A year ago, Barry Frick was making the move from being an assistant boys soccer coach for seven seasons at Salisbury High School to taking over the program.

He inherited a team that was just 5-7 in the Colonial League and to make things even more difficult, he lost 10 seniors from that team, which hit the team’s offense especially hard and took away the team’s starting goalie.

Last season’s team finished 3-14 overall and 1-13 in the Colonial League.

The Falcons lost four games by one goal and two more games by just two goals in 2024 as crucial mistakes seemed to come at the worst times.

Coming into this season, Frick lost six more players to graduation, including top scorer Josh Hudak. Still, Frick has optimism for the upcoming season.

Last season, Julian Makhoul had two weeks of soccer experience when he opened the season as the team’s emergency goalie.

It turned out that the sophomore learned the basics of playing in goal quickly but just lacked some of the finer points he needed to stop some goals. With a year of on-the-job training, Makhoul returns as the Falcons’ goalie.

“Julian did a nice job for us last year and I think he learned a lot and really has worked to be a better goalie,” said Frick. “It was a tough situation for him to step into and he embraced the challenge and has been a big part of the team, so I think he’s going to be a key for us this season.”

The 2025 version of Salisbury soccer also features more depth than the team did coming into Frick’s first season.

“We had pretty low numbers last season, but had a better turnout this year and found some good players who will be able to give us some depth that we didn’t have last year,” said Frick. “That hurt us at times when we had to make substitutions. We’ll be in much better shape as far as depth this season than we were a year ago.”

Senior Christian Marinos scored a career-high seven goals as a junior and returns for the Salisbury offense. Fellow seniors Bradley Lopez, Jude Fitzgerald, Efstratios Hiotis, Gerrit Kloosterman, and Nick Kannan return looking to give Salisbury experience.

“We have a good group of seniors, and we are looking to them to really anchor the team and provide leadership this season,” said Frick.

Along with Makhoul, the junior class provides players Jeandy Lantiqua Batista, Edward Ballek, Thomas Pojanowski, Brian Lopez and Kale Leayman.

“We have some very young players who are going to get some time on the field this season as well,” said Frick. “And we are looking forward to seeing them develop because they have worked really hard for us.

“We are going to need them to step up for us this season and we believe that we can count on them to do that.”

Another difference coming into this season is the addition of a fitness program designed by St. Luke’s Hospital. The team started working on a specially designed program last November in preparation for the upcoming season.

“We have them in at least a couple of times per week and they put them through weight lifting, stretching, flexibility, and other aspects of fitness,” said Frick. “We worked very heavily on that and ran a summer league team and over the summer we gathered up as many players who weren’t playing other sports and had fitness workouts at the high school.”

Frick has been impressed with the work that his players have put in as they prepare for the season and believes that it will pay off for them. He also hopes that with more experience and depth, the team can cut down on the costly mistakes that cost it wins last season.