The Grays Harbor area produces a lot of soccer talent and two local coaches are looking to take advantage.

Aberdeen High School assistant soccer coach Ben Barene is helping to spearhead an effort to organize a men’s club soccer team that will compete against other clubs from around the state in the Western Washington Premier League.

The WWPL is hoping to have its inaugural season in 2018 and has four confirmed teams taking the pitch.

But, the league is looking to add another two to four teams with the Grays Harbor Gulls looking to fill one of those spots.

Barene plans to be an assistant coach on the team and is looking to recruit local soccer players while he tries to fill out the rest of the coaching staff and assemble a roster.

He said he has about 30 or so players from Grays Harbor County who have expressed interest in playing for the team next spring and is looking forward to getting the county’s soccer talent on the field.

“We’ll have a lot of athleticism but everyone in this league is gong to have athletic players,” he said. “The more skill the better. We’ve got players from Aberdeen, Elma, Hoquiam and Montesano that were league MVPs and a lot of guys played college soccer…we’ll have a good team of guys we can rotate in and out. Guys that can compete with athleticism and with skill.”

Ben Barene first got the idea to organize a soccer team when his brother Alex first got wind of WWPL’s desire to expand getting into the 2018 season. With Alex playing soccer at college in Portland, Ben began the slow process of gauging interest from some of the players who had recently graduated.

Ben said he was surprised how quickly the ball got rolling once local soccer players began expressing their interest on social media.

“We kind of started it half-heartedly and things really picked up steam in early December,” he said. “We made a Facebook and a Twitter account to let people know we were starting a team. It’s come on really fast.”

The Gulls hope to have a roster of 20 heading into their inaugural season but filling the coaching staff is also high on the agenda.

Luckily for Grays Harbor’s newest sports team, Drew Grannemann has decided to take the helm of Grays Harbor FC.

Grannemann has coaching experience working with Hoquiam’s high school girls team and had played with Ben’s older brother in high school but was still surprised to receive a Facebook message asking him to fill the coaching vacancy.

“We’ve known each other for a long time and he just hit me up on Facebook out of the blue one day,” he said. “I told him it sounded like an awesome opportunity and told him to let me know what I could do to help. From there, it kind of took off.”

After officially getting approved to enter the league by the WWPL and filling out the coaching staff, The Gulls are now looking to see which prospective players will represent Grays Harbor on the pitch in 2018.

Grannemann oversaw the first round of practices at Stewart Field last week.

While no concrete roster decisions were expected from those practices, Grannemann was excited to start the process of building a team.

“We’ll scrimmage for a bit and get people some touches on the ball and see how everyone’s progressing,” he said. “We’ll have tryouts at the end of March so hopefully we have about a month or month and a half to develop a style of play as a club.”