By Maddox Weddle
He had a monster game at the start of the season, and a teammate had an odd feeling he was going to break the school goal record. He just brushed it off like his teammate was crazy.
Junior Maddox Huffman is a varsity soccer player at Delta High School who was an average skilled player for the team last year, but when the seniors left he got his time to prove himself on the pitch. He used that opportunity to show what he can do by breaking the school record for goals in a season.
Huffman scored 26 goals on the season, breaking 2024 graduate Brayden Stanley’s record of 23, which he set in his junior year.
When Huffman scored four goals in the second game of the year against Blackford, his teammate, junior Luke Hewitt, predicted that he was going to break the scoring record.
“I just played and the opportunities came and I just took advantage of them when I could,” Huffman said.
He started playing at age 5 in leagues for fun to get his footwork better for the other two sports he played at the time and continues to play to this day.
Those sports are baseball, where he plays a mixture between shortstop, third baseman and pitcher, and football, where he is the starting varsity kicker for kickoffs.
Huffman showed up to football practice every day for around 15 minutes to practice for the upcoming game, then would head off to soccer practice. After the soccer team’s recent loss in the sectional semifinals, he can go to a full football practice and put more work in.
All this footwork he does at football practice and soccer practice made Huffman become a more talented player on the pitch. He was able to go from an off-the-bench player last year watching his team from the sideline and getting little playing time to being the starting forward.
Goals were a rare experience for Huffman during his sophomore season, only scoring seven goals and getting three assists.
Once Stanley graduated, still holding the record of 23, that gave Huffman the opportunity to make scoring a more common occurrence. Head coach Tony Pierce knew that Huffman had to fill Stanley’s shoes.
“I talked to Maddox last year after sectionals and I told him that with Stanley graduating he was going to have the opportunity to be the starter and be a big part of the team going forward,” Pierce said.
That’s when he took the role as a starting player on the team and had a breakout season.
In the game against Shelbyville he had two of his most memorable goals: a header from the corner and a header from a deep pass.
Huffman did not slow down. He had many games where he scored one, two or three goals in a game trying to lead the team to a win. Eventually it got to the last game of the regular season against Muncie Central where he was one goal off of breaking Stanley’s record.
The score was 0-0 late in the first half when Delta attempted a free kick and it got cleared by Central. Then sophomore team captain Cooper Pierce cut inside, passed to Huffman and he made the shot to break the record with 24.
At the end of the first the score was still 1-0 Delta. During the halftime athletic director Tilmon Clark announced that Huffman was the new record holder.
“When I scored we kind of just jumped up and down celebrating after the goal, and they announced my goals and stuff at halftime and that was pretty cool,” Huffman said,
The second half was scoreless and the final score was 1-0 Delta. Their next game would be against rival school Yorktown in the first round of sectionals.
The Eagles got their only two goals in the game in the first half, one being scored by sophomore Jed Vanator and the other by Huffman. Yorktown got one goal in the first half to make it 2-1 going into halftime.
In the second half Yorktown scored one more evening it out at 2-2 making it an overtime game. There were no goals in OT which means that they would have to go to penalty shootout to see which team can score the most out of five attempts. Each of the five Delta players who shot scored and gave the Eagles the win on penalty kicks, 5-3.
After that game they played in the sectional semifinals against a tough Jay County team they lost to previously in the season with a score of 3-4. They tried making a run but Delta eventually fell short with a score 1-4 with Huffman scoring the lone goal for the Eagles.
He ended up scoring 26 goals in leading the team to a 10-7 record and a sectional runner-up finish.
“I told him around the third game that he was going to break Stanley’s record,” Hewitt said. ”I didn’t think much of it at the time and it happened.”
Even though Hewitt had a feeling he was going to break the record doesn’t mean he expected him to do it.
“I mean he sat on the bench all last year so I didn’t expect much out of him this year so he definitely exceeded expectations,” Hewitt said.
Although he holds his school record, that’s not his end goal. Huffman’s one goal is to win a sectional.
“We haven’t been able to (win sectional),” Huffman said. ”We should’ve been able to do it for the past three years and we haven’t been able to. So some unfinished business.”
