In her first three years at the helm of the Fairfield High girls' soccer program, Jackie Suchanek's teams went a combined 3-51 and were winless in 36 division matches.

But in 2010, the Lady Knights started to show improvement as they went from two wins to five, then went 9-5-1 in 2011 and missed the District 3 Class AA playoffs by one win. They finished 21st in the district rankings and the top 20 are selected for the tournament.

The 2012 campaign started extremely well for Fairfield as the Lady Knights were 14-0-1 in their first 15 contests and finished 15-4-1 and 8-1-1 in YAIAA Division III. That was good enough to earn them the ninth seed in the district's Class AA tournament.

Fairfield defeated High Point Baptist, 7-2, in the opening round before seeing its season end with a 2-1 loss to Wyomissing in the quarterfinals.

It was the first time in program history that the Lady Knights qualified for the district tournament and the 15 wins are a school record.

For those reasons, Suchanek has been named the All-Area Coach of the Year. It is the first time she has won the award.

"We were disappointed when we missed the playoffs last year," Suchanek said, "but we knew we had a lot of talent coming back and most of the teams in our division had graduated a lot of their players.

"We started this season well and, about six or seven games in, we started to believe that we could make districts."

Fairfield was buoyed by a high-powered offense that rung up 79 goals

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on the season. Sophomore Lexy Junker, the 2011 All-Area Player of the Year and 2012 first-team selection, paced the team with 20 goals and seven assists. Junior Toni Harbaugh added 18 goals and 11 helpers to earn a first-team selection and junior Katelyn McDonald tallied 12 goals and was named to the second team.

The sixth-year head coach started playing soccer when she was young and played in high school at Cedar Crest before going on to study at Penn State University. While at Penn State, she continued to play, though not for the Lady Lion soccer team, but in the intramural league.

Suchanek teaches health, physical education and driver's education at Fairfield and started her coaching career as an assistant under previous head coach Terry Patterson. She served as an assistant in 2006 before taking over the top position a year later.

She reflected on her first few years on the job and remarked how much the program has improved since then.

"When I first started here, we had to teach some of the girls basic things like dribbling the ball and shooting," she said. "We couldn't work on strategy or corners or really anything.

"We told the girls that were on the bench to watch the players on the other team at their position to learn what they needed to do when they were on the field."

That has changed now.

A healthy feeder program and the help of an experienced coaching staff has helped to mold the team into a competitive unit.

"(Assistant coach) Brion Fitzgerald does a lot of offseason training and weightlifting with the girls," Suchanek said. "(Boys head coach) Clyde McClain has done so much to help with training techniques and strategies and (boys assistant) Mike Yocum watches from the stands and always comes down to tell us if he spots something that he thinks can help."

The program will lose three starters to graduation as Cara Yocum (three goals, four assists), Katie Fitzgerald (one goal, two assists) and McKenzie Plovock (one goal) have all played their final game in the green and white.

Despite girls soccer's shift from a spring sport to fall beginning this year, Suchanek expects most, if not all, of her underclassmen to return in the fall.

"We have eight starters that could be back, and only one of them hasn't told me for sure that she will be back," she said. "The other day, we went to the middle school to see what kind of interest was there and we had eight eighth-graders that said they were planning to come out. So our numbers should be about the same as they were this year."