play with the ball.
How good is this Allegany offense? It’s one of the best ever.
Allegany’s 112 goals are the third most in a single season in area history — with the Calvary teams of 2004 (130) and 2018 (121) being the only squads to score more.
Those teams played 25 and 24 games, respectively. Looking at goals per game, the 2023 Campers are second all time at 6.22 behind only Ray Kiddy’s Beall in 2000, which scored 97 goals in 15 contests (6.47).
Those Mountaineers were paced by Area Player of the Year Neil O’Driscoll, a foreign exchange student from Limerick City, Ireland.
O’Driscoll came to the United States with his family as part of an exchange program with Frostburg State University, and he racked up 26 goals and 15 assists in his lone season in the states.
Beall was also bolstered by the recent consolidation with Mount Savage.
In the WMIL’s existence between 1921-2006, the two schools won 39 out of the possible 85 conference crowns (Beall 21 and Mount Savage 18). The next-closest squads were Bruce (12) and Valley (10).
While there are no Irish footballers on the Campers, there is still plenty of firepower, as three players have double-digit goals and four have double-figures in assists.
Caedon Wallace has tallied 26 goals and 13 assists, Mason Salvadge boasts 15 goals and 16 assists, Liam Mowbray sits at 16 goals and 10 assists, and Jace Patton has 12 assists.
The Cumberland city schools didn’t begin to play soccer until 1977, when Allegany and Bishop Walsh revived its programs.
The Campers hadn’t fielded a team since 1942, and the Spartans had never had one, though LaSalle had a soccer squad until 1928.
When the two teams met in 1977, it was believed to be the first soccer match in the history of Greenway Avenue Stadium. Fort Hill played its maiden season in 1979.
Now, more than four decades later, Allegany has a chance to capture its first soccer championship, and it has a chance to shatter a 99-year-old area record in the process.
Note: Please contact Alex Rychwalski via email at arychwalski@times-news.com if you notice a discrepancy or if a team or record is missing. A glance at area boys soccer history is located on the Scoreboard sections on page B4.