Banner night for Bryan Station boys’ soccer includes former player signing with UK
Max Miller only played one season of high school soccer at Bryan Station.
He played for the Defenders as a freshman in 2018, a campaign that saw Bryan Station win its first 42nd District Tournament and make its first trip to the 11th Region Tournament, powered by a young core of players.
But Miller passed up the rest of his high school career for the chance to join the FC Cincinnati Academy and gain daily instruction under the guidance of a Major League Soccer franchise.
Miller has been in the FC Cincinnati Academy since summer 2019, and he played for the academy just last weekend in Chicago, all while still being a Bryan Station student.
But on Monday night, Miller sat beside some of his freshman year teammates from Bryan Station inside the high school’s auditorium as the quartet signed their official letters of intent to play college soccer.
“This is just a day to celebrate,” said Miller, who will be playing at Kentucky. “The thing that sold (UK) for me was they’ve been by my side the entire recruiting process, they really had faith in me … it’s just something about representing my hometown which is really important.”
In 2019 after joining the FC Cincinnati Academy, Miller — then a high school sophomore — told the Herald-Leader it was an easy decision to join the MLS club’s youth setup.
“I’ll improve so much better playing at FC Cincinnati,” Miller said in 2019. “It’s better than I thought. “It’s super professional: top training facilities, top everything, top coaching staff.”
Despite only playing at Bryan Station for one year, Miller took time during Monday’s signing ceremony to express gratitude for the school and Bryan Station head coach Manes Preptit.
“Even though I only played here one year, all the students here, all the people are my family,” Miller said. “Station, the people I’ve met here, have really helped mold me and shape me to the way I live my life today.”
“We are a big family. Even if he chooses to go play someplace else, he’s still a part of this family. We have a saying, ‘Once a Defender, always a Defender,’” added Preptit about Miller’s path to college soccer.
Miller, who has been committed to Kentucky for about a year, said the jump from Bryan Station to the FC Cincinnati Academy has been “worth it 100%.”
“Everything that involves soccer, I’ve learned so much up there: How the game’s supposed to be played, there’s better competition so it pushes me more,” Miller said. “You have to be extremely disciplined to be able to just go up there every day, put your 100% effort in and then come back and still have to maybe do school work and balance family life. The discipline needed to do that has really helped focus me.”
Other Bryan Station signees
Joining Miller in signing their letters of intent to play college soccer on Monday night in the Bryan Station auditorium were Evan Amend, Mario Fuentes and Steven Mahirwe.
Amend — who has played for Preptit since the seventh grade and was a Bryan Station team captain two years in a row — signed to play at The College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio.
Fuentes signed to play at Asbury University in Wilmore, Kentucky.
“He’s just a workhorse, he can play anywhere on the field for us,” Preptit said of Fuentes. “He’s scoring goals as a defender, very versatile player.”
Mahirwe signed to play at Midway University, which only started its men’s soccer program in June 2016.
All four Bryan Station players who signed Monday were freshmen who played varsity on the Bryan Station team that won the school’s first 42nd District Tournament in 2018.
“I don’t think we’ve had more than one or two (players) sign in college in one year,” Preptit said. “But to have all four of them signing, lifting the name of Bryan Station up, is great.”
What have these four players meant to Preptit and the Bryan Station program?
“We were a team that, we were lucky if we ended the game without a mercy rule. We were getting beat left and right,” said Preptit, who began as Bryan Station head coach with the 2013 season. “These guys came up, they wanted to play, they wanted to compete and they wanted to compete at a high level … We’ve come a long way from a team that everyone wants to play, to now being a team that people dread playing for all the right reasons.”
