CCU soccer player strives to be the best

CONWAY Back in the area of Jamaica where he grew up, Ashton Bennett had earned a certain stature in his community, a certain respect for what he could do with a soccer ball.

It kept him out of trouble, he says. It opened doors for him and provided opportunities he wouldn’t have had otherwise.

And eventually, it led him here -- to Coastal Carolina, to NCAA Division I competition and the next step in a journey he hopes will take him to the professional ranks someday soon.

“Soccer has done so much for me,” Bennett likes to say.

He reiterated that point several times during an interview after practice last Thursday -- a day before leading the upstart nationally-ranked Chanticleers to their ninth straight win while scoring his NCAA-best 16th goal of the season.

Far away from home now, his stature is growing once again. And like the support he left behind in Jamaica, he’s gaining more and more respect with every powerful shot into the back of the net, every heady play around the goal and every win for his new team.

“I came ... striving to be the best,” he says. “I wanted to put my name out there.”

Indeed, he has -- all the while maintaining a healthy dose of perspective, though.

Standing on the field as his teammates headed off after practice last week, Bennett reflected back on the last few years. About wanting to go home after his first week at Cincinnati State Technical and Community College, where he would instead stay for two seasons and turn himself into one of the top scorers in the junior college ranks. And about trying to prove himself yet again this fall at Coastal, where he’s on pace to turn in one of the most productive offensive seasons in program history.

But, of course, to fully tell his story -- and the story of how one of the nation’s leading scorers ended up in Conway -- he must begin all the way back in Clarendon, Jamaica.

A gift

Even now, Bennett is listed at just 5-foot-9 and 162 pounds. He’s never been the biggest or fastest player on the field. But then again, that’s never mattered.

By high school, he was turning heads in his homeland and developing a reputation that would help him get where he is today -- on and off the field.

“I was the smallest kid on the pitch every day,” he recalls. “Every game, there was big players, and I was the skinniest and smallest kid on the field, and I’m the one scoring all the goals. I think it’s just a gift for me to score goals. I’m not the [most skilled] player or the fastest player, but I think my ability is to score. That’s what I believe.”

It would be hard to argue with him.

After tallying 24 goals and 19 assists last season for his junior college team, Bennett has registered a point in 10 of 15 games so far for the Chants while entering the week tied for first among all Division I players with his 16 goals and 37 points.

And back in Jamaica, that kind of talent meant something -- especially to a young kid from an economically-challenged background with various influences around him.

Bennett doesn’t want to paint a bad picture about his home country, but he speaks openly about the area in which he was raised.

“Where I’m from, it’s violent,” Bennett says. “I’m not going to say it’s not. It is. I had a lot of friends who do different stuff or did different stuff, but I [chose] not to. ... My focus was mostly on soccer; not doing anything else. So I [kept] my focus on soccer, I [kept] playing soccer even though there was so much chances for me to go the other way.”

As an example, he tells a story about his brother getting mixed up with a different crowd over issues he doesn’t specify. Nonetheless, the situation permeated through the community, Bennett says, and his natural inclination was to get involved and defend his brother.

“It got so big that the whole community ... it started getting violent. I had to make decisions of moving and going different places,” he says, telling the story. “But because of soccer, I meet a lot of people, a lot of people of power. ... In my community, I was known for soccer. So a lot of people were like, ‘No, it’s his little brother and stuff.’ So everything [got] squashed just because people know me because I’m a good player in soccer and they don’t want anything to happen.

“Like I said, soccer has done so much stuff for me -- it’s unbelievable.”

New challenges

That reputation would also land him an opportunity to come to the United States when Mike Combs -- the head men’s soccer coach at Cincinnati State Technical and Community College -- heard about Bennett from a contact of his in Jamaica.

The coach and player would never meet until the day Bennett arrived at the airport in Cincinnati, but the situation worked out ideally for both parties as the team reached the NJCAA national championship game last year while Bennett turned himself into a desired Division I recruit.

Not that the experience was smooth.

“The first week I went to Cincinnati, I wanted to go back home,” Bennett says now. “My language is one of the reasons why. Every time I talked to somebody, they would be like, ‘What are you saying?’”

He’d work on that while devoting the rest of his focus to the reason why he had left his life in Jamaica behind.

“We could see that it was affecting him, but he certainly made the most of the opportunity,” Combs says, thinking back to Bennett’s adjustment. “[His background] motivated him and made him realize this is worth fighting for.”

And that’s where he would catch the Chants’ attention.

It was about this time last year when Coastal head coach Shaun Docking and assistant Kyle Russell were talking about their recruiting class for the 2011 season. It had been a trying offensive year for the squad, and Docking told Russell to find the Chants a goal scorer. A friend from Russell’s own playing career suggested he check out this forward in Cincinnati that was putting up eye-popping stats.

“I went online and saw he was leading the nation in goals, so I called his coach and got the next flight out there and saw him play,” Russell says. “Shaun called me and said, ‘What do you think?’ And I said, ‘He’s the real deal. We need to get on him tomorrow.’ So the next day we flew him in for an official visit and got him to commit here just like that. Shaun never saw him play.”

By the time schools from larger conferences started to take serious notice of Bennett, he was already locked in to becoming a Chant.

“His team made the national JuCo finals and he got a lot of interest from a lot of big schools -- Indiana and Akron and those kind of schools -- but he had already committed to us,” Docking says. “So, yeah, we were very fortunate to get him.”

Actually getting him to Conway, though, was a wholly different challenge.

Late arrival

Bennett had been visiting his father in Canada over the summer when it came time to head to Coastal and join his new team for preseason workouts.

But he was delayed access to the country, and Docking started to legitimately wonder if his prized offensive recruit would make it at all.

“He was in Canada. He’s Jamaican. That kind of caused some confusion at the embassy,” Docking says. “... We had a couple of guys fall through [for similar reasons]. We had three or four other guys fall through that would be seeing a lot of playing for us right now. And that’s scary how good we really could have been this year.”

The Chants have nonetheless been plenty good while getting off to a 13-2 start. They’re 6-0 in Big South play with three regular season games remaining and ranked between No. 13 and No. 17 in three national polls.

Thanks in large part to Bennett, who wasted no time showing his teammates -- and the opposition -- what he could do on the soccer field.

“He came in late after we all went through preseason, so at first we didn’t really know what to expect from him,” senior goalkeeper Scott Angevine says. “Because you build a kind of camaraderie through preseason with doing all the fitness and the three-a-days and weight lifting, all that stuff. So this guy shows up after we get done doing all that stuff for two, three weeks and you kind of wonder what can this guy do for us?

“But I remember the first practice he came, he got a ball about 35 yards out and just ripped it and put it off the crossbar, down and back up into the net. And after he scored that goal -- it was literally five minutes into his first practice -- I knew that this guy was going to be a goal-scoring machine for us.”

Bennett, having missed the Chants’ preseason workouts, wasn’t cleared to play in the team’s preseason exhibition game, but he’s been a formidable presence in the lineup ever since.

While he’s still a ways off from Joseph Ngwenya’s program record of 27 goals in a season (set in 2002), his 16 goals are 10 more than any Coastal player had all of last season and already tied for the eight-best total in CCU history. He was named the national player of the week by TopDrawerSoccer.com after tallying two goals and two assists over two wins last week, and he isn’t afraid to admit he’s paying close attention to where he stands on that national leaders list (while he’s tied for tops in overall goals, he’s tied for sixth in goals per game at 1.07).

“It’s a competition. I always want to be the best -- I want to be No. 1,” Bennett says. “And that motivates me when I look and see my name at fourth, fifth. I always want to be No. 1. ... I check every day.”

Docking says that if Bennett wants to advance his career to the professional level -- the Major League Soccer level -- he still has some work to do and plenty left to learn, but that the junior also has the work ethic to continue progressing.

And the motivation.

“Soccer has done so much for me,” Bennett says. “I know there’s one kid or there’s kids out there that want the same thing and want soccer to be eye-opening for them, something that makes them better than the way they are. If it wasn’t for soccer, I wouldn’t be right here standing with you right now.

“I want to do the same thing, I wanted to reach the highest peak I can go. I want to play professional. ... But I don’t want to play just for me. I want to use soccer to help other kids as well as me because I know what’s it like not to have anything or not to come from a background [that’s] financially stable. I’ve gotten a lot of help, so I want to return the favor.”