High school soccer in the Twin Counties is better now than it has been at any point during the last three or four decades.

Just ask Northern Nash coach Joe McCarthy, who has walked the sideline with the Knights since the late 1980s. Or Tarboro coach Leshaun Jenkins, who played at SouthWest Edgecombe during the late 1990s and has coached the Vikings during much of this decade. Or even new Rocky Mount High coach Drew Nick, who will guide the Gryphons this season after a move from Wilson Hunt.

All of them – and just about every other high school soccer coach in Nash and Edgecombe counties, for that matter – will tell you that the sport is thriving. But all of them will also tell you that the sport still falls far behind a lot of cities and counties across the state that are more traditional soccer powers. Durham, Fayetteville, Jacksonville, Raleigh and even Wilson remain far ahead of the Twin Counties in developing soccer players at the youth level, then translating that success to the high school pitch.

"There is not a multitude of soccer players here," McCarthy said. "We are not, by any means, a Fayetteville or a Jackson County. We just do not have those numbers. ... But there is no doubt the level of the players we have now is much better than 10 years ago."

There are any number of solutions to this conundrum. The Rocky Mount Area Youth Soccer Association and the Harrison Family YMCA combined their resources last year in an effort to improve the youth program in and around the city.

A number of Twin Counties high school coaches have started to suggest that pooling their collective knowledge of the sport and organizing an elite team during the winter and summer might also be productive. Jenkins even suggested something as simple as throwing a soccer ball into the mix when footballs and basketballs are poured out during gym classes or at recess.

"We have to change our mindset," Jenkins said.

Change, some change, might be headed for the Twin Counties soon. Nick, the new Rocky Mount coach who worked for years with the Wilson Youth Soccer Association as both an official and a coach, said he would like to help the sport grow here as it has in Wilson during the last 35 years. And it is possible, Nick said, though it would require plenty of hard work.

"Now that I have my feet a little wet, now that I have some stability, I would definitely like to get involved and build on to what is already established," Nick said. "There is something established here, it just happens to be very small. ... People are going to see that we are involved in promoting soccer in this area."

Sounds good to most coaches, including Jenkins.

"There are ideological misconceptions about the sport, and there are stereotypical misconceptions about the sport," Jenkins said. "But this is a universal sport, one of the most popular sports in the world, and anybody can play it."

Matt LaWell can be reached at 407-9952 or mlawell@coxnc.com