| Friday, Aug. 5, 2016, TRIB-LIVE
Fox Chapel senior Dixon Veltri, is optimistic that the girls soccer team can duplicate the success of last year’s team.
“We lost to Upper St. Clair in the WPIAL semifinals,” she said. “They went on to win the WPIAL and the PIAA championships, so we lost to a pretty good team. We believe that we’ll be pretty good again, too.”
Veltri also is on the Fox Chapel gymnastics team, the track team and the diving team but she will be concentrating on soccer when she begins college. Recently, she committed to UNC-Wilmington, a Division I school where she will major in business.
“I liked everything about the school,” she said. “Their soccer team is a successful one.”
Last year, the Seahawks finished with a 15-7-1 record and made it to the second round of the NCAA tournament.
This summer, Veltri and fellow Fox Chapel seniors Annamarie Alfery and Deena DeBaldo played on the Beadling Bulldogs U17 club team. The team won the Region 1 championships and followed that up with a third-place finish at the 2016 US Youth Soccer National Championships in Frisco, Texas.
Veltri, who plays midfield, center or forward, has some specific goals for this season.
“I would like to be a good role model and a good team captain,” she said. “We lost a decent amount of seniors from last year, but we feel that we can continue the team’s success. We have some talented freshmen coming up, and we’ll have a lot of good players returning.”
The Foxes will play in Class 4A, Section 3 with Brashear, Penn Hills, Plum, Allderdice and Woodland Hills. Practice begins Aug. 15.
“We will work hard and hopefully make the playoffs again,” Veltri said. “We will have a lot of tough nonsection games, and that will help us in the section and the playoffs.”