Kearsarge varsity boys soccer coach Couper Gunn has a big task ahead. He’ll lead the 22 best players from NHIAA schools up against Vermont and an old friend turned foe for a day.
On Saturday, New Hampshire and Vermont will field their best boys and girls soccer squads at Hanover High School in the annual Lions Twin State Soccer Cup. For the Granite State, money raised will go to the Lions Sight & Hearing Foundation, which supports projects throughout the New Hampshire. The boys’ match will kick off at 1 p.m., and the girls’ match will start at 4 p.m.
What makes it special for Gunn, though, is facing a Green Mountain State roster led by his good friend Jake Walker. The two coached together at Lightning Soccer Club and have similar styles, he said.
Gunn and Walker are so close in fact that Gunn was a filmmaker at Walker’s wedding.
“I want to beat him as I’m sure he wants to beat me, and I think it’s cool because it definitely adds another layer to it, outside of the whole regional rivalry,” he said.
New Hampshire’s teams are led by a combined staff of every division’s Coach of the Year winner. The head coach is selected on a rotating basis from division to division. This being Division III’s turn, Gunn is at the helm for the boys. He’ll be joined by another local coach on the Granite State staff, Pembroke’s Drou Goff.
Multiple local players were selected among the best and will represent the Granite State on Saturday, too.
On the girls’ side, Bow’s Charlotte Larochelle and Cow-Brown’s Bella Lapierre and Sadie Scruton will join a large squad including some of the top Division I players from New Hampshire. Gunn will lead some local players, Hopkinton’s Finan Murphy, Coe-Brown’s Brady Colgan and Bow’s Ciaran Duffy.
He’s approaching the Lions Cup in a similar way to international football, where you only have a short time to put together a team of players who don’t compete together often and must unify to represent something larger than themselves.
“It’s less so about you know getting into like these very super specific tactics that you spend hours on, and more so about creating a general set of principles that individual players can then have the freedom,” Gunn said.
Similar to his philosophy with Kearsarge, he hopes to give the talent on his squad the opportunity to shine and find spaces in crucial moments. His objective is to instill confidence and beat Vermont.
Many of the players chosen for the Lions Cup compete together at the club level or have faced each other before, even if they play in different divisions. The wealth of talent on the squad will be an opportunity for Gunn to test if his tactical set-ups can hold up at an even higher level.
New Hampshire holds narrow win-loss advantage over Vermont — 21-19-10 for the boys, 20-18-4 for the girls — and he expects the Green Mountain squads to try and address that.
“There’s lots of things that are going to lead to seeing a Vermont team that is going to come out really quick, looking to sort of prove a point,” he said.
