In a crowded California girls soccer landscape, one club is rising above the others in 2011 and that’s the San Diego Surf.

With a combined seven players in our 2011, 2012 and 2013 Players To Watch National Top 100 rankings, Surf possess an incredible talent level across the age groups and it’s shown with their performances in the Elite Clubs National League. Through the weekend of April 3, teams from the club sit in the top five of the U18, U17, and U15 divisions. Surf Director of Coaching Colin Chesters says the results are important, but style of play also matters.

“In this format, everybody wants to be in the final 8 and get into the playoffs so you’ve got to combine your philosophy and your wanting to be pleasing on the eye with how to get results and I think that’s the nature of how soccer goes,” Chesters said. “I think at different times of the season, both these teams will take bad moments, goals against, times where we don’t do things correctly, and try and remember them for this league and these games coming up. I think results in these games are important and the kids are managing the games well.”

According to Coach Chesters, the Surf play a style of soccer that focuses on defending with a passion, being effective going to goal and going forward as quickly as you can, but not so quickly that you give the ball away.

The talented U18 team is loaded, with one standout being goalscoring forward Katie Trees.

“She’s obviously one of the forwards on the team that keeps our team believing that we can win any game because at any second she can get the ball, drop her shoulder, beat two or three players and bash it into the back of the net,” said Chesters. “It keeps your team believing that it’s worth defending hard because we just need to get Katie the ball one time and maybe she can win the game for us.”

Trees may be taking her talents to Duke University next season, but there’s still plenty of talent left in the pipeline for the Surf, no pun intended. The club’s U17 team, currently in 2nd place out of 26 teams in the ECNL Flight A bracket, boasts two defenders among the top ten overall players on our 2012 Players to Watch list in Laura Liedle and Maya Theuer.

“[Maya] is a center back who’s probably the best leader of any group, and the best communicator that I’ve ever had in the club,” said Chesters. “[Laura] is a super talented, Brazilian style left back who’s so confident and comfortable on the ball and hard too. She makes a massive impact on the game from a left back where normally she can have a forward type impact on the game from the left back position.”

With players like Trees, Liedle and Theuer leading them, it looks like Surf will certainly be a program to watch this summer in multiple age groups. Most of the Surf teams have just a few games left as they look to stay at the top of their respective league standings and go to the ECNL National Championships in Aurora, Colorado from July 14-16.