The new coach of the girls varsity soccer team will be a familiar face at Wareham High School. Megan Kashner, who has coached junior varsity soccer for six years, will take over the varsity job this fall, following the retirement of Cindy Silvia.

“When I got into coaching this is the position I wanted,” Kashner said. “This was the goal.”

Kashner coaches three sports at the high school, in addition to soccer she is the the girls junior varsity basketball coach and the girls junior varsity softball coach.

She played all three sports at Wareham High School but soccer was, and is, her passion. After high school Kashner played soccer for three years at Providence College.

Kashner acknowledges that the program has struggled for awhile now. The girls soccer team has gone winless in the last three seasons. As recent as 2010, however, the team was a mere 19 seconds from making the playoffs. Needing a tie to advance, the team was locked in a stalemate with ORR in the last game of the season before a very late goal by ORR kept Wareham out of the postseason.

Kashner said the key is to develop players at the youth level and that she is aware that will take time.

“We need to develop players where soccer is their passion, where it’s not their second or third sport,” she said.

For the short term, however, Kashner believes in the team that will take the field this fall. With 16 seniors on the roster, the team certainly won’t be lacking in veteran leadership.

“I want this team to send the message that things are going to change,” she said. “Our goal is for them to not step on the field defeated already.”

Kashner said she has already given her players a summer fitness program, a big change from the past, she said, when the team would only start rounding into shape halfway through the season.

She said she is confident this current crop of players can be the group that makes Wareham a competitive team in the South Coast Conference again.

“It’s on them to be the catalyst for change,” she said.