1126 wins and another district championship for Glendale. Monday night, Jeff Rogers became the winningest high school coach in Missouri history.
“I think I was more focused on winning a district championship, which puts us into the postseason,” said Rogers, Glendale’s boys and girls head soccer coach. “Having that honor with the milestone made it extra special.”
This was the Falcons’ 28 district championship. Building a program like this doesn’t happen overnight.
“I think we’ve created a culture here,” Jeff said. “We use the saying, ‘It’s a family thing’, which was born out of a tragedy where we lost one of our players in 2012. His last words to me was, ‘It’s a family thing’ so we’ve taken that on and we live it.”
‘It’s a family thing’ is more than just a cliche for this program.
“It was June when [Ruby] was diagnosed as a baby, 3 1/2 years old,” Jeff said. “I turned 60 in June. So for me, it was kind of one of those conversations I had with God. I’ve had a great life. You know, I’ll push all my chips in, just, you know, let this little one have a good life.”
Ruby, Jeff’s granddaughter, was dealing with non-stop headaches. A CT scan revealed a tumor about the size of a lime in the back of her head. She went to St. Louis Children’s hospital to have it removed.
“It was basically just pushing all her brain matter over into the side,” said Justin Rogers, Jeff’s son and Ruby’s father. “That’s why we weren’t able to fully discover the intent of the other three tumors that remain today.”
She has a cancer so rare that it is not even classified in the World Health Organization’s database. But with routine trips to St. Jude and daily doses of medication to keep the cancer from growing, her fight is going well.
“She just turned four this last week and her birthday theme was a unicorn,” Justin said. “I think that’s pretty fitting considering she is a unicorn.”
Ruby is not alone in the fight when she’s got “Ruby’s Fight Club”. Glendale wears warm up shirts with “Ruby’s Flight Club” plastered across the back.
The Falcons also dedicated a game to her this season. She put her trust in senior goalkeeper Jase Jaeger when it was time to be recognized pre-game.
“Her little doll, Cora, [has] been everywhere with us,” Justin said. “Whenever she was walking out, he was trying to hold her hand. She just said, ‘Here, you can have Cora’. So that is a pretty big moment that she actually let someone hold her prized possession.”
It’s a team effort day in and day out for Ruby’s Fight Club.
“Yesterday when I shared with them that, you know, she had her MRI and she was stable, they all started clapping,” Jeff said.
Glendale comes out and battles for 80 minutes every match knowing that she battles daily. The wins at the end of each battle means nothing if you don’t have the people you care about most to share them with.
“I’m glad what we’ve accomplished at Glendale,” Jeff said. “But when I’m done here, the wins and losses and championships and all those things that for me, it’s the relationships that I have. The community of love that we’ve been able to build is more important. That’s what I want to be known for.”
