Benincasa spearheads Jefferson Forest attack

By Ted Allen

Published: March 27, 2008

FOREST — Some might say senior captain Brigid Benincasa has it easy playing center midfielder on Jefferson Forest’s girls soccer team, feeding a trio of forwards — Brittany Gallagher, Taylor Duff and Cameron DeWitt — who netted 65 goals last season, and supported by a defensive line that is constantly alerting her to oncoming attackers.
Perhaps she just makes playing the most demanding role on the field look easy with her smooth moves, fancy footwork and technical skills with the ball.
“It’s a difficult position because you have to be aware of what’s going on in front of you and behind you,” Benincasa said. “But I have an awesome defense that talks to me. They make it a lot easier to play with. They keep my head on straight.”
Playing on Forest’s Bermuda grass field, Benincasa and defensive co-captains Jaime White and Jordan May form a sort of Bermuda Triangle in the back, where many opposing forwards have gotten lost and all but forgotten.
They work together to build the attack from the back, gaining control of the ball and surveying the field for the best outlet lanes.
“Being the center back, I can see the rest of the field, so I always try to make sure I’m helping other players, letting them know ‘Man-on’ and things like that.” White said. “Having played with Brigid for so many years, and Jordan, it’s almost instinct. She knows that I’ll be there to drop for her or Jordan’s there. It just comes so easily.”
The transition up through the midfield to the front line is just as streamline, with Benincasa serving as facilitator.
“She does a lot of the hard work in the midfield, winning the ball, getting into space,” JF coach Stan Golon said. “She’s a good one v. one player and a good distributor of the ball.”
“I’m usually the passer,” added Benincasa, who scored only one goal but added nine assists last spring. “I pass more than I shoot, but people are trying to persuade me to shoot more this year. But I like passing, that’s my game.”
Golon considers Benincasa’s role paramount to the Cavaliers’ success this season.
“Her ability to play laterally will advance our attack in all directions,” he said on the team’s Web site.
The defending Seminole District regular season and tournament champion Cavaliers are as deep and talented as ever, giving Golon plenty of flexibility with his lineup.
“We’re just solid through and through,” White said. “We’ve got a solid defense, we’ve got a solid midfield and we’ve got solid forwards. We’re just so deep that even when we put our subs in, there’s no change.”
She said everyone embraces their roles and works together for the common good, with a common goal in sight.
“Our big thing is teamwork this year and we’re making sure we all play as one,” White said. “That’s showing in our game because our passes are being a lot more fluid, our movement off the ball, we’re just playing more as a team than we have in years, so that’s great to have that sort of teamwork coming through.”
With most of the team playing travel soccer together in the offseason, they have fine-tuned their ball-control and passing abilities and gained a better spatial understanding of where to position themselves.
“We’re trying to do more with movement off the ball because that’s one thing you can always improve on is making sure you’re not static,” White said. “That way, if we keep on improving our fitness, we’re able to move off the ball and that just makes it that much easier to make the ball do the work.”
Whereas Benincasa, a defensive midfielder, likes to keep the ball on the ground, offensive midfielder Shelby Peterson is better at serving up aerial passes into the box to Gallagher, Duff, DeWitt and freshman Chelsea Hayes, who had a hat trick in her first game, a 9-0 win over Heritage.
Benincasa said the offense has added some new wrinkles this season.
“We like to be creative,” she said. “Stan’s been trying to get me to work on my through ball, to split the defenders and have the forwards run onto it — to switch up the attack instead of going always wide, try to go right through the center because that takes their goalie off her guard.”
That creative playmaking derives not only from the midfield, but the front and back as well.
“Our forwards, they criss-cross, they check in, they’re more creative,” Benincasa said. “(And) Jordan (May) always makes spirited runs. She tries to get into the offense a lot.”