Building off a loss in 2025, Caldwell girls soccer won the 2026 championship
Maciej Sliwinski said his Caldwell girls soccer team wasn't built over a couple weeks but instead from year-round training from the time it lost the 2025 state finals to Rocky Mount Academy.
The united effort, coupled with a few key additions, created more depth and collective belief which paid off come playoff time as it captured its second state championship and first in 15 years when the Eagles (13-4) defeated Burlington Christian (14-4-2), 3-1, in the independent 2A title game on May 16 at North Carolina Wesleyan.
"Well, we had a couple new players join the team," said senior defender Stella Streng. "Mikayla (Hulen) is one of them. She is a huge part of getting us as far as we made it and we have also had a young team in the past, so we've been playing together for a long time, so we know how to play together as a team. We get along really well, we have good team chemistry and that is a huge part of being successful in sports, of course.
Streng said the team knew it had a chance for the title and also knew their coach believed in them, and he pushed them toward that goal by going by getting them to reach their full potential. Junior Julia Messick pointed out additional people who contributed to the success.
"We got Mikayla (Hulen), Josie (Crowe) and McKenna (Saunders), so that was very helpful because we had other players come that would deepen our bench a little more because last year, we had pretty much just our starting lineup and then it kind of trailed off a little bit, but this year, we actually had four or five really good players that could sub in and help us a lot," Messick said.
While no title is a guarantee, Stiwinski said, Caldwell felt confident entering the 2026 season because it returned 10 starters and only graduated three seniors from the previous year's state runner-up that finished 12-5.
Many of the players had developed chemistry being young players on the 2024 team that went 7-10. For them, a family-like culture also helped make it easy to gel well with the newcomers without any disruption.
"I think the fact that our school is so small, we already see each other in the halls," Streng said. "Soccer season is in the spring, so we've had a whole semester seeing people around and knowing that they are going to be playing soccer and I think this group is really welcoming to new players and I don't think anybody had a hard time inviting the new players into our team. Everyone meshed really well."
Caldwell began its girls soccer season on March 2, just two days after the school's girls basketball state finals victory on Feb. 28. Six players from the title-winning hoops squad joined up with the soccer team for the opener at Gaston Day that it won 2-0.
Being a 2A program playing against larger schools in the Piedmont Triad Athletic Conference helped the Eagles at playoff time, Streng thinks. They knew what it was like to play hard teams and didn't feel a sense of panic.
"Teams like Calvary (Day) and Forsyth (Country Day), they have players that don't necessarily start the game but they come in and they are just as good as the players that started and they have a lot more depth and a higher number of talented players and so in the state playoffs, we are playing a smaller team or at least they have less talented players, so when their starting lineup gets tired, when they sub in, it is a little bit weaker of a team you are playing against…"
The Eagles had three players named to the independent 2A all-state team in sophomore Kaylie Kocher, who scored a single-season school-record 38 goals, junior Deirdre Derengowski, who was the second-leading scorer with 21 goals and also had nine assists, and freshman Mikayla Hulen, a Covenant School product who was a key addition with her strong fitness and soccer IQ.
"As a defender, I get to see everybody throughout the whole game because I can see the whole field in front of me and she always finds the right passes," said Streng of Hulen. "She always knows where to be when she is defending. I didn't have to stress too much as a center back because I knew she was in front of me and she was always in the right place and always fast, always winning 50-50s, winning tackles. She was just a really reliable player. None of us would ever worry if she had the ball at her feet."
Caldwell received the No. 3 seed in its state playoff bracket, defeating St. Thomas More in the quarterfinals and No. 2 seed Westminster Catawba in the semifinals by identical 6-0 scores. In the finals, the game was tied at one when assistant coach Kent Bighanatti ignited the team with a halftime speech.
" ... His direct quote was ‘We will not lose this game. We are going to win this game' and I think we adjusted slightly how we were going to play, how we played in the midfield," Sliwinski said. "We played with a little bit of a different formation in the second half. I think we were just a little nervous in the first half ... and in the second half just playing more calm and more to our abilities."
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This story was originally published May 24, 2026 at 9:05 PM.