Jeremy Young has been pleasantly surprised about a few things this fall, but one of them was not how well his Oak Hill girls soccer team played.

“We lost only four games this year, including the playoffs, and only by one goal in each of them,” Young said. “That certainly wasn’t the way it was last year for the team, when going down the stretch we were blown out of a few games.”

Oak Hill won the school’s first Mountain Valley Conference championship and earned the No. 6 seed in the Class B South playoffs, and for his efforts, the first-year head coach Young has been selected as the Kennebec Journal’s Girls Soccer Coach of the Year.

“The ability to be in each game was huge for us,” he said.

Oak Hill beat Madison in the MVC championship game. The banner, which Young still has, will soon go up in the school’s gymnasium. It will be the first soccer banner of any kind to hang there.

“It’s an awesome thing to see,” Young said. “It was a special season.”

Young was named the conference’s coach of the year, too, which he said surprised him. But he was thrilled with the way in which the Raiders — who finished the season with a 9-4-2 record — were able to compete in every game they had on their schedule.

A late first-half goal was the difference in a game against Monmouth, and a goal in the dying moments against Madison accounted for a pair of 1-0 defeats against the MVC’s heavies.

“It wasn’t an issue where the top teams were killing us,” Young said. “It was just an issue of needing the ball to go our way and playing for 80 minutes. We only needed a couple more times where we played the full 80 minutes and closed out the games.

“But we were in all of the games, which was a lot of fun.”

Travis Barrett — 621-5621

tbarrett@centralmaine.com

Twitter: @TBarrettGWC