Monomoy Downs Nauset For First Time In Boys Soccer Program History

NORTH EASTHAM – Tate Laramee waited a long time for the night like Monomoy had under the lights on Nauset’s turf Wednesday, Oct. 22.

 Laramee, a junior captain, remembered a game against the Warriors three years ago. He was an eighth grader, and his arm was broken. From the sideline, he watched Nauset — a team the Sharks had never, not once, beaten — chanting in the middle of the field.

“I look at coach, I'm like, ‘I want to be out there so bad,’” Laramee said. “And he just looked at me. He stopped, and he said, ‘You'll get your chance.’”

That chance came Wednesday. Monomoy defeated Nauset 2-1 for the first win against their regional rival in the boys soccer program’s history. All the consecutive losses, built up over more than a decade, came crashing like a wave into a last few minutes of hold-your-breath, hold-the-line defense as the Warriors mounted attack after attack. Finally, the referee called game. The drought was over. 

“Here it is, and I've been waiting for it forever,” Laramee said afterwards. “As a team and just me and my brothers, we've been waiting for this for a long time.”

Laramee’s younger brother Derek, an eighth grader, opened the scoring with 10 minutes left in the first half. He ripped a strike that Nauset freshman goalkeeper Matteo LaRosa pushed away, got the ball back and, from closer range, buried the follow-up shot. 

Nauset equalized just a few minutes into the second half, as senior Felipe Cronin hit a cross from the right to a wide-open Omari Perry, a senior, who finished at the far post. Two minutes later though, Monomoy sophomore Chris Shea used a nice touch to intercept a ball and moved it to junior Ben Hager, who sent it upfield to Laramee. He had just one Nauset defender to outrun. After scoring to put the Sharks back ahead, Laramee trotted to the left corner and jumped at the flag. About 30 minutes remained.

“We knew we had it,” Laramee said. “I brought the boys in after the second goal, after they scored their first, and I was like, ‘Boys, just calm down, relax, we have it.’ That's what we did and executed it perfectly.”

The Warriors had good chances as the match crescendoed into its final segment, what would become the last chapter of the decade-plus period in which Monomoy had never won against Nauset. Sharks sophomore goalkeeper Tyler Layton made a huge save diving into the goalpost. More shots from Nauset followed. On another chance, Layton ran out to the edge of the box and jumped on a ball, corralling it on the ground.

The Warriors called timeout with a little over eight minutes to go. Soon after, with the scoreboard clock ceasing to tick upon hitting the customary five-minute mark, the balance hung on the ref and his wristwatch.

“It was the longest five minutes of the entire game,” Layton said. “I kept looking back, just waiting for that whistle. I was hoping it would blow, but we were able to hold it down.”

Earlier in the season, Monomoy had already checked off a first by drawing with Nauset 2-2 on Sept. 26. That tie acted as a foreboding nick in Nauset’s armor. 

“We just had that passion, and we just wanted to beat them,” Shea said.

Monomoy head coach Keith Clark called Nauset the “gold standard” of teams on Cape Cod. He called his own team a “great bunch of guys” with a “really great culture.”

“Everybody contributed,” he said. “You can see how happy they are. They've been working at this for a long time, and full credit to them.”

In addition to the Laramee brothers and Layton, Clark praised sophomores Juan Pablo Baquero and Jacob Gould on Monomoy’s backline, as well as Shea.

 “The amount of ground he covers is unbelievable, his vision, his ability to be in spaces,” Clark said.

 The win, with all its relevance as a groundbreaker for the boys soccer program, was also something of a rebound performance for the team in their third-to-last match of the regular season. Monomoy, in their previous game, had led 2-0 at Archbishop Williams in Braintree but subsequently allowed four goals in the second half. 

And the end against Nauset generated flashbacks to a 1-1 draw Oct. 4 against undefeated St. John Paul II, in which the Sharks were moments away from the win until a tying shot squeaked just past the goal line at the last second. But Monomoy, with the Division 4 state tournament soon to come, wrote a new story Wednesday.

 “This group is different,” Laramee said. “It's something really special. It's a group of boys that just want to do it for each other.”