Another goal for ‘Coach’ from Moody

GREENVILLE

Sitting on the moist grass, Kristen Moody slowly laces up her cleats, adjusts her shin guards and, in one quick motion, reaches for her low-cut Converse and throws them out of the way.

She lets out a soft sigh.

“When [the official] said ‘that’s the game,’ at first I was nervous,” she says, never taking her eyes off the grass. “But I knew coach Dattilio would have faith in me.”

Moody’s penalty-kick goal with no time left to play Monday gave the Riverheads girls soccer program its fifth straight Region B berth. It was also the second time in as many postseasons that Moody scored a memorable goal with Mike Dattilio, the assistant girls soccer coach who passed away late last season, on her mind.

“When I thought about him,” she says, “it really did calm me down.”

Dattilio meant so much to the program, anybody involved with Riverheads girls soccer will tell you. When Holmes Tehrani became head coach five years ago, Dattilio was the segue, the old helping the new.

“He’s what made coach Tehrani the coach that he is,” Moody says.

And on May 19, 2008, he was gone. All that remained was a yellow Christopher Newport cap his wife, Marsha, clutched close to her chest during the postseason, a makeshift memorial strung along the chain-link fence of the pitch and his spirit in the heart of the players.

On Monday, it was a year to the day of his death and Moody found herself, ball placed in front of her and the pitch cleared of players, alone with the Buffalo Gap keeper in a game tied at 1.

Her calming influence was simple, she says, still fidgeting with her cleats. Before taking the kick, she closed her eyes and thought, “You know what, coach,” she says, “you’re here, you have faith in me. I gotta believe in you, too.”

Her shot went to the left, the Bison keeper went that way too.

Not far enough, however.

Last season against Clarke County, the Gladiators were a week to the day past the death of the beloved assistant coach. Moody’s goal in the Region B quarterfinal in 2008 had a lot on the line.

During the Pride’s three previous trips to the regionals, a victory over one of the vaunted Bull Run District teams had always eluded the program. That game was tied at 1 as well, until a picture-perfect Jessica Glover corner kick found the top of the then-sophomore’s head. She hammered it in so hard, you would have missed it by blinking.

“I hit it so hard, it made me dizzy,” she said a year ago. “I saw [the ball] coming and it was like tunnel vision.”

Amid the sea of Riverheads jerseys that tackled Moody after her game-winner in that game was Olivia Damico, who graduated shortly after the win over Clarke.

“I was hard to describe it,” she says of Moody’s Region B goal. “For her to score that goal was perfect. Coach Dattilio meant so much to her.”

Damico was at Monday’s Buffalo Gap game expecting, she admits, the worst. When Moody’s PK rolled into the net, it was hard for her not to run back out onto the pitch and wrap her old teammate in her arms.

“Just seeing that happen again,” she says, “… I was so happy for her.”

Dattilio coached Damico for three-and-a-half years and she “can’t even begin to describe the impact he had on us,” she says.

When the team was done mobbing her Monday, Moody ran into the stands where she found Dattilio’s two daughters, Elizabeth and Laura. She hugged the two and the tears, again, began to flow.

“That’s when I lost it,” Moody says, still staring at the grass. “The first thing I said to Elizabeth was, ‘I wish he were here.’ ”

Damico got emotional as well.

“My eyes watered,” she says. “I’m not much of a crier.”

Moody brushes off all of Monday’s credit with ease. Without Glover’s match-opening goal, she says, her heroics wouldn’t have meant squat.

Without Liz Mahaney playing “the game of her life,” she says, who knows what the score would have been when Jill Jackson was fouled in the box in the waning moments to set up Moody’s freebie.

After the game, Damico and a few other girls went over to visit Marsha at her home. Earlier in the day she sent an e-mail to Tehrani saying she wouldn’t be attending the match.

“She needed the break,” he says, “it’s rough for her.”

Marsha went to the family plot instead of Swoope, Damico says, a place she brings flowers to and, in turn, brings her comfort and ease. A place where she often feels Mike’s presence.

“She told us she didn’t feel him that night,” Damico says.

As her goal rolled into the back of the net, Moody says she immediately thought of the man she still calls “Coach.” She closed her eyes and talked to her mentor in her mind.

“I know, Coach,” she says, “I wouldn’t have been able to do it without you.”

She’s finishes tying the laces on her cleats and wraps the slack up under and back toward the top before cinching them up in a knot.

Never does she look up from the grass.

Never did she doubt where Dattilio was Monday.