Four years ago, the Massillon girl’s soccer team was 1-11-0. Their only win came versus an 0-15 St. Thomas Aquinas squad. They were outscored by 78 goals and only managed to put up 14 goals in their 12 matches. In 2025, they won 8 games, the most in program history.
It was not an easy road for the Tigers, although their record has quickly grown better over the last 3 seasons. The squad owes a large part of their success to their coaching staff, who took a team who won 12 games over 6 seasons and turned them into a successful team. Head Coach Tanna Sebrell and Assistant Coach Nicole Herrera’s squad has taken three trips to the tournament with records near or above .500 since the duo took over the team three seasons ago. The 2023 season saw the Tigers qualify after improving their winning percentage from .083 to .423 in a 5-7-1 campaign. The 2024 season was another improvement with a 6-7-1 record. This season, the Tigers went 8-5-4, their best record since the program’s founding in 1995.
Head Coach Tanna Sebrell and Assistant Coach Nicole Herrera know a thing or two about soccer. Coach Sebrell, a biology and anatomy teacher at WHS, has been involved in the sport since high school, where she played at sweeper for Salem. After playing casual soccer in college with a rec league, she became involved in coaching. First on the list was Boardman, where she helped coach club teams. After moving to Massillon, she eventually became involved with the Massillon Youth Sports Association, enrolling her children in the youth soccer program and coaching with Jennifer Fromholtz, director of the Tigers’ youth soccer program. After being hired by the Massillon City Schools as an anatomy instructor, she became an assistant for the varsity soccer squad. After some time away from the program, Coach Sebrell had the opportunity to fill an opening for head coach of the program, where she quickly began to build a brand of increasing success.
Coach Herrera was a founding member of the 1995 girl’s soccer team as well as the 1995 boy’s soccer team. Both of her children, Mateo and Lucy, play soccer for Massillon. Mateo is a record-holding attacking midfielder for the Tiger boy’s soccer who became the program’s single season goals leader this past season. Mateo plays alongside Coach Sebrell’s son Lucas, a senior captain for the boy’s squad. He is also the kicker for the Massillon Tigers football team and is among the top kickers in Tiger football history. Lucy, a freshman who also plays basketball and flag football for Massillon, emerged as a team-leading defender in her first year with the varsity soccer squad. For Coach Herrera, coaching her daughter has been an emotional journey. “Coach Sebrell asked me to join her because she knew my connection to the program, my passion for soccer, and that Lucy was an up and coming player who would need a solid program”, she said. “I was hesitant as the plan was always to hand my kiddos off in high school, but Tanna convinced me that I could help strengthen the program. Lucy has been like a little sister to the team for the past two years, training alongside them and joining the team as statistician. Now that she’s an official member of the team, it’s been surreal.”
A few key players led the Tigers to success this season. Team captain Hanna Nicola, a four-year player for the Massillon squad, led the Tiger offense with 13 goals. Much like her prolific offensive play in basketball, Nicola dominated the offensive side for the Tigers, scoring 36% of the Massillon’s goals on 42 shots while adding 4 assists. Lucy Herrera was the second-leading scorer and top shot-taker for the Tigers with 11 goals on 88 shots. Kynslie Williams, another Tigers basketball star, was an excellent scorer on strategic sets for the Tigers. She held the highest percentage on shots, scoring 6 goals on only 11 shots. Maria Rastetter was the Tigers top assister with 7; she also added 4 goals for Massillon. These four key Tigers also contributed much on the defensive side. The aggressive Herrera led the team with 69 steals. Williams was also a disruptive defender, picking up 51 steals. Nicola also played a key role on the defensive side helping attack in transition and gathering 46 steals. Rastetter balanced out the group at outside back and midfield, gathering 39 steals. Team captain Sofia Dreussi, Shayla Herring, and the keeper combo of Brayli Grant and Janaya Jones helped to form a solid defensive backline. Grant had 87 saves for the Tigers, and Jones picked up 42. These players and several others helped the Tigers achieve their historic 8-win season. Seniors Hannah Nicola, Sofia Dreussi, Lindsey Reyes, Winter Focht, Brayli Grant, and Shayla Herring helped to lead and mentor the 9 freshmen players and 6 new teammates who had never before played soccer. These players and coaches Sebrell and Herrera turned the entire program’s course around, nearly tripling the team’s scoring and lowering the goals allowed by over 65%. An 8th win of the season, fittingly coming in a 9-0 contest versus archrival Canton McKinley, rounded out a historic season that will live long in the memories of the players, coaches, families, and fans that witnessed and participated in it.
Coach Sebrell has high praise for her team leaders. “Hannah [Nicola] and Sophia [Dreussi] have been phenomenal captains that have really been our backbone over these last several years, and they drive themselves, they show up, they push themselves to succeed. As coaches, we want to show you the rewards that come with hard work rather than beat you down for not doing what you need to do– I think doing that has helped those younger girls that are coming onto this team. There are still growing pains and having such a young team can be a challenge. To have a really young team with young talent such as Lucy Herrera and more experienced talent like Sophia and Hannah helps when you have both younger and older girls who have never played before.”
Retaining players is a challenge for the Tigers. “It is incredibly unheard of to have a varsity team that has juniors and seniors walk on for soccer, and we get that all the time,” says Coach Sebrell. Many teams around the Tigers have squads who have played together for years, and players who have played soccer since they were 3 or 4 years old. “That’s not the case for us,” she told me. “It can be incredibly trying for a not only a young player like Lucy that is a freshman, but also to have a player that is as skilled as Lu that has to figure out how to navigate a field of players. These next couple years we’re going to be rebuilding again as we lose multiple seniors including both of our captains. Having those retaining structures in place help us continue on with what we’ve been doing. I think that comes back to the respectability and then us gaining some wins and people saying, ‘Hey, there is stuff going on here.’ These girls are trying, and I think that once you see us in action, you see how hard these girls are working and how physical it is. You’ll see my girls out there that are not willing to come off the field because they are such athletes like Kynslie Williams. She’s out there playing all wrapped up and my keepers are just jumping at the bit to stay in. These girls are tough. Hannah is a beast in whatever she does. They don’t come out–they get knocked down and they get back up and off we go again.”
“The girls understand the high standards before they even put on their cleats. They understand my passion and my sincerity– the upper classmen and the captains come to those meetings and they discuss the expectations. These are the things that you need to do, and we’re going to keep doing them. One of the things that I tell them all the time is that you have to earn a position on the turf. We’re setting cleat marks in that turf for the girls that are coming up after you. This program is bigger than me as a coach. If I can move this mark and get this program moving in the direction with respectability and competitiveness, then I’ve done my job because this program should continue on in that direction after I’m gone. It should continue in that direction after my seniors graduate this year.”
How did the Tigers put up these numbers and swing the goal differential by nearly 90 goals? According to Coach Sebrell, there are several reasons. The first, as she puts it, is an “increase in accountability and expectations.” “Over the past three years,” she says, “we’ve tried to have manageable expectations with very clear accountability standards with a goal in mind. The goal was always to become a respectable team so that we could become a competitive team. I wanted to change the mindset of the team itself and then change people’s perceptions of us in the community– you cannot achieve competitiveness without people respecting the team.” To get to that goal, the girls start the work early by putting time into practice during the summer. When school is back in session, accountability is found both on the field and in the classroom. Coach Sebrell makes sure to check grades every week. If her student-athlete’s grades slip, she takes time out of practice to talk with them. “You are a student first and an athlete second. Are they tardy? Do they have attitude problems in class? They have to turn grades and notes in and I check them every week and I pull the girls aside if they start to slip–that’s accountability. That accountability allows people to respect our program; and while we might not be pulling competitive stats yet, we’re at least gaining the respect of the teachers and the other coaches in the building, and parents, and other kids in the school.” Coach Sebrell makes it clear that she will not budge on her standards. Having a smart and disciplined team has been crucial in aiding the Tigers in their path to improve every season.
Another reason for the Tigers’ success lies in their practices. Highly organized and goal-oriented, these help set the stage for real-time play. The coaching staff and players alike know that they are an underdog. Many players from other communities are playing soccer from the moment they hit grade school or before. Club teams and youth leagues abound and are well funded. In Massillon, programs such as the MYSA are helping to build a foundation, but many Tiger players have little to no experience in the sport when they join the varsity squad– practices are key when it comes to developing a team composed of experienced and inexperienced players, freshmen and seniors. Coach Sebrell elaborated on this process. “We can try to counter this inexperience by making sure that our conditioning is on on point. We make sure that we can get back and forth on the field so we are not having our head between our knees, not able to catch our breath. We spend a lot of time conditioning in the heat because we play in the heat, and we spend a lot of time working on soccer IQ. ‘Where should you be?’ ‘What should you be doing?’ I say that to the girls all the time. That’s part of building that respect–we’re out here busting it. I think that’s where the program is heading.” Goals are set in game play for the Tigers as well. “In the first two years, we just kept decreasing point spreads. That was my goal,” says Coach Sebrell. “Instead of being beat by 10 to 12 points, can we make that margin less than four? We did and kept doing that. And then we’d win a couple games. The second year I coached, we continued to decrease that point spread, and we won some more games. This year, we had the best record that I can find in school records, with very minimal point spreads.” Within this program-best season, Massillon had a couple of landmark games. They had up a 0-0 tie against Hoover, a game that felt like a win versus a Hoover team that is difficult to beat. The 8th win, a 9-0 thumping of McKinley, pushed the Tigers up to a new goal– a season record in wins.
Coach Sebrell recalled a game that defines her team’s spirit– the final game of the 2024 season, a tournament game versus North Royalton. “The first 23 minutes we just got clobbered,” she recalls. “It was ugly. But the girls regrouped. They figured out the fast pace. They saw the weaknesses. They regrouped and they got gritty. We got pulled over at one point and one the refs said, ‘Coach, I’ve seen this team in the past and we thought this would be a bloodbath– that there is some good soccer from your girls.’ To me that’s kind of a big deal– I was really proud of that. It’s that respect. That’s what’s led to us increasing our competitiveness– it doesn’t happen overnight. It takes a while to build that, but I think that we’ve transitioned to a point where the program’s going in a good direction.”
Another important aspect of this stellar season for the Massillon Girl’s Soccer program was community participation, especially late in the season. Key in this community effort were the Massillon students. “Several of our soccer players also help paint the Village Idiots on Fridays and participate in advisory and pep club,” says Coach Herrera. “During our game against McKinley, we turned around to find a huge group of football players, soccer players, Village Idiots, and other students who we called the “Beater Bandits” loudly rooting on the Tigers. It was incredible! The stands were packed with parents and community and then the students were wild on the sidelines. After the McKinley game, our girls were so inspired that they suited up and created their own cheering section for the boys’ win against McKinley. Then on Saturday, we were all floored when a group of Massillon students showed up, all painted for the girls’ game against Fairless. The referees were slightly amused and even Fairless’ athletic director was impressed that our kids would come to an away game to support our girls.” One of the students who stepped up also spoke to me on their efforts to root on the girl’s squad. “Van Hawkins [a junior wide receiver for Massillon] and I came up with the idea when we noticed that various Tiger sports were not receiving the support they deserved,” Massillon sophomore quarterback and punter Rasmus Haines told me. “We decided to gather a couple friends and go show some Tiger pride to various Tiger teams. It was truly an honor to be able to support these teams with my friends!”
“That’s respect,” said Coach Sebrell on the student participation. “Respect has a lot of different faces on it. Students don’t typically show up to the games or for the players that they don’t respect, so the fact that we finally have people in our stands is huge.” It was not only students who showed up. Families, and friends started coming to the games, filling the once empty stands with a substantial crowd. Fans even followed the Tigers on the road. Coach Sebrell told me that this has been a blessing to the program. “The girls get a kick out of it. I know it makes them feel good. I think people don’t understand how disheartening it is to play a game after you’ve worked so hard and look in the stands and see nobody cheering for you. A lot of Tiger programs face that reality, so it has been a blessing. We try to reciprocate that by attending the boys’ soccer games. I think once people see us in action, we get a little bit more attention, and a couple will return to watch more games.”
Within the team, it feels like family. “They all support each other like family,” says Coach Herrera. “I am in awe of what this program has become this year. We fought for years to establish a program and this community has still not fully embraced the sport as the surrounding ones have. I’m astounded by what these girls have accomplished by shear grit and determination. I’m grateful and humbled to see it come full circle with Lucia on the team!” Coach Herrera gives the Tigers’ head coach the credit for the sudden upswing in the program’s success. “Coach Sebrell made this all happen; she initiated the change and has been a driving force for it.” What will the next season bring for this up-and-coming Massillon program? Check out a few games this fall to find out!
Thanks to Nicole Herrera for providing statistics and stories, Rasmus Haines giving the “Beater Bandits” side of the story, Tanna Sebrell for providing her story, and Marlene Kanipe for contributing photos.
awesome. great to learn about their growth