As Delaney Gummel begins her final year at Ewing High School, she is a bit nervous about preparing for and selecting a college.
Having soccer to start her senior year is a welcome relief from that stress. It’s an area she’s a lot more comfortable with after already playing three seasons for the Blue Devils girls team.
“I’m definitely excited for that as well,” Gummel said. “I think now going into my senior year, I have a lot more experience with what I’m doing and so I can give the new players a lot of assistance and I like to be someone that they can look up to, which I think is a key part of being a senior on the team. And so I’m excited to make their experience as fun as mine was with the seniors when I was a freshman.”
Gummel is one of five seniors listed on Ewing’s opening roster. They’ll lead a mix of talent and experience for a team that picked up wins over Trenton and Wilberforce School last year. She’s looking forward to being part of the class to set the tone and is a returning captain along with Kennedy Hendrix.
Other seniors expected to play are Adelyn Martinez, goalie Kennedy Tillery-Williams and Jayla Little, a strong player who took off last fall to focus on academics and is back. They’re looking to enjoy their final scholastic season together, which begins Friday, Sept. 4, with a game against Lakewood. They’ll jump into Colonial Valley Conference play Thursday, Sept. 10, against Lawrence High.
“Our class is actually pretty small,” Gummel said. “Our team in general is kind of small, so I would say from my class, the people that I’ve been playing with since I was younger, there’s about four of us. And then there’s a few other people that I think are going to join from other sports that I’ve kind of been like recruiting.”
Gummel has been trying to get more players out for the team from other sports and is optimistic about how it’ll all come together. She’ll be trying to help bring along not just the younger players who have to adjust to the speed and physicality of the high school game, but also help find where some of the inexperienced players can bolster the team.
“A big thing with that is trying to get them used to how to play soccer, because these are all very athletic people but not necessarily directly for soccer, so working with them on positioning and just all coming together as a team kind of with communication and making sure everyone feels comfortable to speak up and speak on the field, which was a big thing for us last year, is kind of big again,” Gummel said. “Making sure everybody’s playing their part and playing their position correctly so that we can all work together. And I think just effort is a big thing we need to work on. So I’m hoping what will be better this season is making sure everybody wants to be out there and wants to be putting in their full effort that they can for us.”
Gummel has been at it since freshman year, and she’s moved around for the Blue Devils. She was up front on a wing as a freshman and scored three goals in her debut high school season. Since then, Ewing has used her farther and farther toward the back to help improve its defense. While her scoring has gone down, she’s helped the team in other ways and has gone from being apprehensive about the move to enjoying her time in the back.
“I feel like I can see the whole field from back there,” she said. “I’m able to give more instruction to the other players from being further back because I can see everything going on and I can get a kind of get a better feel of how to position people and how to give them better direction for the rest of the team. So I think it does help from that aspect.”
Gummel has always been receptive to the coaching she’s gotten in high school. She’s more familiar than anyone on the team with Blue Devils coach Angelina Gummel, who is her cousin. In soccer, it’s felt like the usual coach-player relationship.
“She treats me the same as everybody else,” Delaney said. “It’s not any like favoritism, but I definitely do feel more comfortable with asking her questions or bringing up ideas to her in that sense, because obviously we’re already comfortable with each other. And I feel like some of the time we can understand each other better. Like if she has an idea, I kind of know where she’s coming from, or if she gives me tougher love I know that it’s just coming from her heart and not actual like being mean. I would say big part of that is if she makes jokes or stuff I know she’s just joking and she’s trying to help me be the best that I can be.”
Angelina Gummel has had the unique ability to watch Delaney grow from a young age. She’s seen Delaney mature as a player and a leader and is looking forward to seeing how she helps the Blue Devils in her final season.
“She’s kind of that person in the middle that everyone looks towards,” Angelina said. “She is learning how to be more vocal and kind of coaching on the field as well. She always looks to me and the girls notice it too, but she knows when she does something wrong. She looks to know what she can do to improve upon or she’s like, ‘I know I did that wrong, but this is what I should have done.’ So she recognizes that it could have been fixed and then she tries to fix it for next time. So I always appreciate when a player is able to see something differently and then correct it without having to be told to correct it.”
Angelina Gummel is appreciative of the senior class she’ll have this year. It’s not just her cousin that she’s familiar with.
“These seniors are kind of like my seniors from a few years ago,” Angelina said. “They’ve played together, they started travel together – they were actually my first travel program. So it’s a nice full circle moment to be able to coach them their first year of travel and now their last senior year of soccer.”
Angelina has tried to create a great experience for each of her players. She’s been able to balance preparing them for games with some lighter bonding moments that have contributed to the camaraderie of each group.
“Something that I started to do the last few years is actually just have some fun practices,” she said. “As a coach and as a player, you can kind of see when the team needs a reset. And so sometimes we play kickball as a practice. It’s a great way to communicate, get your sillies out, be able to have a good time and then reset and focus again. They love playing team handball. That’s one of their other ones that they like to do. Again, just focusing on building their team together. One year I did a scavenger hunt for them. They got paired up. It was a great way to have a little competition.”
It’s all part of the memories that the team is making together. Soccer may not continue past this year for Delaney. Her big focus in college will be on studying psychology with hopes of working in mental health with athletes.
“I still want to have sports in my career in some way,” Delaney said. “And I would like to do club sports if that’s available at my college that I end up going to.”
Delaney will be relying on her decade-plus of playing experience as she leads in her final season. She’s developed her game each year and is looking to use her past seasons to guide her now. She’s looking to make the most of her time as part of the oldest class on the team.
“I would say definitely the experience that I have now going into it is the biggest difference because now I know what I’m doing, I know what the practices consist of, I know how to have more time management with soccer in school and balancing both,” Delaney said.
She’s managed a lot of other important experiences along with playing soccer each season. As a freshman, she picked up flag football for the first time. She’s become a standout wide receiver for one of the top teams in the Colonial Valley Conference. She’s looking forward to a final spring of flag now as a veteran of that sport as well.
“My reasoning for getting into that was kind of because when I was younger, my little brother used to play football and me and my dad would have a catch on the side,” she said. “And I always thought it was fun, but obviously regular football was a little too rough for me. So when I found out about flag football my freshman year, I was really excited because that sounded like something I would be very interested in. And it was everything that I was hoping it would be.”
In the winter, Delaney picked up managing the girls basketball team. That gave her another opportunity to talk up soccer and try to bring out some other athletes. She also works with another set of athletes at EHS when she helps with Unified Sports.
“That’s a very important thing to me,” Delaney said. “I also am involved in Unified Gym, and that’s been my favorite class for the past like two years.”
She helped with Special Olympics pickleball last winter and would like to continue that as well. She’ll also have some responsibilities this year as a member of the National Honor Society and Ewing’s peer leadership group. She’ll balance it all with working on the side. Her senior year will begin as it has each year, with soccer season.
“It’s always been kind of a part of my life,” Gummel said. “But I would say the key part about school soccer is definitely the people that I get to do it with. Some of the people I’ve been playing with since I was younger and we were on a team together when we were younger. So it’s really cool that now we started soccer together and now we’re also gonna finish it together. So that’s a really big, key part of it is the people that I’m playing with.”
