Local 13-year-old Jacki King is learning to ride the whirlwind of change.

After starting on the volleyball A team in her first season playing the sport at West Sedona School, where she had been a student since the first grade, the eighth-grader is now juggling her first year of basketball at Big Park Community School with her first love — soccer.

Between Friday afternoon practices at the Verde Valley School and weekend games and tryouts in Cottonwood, King has found the time to score a goal every game for the coed Verde Valley Venom heading into its 9 a.m. finale Saturday, Nov. 21, in Clarkdale.

“They’ve won games playing down a player and with no substitutes,” said King’s mother, Patti, who helped coach her in volleyball as well as in soccer until she turned 12, when she realized her daughter needed “more sophisticated” coaching. “They’re a feisty little team.”

Jacki King has scored 13 goals in her nine-week American Youth Soccer Organization season, including two hat tricks, or three-goal efforts, to propel the Sedona area’s lone soccer team for players 14 years old and younger.

“They have their own teams in Cottonwood, but Sedona and the Village have to always combine teams,” said Patti King, who assists Joey and Patty Falsetto with coaching Barcelona, the U12 team in West Sedona, which has split a pair of games this fall with Jason Metzger’s U12 team from the Village of Oak Creek. “They’re always short.”

Jacki King gets by with a little help from her six local teammates: Big Park eighth-graders Jaiah Grondin and Joey Johnson, Village of Oak Creek 13-year-olds Tashanae Kristofors and Alena Rescigno and West Sedona School eighth-grader Alfonso Diaz and his cousin, defender Lizbeth Corral-Diaz.

For the full story, please see the Friday, Nov. 20, issue of the Sedona Red Rock News.