Before the 2025 season began, Hough High girls’ soccer goalie Riley Pickels said there were a lot of players on the team worried how things might go.
After three straight 20-win seasons, Hough was basically returning just three starters and was losing three players — Sarah Funderburk, Avery Rush and Kylee Thompson — who had scored 67 of the team’s 136 goals last year.
“I mean, we lost almost our entire starting lineup,” said Pickels, a junior committed to N.C. State. “But (new head coach Mike) Kutcher did a good job with settling all the rumors and he said, ‘I think you’ll be surprised by how well you’ll mesh together.’ He said, ‘If you put in the work, we can be a state championship team.’”
Heading into Tuesday’s game at Mallard Creek, Hough is 18-0-1 and has outscored opponents 114-5. The Huskies have 16 shutouts in 19 games.
“All we did is what we’ve always done,” said Kutcher, a former assistant at Hough. “We just plug people in when we lose folks, but the biggest question in the girls’ minds was, ‘You’re graduating (67 goals and 62 assists) from three players. Like, how do you make that up?’”
Kutcher graduated North Mecklenburg in 1999 and played on a boys’ state championship finalist when he was high school. He was an assistant at Hough when the Huskies’ won the 2014 title, the school’s second girls’ soccer state championship.
Kutcher stayed at Hough as a teacher, but coached girls at North Mecklenburg for seven years, from 2015-22. So he knew, very well, about the tradition that Smith had built at the school.
Smith retired from teaching and coaching after 32 years in March and was the only boys’ and girls’ soccer coach the school ever had. Smith coached in five state championship games since Hough opened 15 years ago, including three straight girls’ finals from 2012-14.
Smith won more than 600 games combined with boys’ and girls’ teams, including more than 500 at Hough, where he won 12 boys’ and 12 girls’ conference titles.
In fact, Smith once coached Kutcher in middle school.
“I knew we couldn’t let tradition die,” Kutcher said. “So I just said, ‘We can get those 75 goals we got from three players last year from 10 players this year.’ I said, ‘We can also give up less goals.’ Last year, we gave up (15). This year, we’ve given up five.”
Pickels has allowed three, but two were on penalty kicks and one was an own-goal.
“She hasn’t given up a legit goal all year,” Kutcher said. “That’s big to have.”
And just as he’d predicted, Hough’s tradition of plugging in the next player is also working.
Sophomore Olivia Miller (17 goals, 12 assists) leads the team in scoring. Miller had 31 goals and 14 assists, mostly on the junior varsity as a freshman last year. Junior Ava Hauser has 12 goals and 16 assists, up from five goals and six assists last year. Freshman Campbell Schmidt has 10 goals and five assists. And senior Elise Larimer, who missed most of last year with shoulder surgery, has 16 goals and 20 assists.
“We’ve been pretty good,” Kutcher said.
Here’s how good.
Hough didn’t as much as trail in a game until it got down by a goal to Ardrey Kell a couple weeks ago with 10 minutes to play. Hauser hit the post with a potential game-tying goal. Everybody got down.
“I said, ‘We’ll get another one,’” Kutcher said.
With two minutes left, Hauser scored to tie the game.
Despite its success, Hough is ranked outside the top 20 in North Carolina. Part of that is the schedule. The Huskies’ conference, the Queen City 3A/4A includes three teams that have seven or fewer goals, total, for the season. So outside of Hopewell (13-5-2, 10-1), most of Hough’s conference games are lopsided.
That’s led Kutcher to find different ways to keep his team focused.
“One of our mottos is, every week, no matter who we play, we want the practices against ourselves to the toughest game we have,” Kutcher said. “We should be our toughest opponents.”
Often, Kutcher said, Huskies’ players will stay after practice for additional work and Kutcher said he pushes them hard to avoid developing bad habits and to keep their focus sharp.
Hough has five regular-season games left, including a game at home against Hopewell May 6 that will decide the league title, but more and more, the Huskies are starting to hone in on a deep playoff run not too many of them were sure was possible back in February.
“I think we can go as far as we want to go as long as we continue to put the work in,” said Pickels, the junior goalie. “We’ve got a few good games coming in and the main thing is really getting your mind right. But I think we’ve got a chance.”