HOMETOWN SPORTS · WYANDANCH

Every season has a team that keeps showing up. Wyandanch had five of them.

The girls varsity soccer program at Wyandanch was established in 2021. For five years it practiced, played and lost. Not a close season, not a rebuilding year — no wins at all, which is the kind of streak that stops being a sports fact and turns into something people say to you in the hallway.

On Tuesday, October 6, at home, Wyandanch beat Copiague, 3–1.

All three goals came from one player: junior Kaylee Ibarra.

What makes her account worth reading is how carefully she handled the thing that usually ruins a first win — hope. She told News 12 that after her first goal she could feel the chance sitting there, and that she deliberately refused to let the thought take over. She told her teammates to pretend the score was still 0–0. They played the rest of the game that way, and it held.

Ibarra also said the mockery had been constant, and that it made her want to win more rather than less. That is a harder trick at sixteen than most adults will admit.

Senior Jocelyn Morocho was blunter about where the team’s head had been. She said she never thought they would win, and that she was glad to be proved wrong.

“We didn’t let anyone bring us down,” she told the station.

A first win in a program’s history is not a trophy. Nobody hangs a banner for 3–1 against Copiague on a Tuesday. But a five-year-old program with no wins is a program that is one bad budget season away from quietly not existing — and a team that scores three goals in October comes back in the spring with juniors who know what winning feels like.

Wyandanch has had a year of things arriving. In August the state announced $4.1 million for Wyandanch: $3 million for a one-acre Great Lawn at Wyandanch Rising, with a dog park, playground and community garden, and $1.1 million to renovate the playing fields at Wyandanch Park.

The fields were the smaller number. This week they look like the better buy.

Sources: News 12 Long Island · Office of the Governor, August 7, 2026