Tracy High’s freshman-sophomore girls soccer program reached a milestone last week with a

6-2 win at Lodi on April 5.

It was the 50th-consecutive San Joaquin Athletic Association win for the Bulldog frosh-soph team.

The girls have won two more games since then and are 12-0 for the season.

Freshman-sophomore coach Phil Kalis said that his team went 9-1 in league in 2007, including a 2-1 loss to Lincoln in the first SJAA game of that year. Since then, his teams have played four 10-0 league seasons in a row.

There have been a few ties and losses in pre-league games in the past five years, but in the eight years Kalis has been coach, he had one team with a perfect season: Last year’s frosh-soph girls went 19-0.

The job of a junior varsity coach is usually to teach the game to inexperienced players, but Kalis said that incoming freshmen who join the high school teams have a big head start.

“We’re blessed with a lot of good competitive teams and youth teams. There are a lot of good feeder systems in Tracy,” he said. “We get girls who are really experienced in soccer. The beginning of the year is just about trying to get them to play together. By the end of the year, we’re working on individual ball skills.”

He added that while many frosh-soph players are skilled enough to be on the varsity team, he and varsity coaches Joe and Nate Perry don’t want to see younger players move up if they’re not going to be prominent varsity players. The junior varsity level, he said, is for players to develop skills that might or might not work well at first.

“The goal for our entire season is just to get better, and winning is a by-product of trying to get better,” he said.

Kalis added that he felt comfortable treating all of his players as equal.

“We really don’t have a second string, because we have such a depth of talent in this town,” he said. “We really are 18, 19 deep, and I can sub them in without being scared. Everybody who comes to practice plays every game. We out-sub teams and out-work teams, and the winning is just a by-product.”