At halftime of the Long Island Championship game against Mattituck, the Wheatley Wildcats soccer team was on unfamiliar ground, losing 2-0.
Sophomore goalkeeper Eric Orologio and his teammates were feeling a bit stunned, but they knew they weren’t out of the match yet.
“I was in disbelief. We were the better team,” Orologio recalled. “I knew in my heart we were going to come back.”
Before the half ended, team captain Jake Butwin was already thinking about how to lead Wheatley’s comeback.
“We came out flat. Towards the end of the half, I said to myself ‘I have to take control of this game’,” he said.
Butwin did just that. After leading Wheatley in scoring with 17 goals during the regular season, he didn’t doubt himself or his team’s ability to play a strong second half. Coach Steve Cadet took his star striker aside at halftime and told him to stop passing the ball off, to draw the defense to him and find openings to feed his teammates the ball.
Butwin followed his coach’s direction, registering an assist on his team’s first goal in the second half. Butwin himself scored the tying goal. The Mattituck goalie stopped two breakaway chances by Alex Butwin, Jake’s younger brother. And Orologio just couldn’t stop a nearly perfect shot by a Mattituck striker, and the Wheatley season ended on the short end of a 3-2 score, short of their goal to win a state championship.
But Wheatley compiled an exemplary record, losing only one regular season match, and beating the Carle Place team that topped them by a 2-1 score to capture the county championship in their class C conference before losing to Mattituck.
They had handed a talented Friends Academy team its only loss in a 3-2 thriller with Butwin deftly completing a hat trick. Butwin, on his way to Duke University next year, was named to the All-State team, with a shot at being named an All-American.
“Aside from his skill, he’s just like having another coach on the field,” Cadet said.
Butwin is modest about his talent, crediting his teammates with creating scoring opportunities for him. His brother Alex, a midfielder, was one of his elder brother’s adept supporting cast, recording four assists by feeding his brother the ball.
That was the most efficient method to enable Wheatley to finish, according to the younger Butwin. “I just get him the ball. That’s the easiest way,” Alex said.
He’s hoping to follow his brother to Duke after his senior year at Wheatley.
“It’d be cool,” he said.
Coach Cadet first saw Orologio play on a U-16 Albertson Soccer Academy team before the young goalkeeper started for Wheatley as a freshman, and Cadet had heard about the talented Butwin brothers. The Albertson Academy is a private soccer school that fields teams in a development league that competes with squads of promising players committed to Major League Soccer squads
With seven shutouts in his freshman year and six shutouts in the campaign just completed, Cadet is expecting Orologio to lead a more mature defense next season for a Wheatley team that will have 16 players returning. That includes standout center defender B.J. Shiela, who, along with Orologio, was the backbone of Wheatley’s staunch defense.
“Our goalie will be a year older and we’ll be much stronger on defense next year. He’s the real deal,” Cadet said.
Orologio has the advantage of growing up with a personal coach, his father Ottadio, who played in Italy in his younger days. He still competes in an amateur league today.
Orologio’s older brother Gregory, a defender like his father, helped lead Wheatley to a state title in 2006.
Now the Orologio soccer partriarch focuses on his 16-year-old son, who has aspirations of making it to the professional level of play. He said his son always has a good attitude and he encourages him to maintain that, whatever the game result.
“The important thing I tell him after every game is to keep your head up,” the elder Orologio said.
Time will tell whether his son can make that cut, according to Ottadio Orologio, who sees soccer as much more than just a game.
“Soccer is a sport, but it’s a discipline. It’s a way of living,” he said. “If you’re not sloppy and you do it right, it will help you in life with everything else.”
Jake Butwin plans to apply that discipline to his studies at Duke, dismissing any professional soccer aspirations.
Meanwhile, his younger brother Alex, who plays on the same Albertson Academy team with the youngest Orologio, hopes to step up and improve on his record of four goals scored this season. And for that dynamic duo and their teammates, they’ll wait ‘til next year, with high expectations.
