Milestone on Horizon for Huntington Boys’ Soccer

Legions of former Huntington High School boys’ soccer players still follow the Blue Devils and still long for the team to win games and even championships. This is the program’s 66th season.

The Blue Devil boys’ soccer family is a proud group. Current Huntington head coach John Pagano is entering his 26th season in the position. He’s compiled a lifetime record of 229-173-35. A graduate of Berner High School in Massapequa, he went on to play at SUNY Cortland.

Since the program’s first season in 1961, the Blue Devils have gone 587-403-99. The team has played 1,089 games and won 59.2 percent of them.

Huntington needs 13 wins to reach the coveted number of 600 program victories. That would require the Blue Devils to play at a near championship level during the coming season. Anything is possible.

Wade Lange founded the Blue Devil boys’ soccer program in 1961 and it immediately started winning in its very first season. A splendid Huntington athlete himself, Lange pitched a no-hitter as a junior for the Blue Devil baseball team. He graduated with the Class of 1946. His yearbook entry noted that he “likes music and plays a mean trumpet in the band – hates jealous people – going to make his mark in college.”

Lange went on to earn undergraduate and graduate degrees in health and physical education at Cortland State Teachers College, which is today known as SUNY College at Cortland. After serving a stint in the US Army during the Korean War from 1951 to 1953, he was hired to teach in Huntington UFSD effective February 1, 1954.

As a brand new program, there weren’t particularly high expectations for the Blue Devil varsity boys’ soccer team when it took the field for the first time ever in September 1961.

“Entering the season with no experience, the Devil soccer team just wanted to win a few games,” according to the 1962 edition of The Huntingtonian, the high school yearbook. “To the surprise of everyone, however, they won nine, lost three and tied one to take second place in League A-1 competition.”

That first season saw the Blue Devils outscore their league rivals by a 60-25 margin in 12 games. (The 1-0 victory over Lloyd Harbor/Cold Spring Harbor was a non-league game.)

Lange stayed on as coach through 1973, compiling a career mark of 130-55-16 over 13 seasons. He also coached varsity boys’ tennis and JV baseball, taught driver education and served as a class advisor. He taught on the high school and junior high school levels and retired on June 30, 1986.

When Lange stepped down as coach, science teacher George Hiscox took over and over the next 23 years his teams went 204-143-42. Paul Amato became head coach in 1997 and in four seasons recorded a mark of 24-32-6. John Pagano has been the head coach since 2001 and he’s compiled a record of 229-173-35.