Sedona Red Rock High School’s varsity girls’ soccer team will kick off the coming season with seven talented new freshmen but only one available substitution for its anticipated 12-player roster.

Head coach Stephen Hanks said that previously having a number of senior players who graduated in the spring, and the decisions of several players not to return, resulted in a roster composed primarily of freshmen. However, nearly all of the new players have played soccer either in middle school or in youth leagues.

Update: The team’s season is currently in limbo and may be subject to cancellation.

“Three of the seniors, Ariana Benitez, Gabriela Dias Curi and Estefani Cruz, have been named co-captains,” Hanks said. “Angelina Hillyer is assistant captain and Maya Esquer will be freshman captain, a designation I created since there are so many freshmen on the team and [Esquer] exhibits great leadership qualities.”

For the Scorpions’ season opener on Friday, Sept. 1, against the Round Valley Elks at 4 p.m. at SRRHS, the team will be fielding nine players. Eleven players are supposed to be on the field and teams are typically made up of 18 to 20 players to allow for substitutions.

However, two players are currently academically ineligible, and one new recruit, freshman Analeya Martinez, won’t be ready until this week.

“You hope that you can get a couple of goals early and then play defense the rest of the game and run the clock out,” Hanks said, discussing the team’s strategy ahead of the opening game. “In a couple of practices, I could tell who had goalie potential. The two I picked to be goalie, Maya [Esquer] and Angelina [Hillyer], they’re both good in net, they’re tall and they move well. So if we can stop goals, and get a couple of lucky goals … the other team might get cocky and relax. There’s any number of scenarios that I’m hoping [for].”

“I kind of can tell how people are going to shoot and how to tell my defense where to go,” Hillyer said about her new position.

Hanks was optimistic about having a full roster of 12 players for the rest of the season. He said that he decided to go ahead with the opening game against Round Valley because that school only had two wins last year, one of which was against SRRHS, and he felt the team would be competitive against them with only nine players.

The team has been working to recruit additional players with lunchtime announcements in an effort to get a few more students to sign up for bench positions in case of an injury or to be able to substitute players more freely during the game. Hanks said that his goal for the season is to have more wins than last year — which was zero — and that cardio has been a training focus to ready the players for having to play entire games with minimal substitutions.

“What I tell my players [is], ‘All you want them to do is concentrate on improving every time they go out,’” Hanks said. “Whether it’s practice or a game, they don’t have to become stars. They just have to identify what skill they need to improve and work on that and say at the end of practice, ‘You know what? I’m not the star of the team, but I’m better today than I was yesterday.’”

“Girls are still continuing to play throughout the years, even though we haven’t had good seasons in the past,” Cruz said. “But girls keep on coming and I think that’s what matters. That we keep on trying. I’m just excited for the season and I’m glad that we have a coach [and] we have a team because I didn’t think we were going have a team this year.”