Morton’s Statham wins 2026 Clutch Sports Media Girls Soccer Coach of the Year

Zach Statham has embraced the grind of coaching soccer for over a decade and there have been few shortcuts on his road to success.

From being a head coach at East Peoria in his early 20s, to starting an entire program from scratch and embracing the challenges that come with it, to becoming the head coach at one of the Mid-Illini’s top boys and girls programs, Statham has experienced a lot already. Those experiences have helped shape him into who he is today, which is the leader of the Class 2A state runner-up Morton girls soccer team and Clutch Sports Media’s 2026 Girls Soccer Coach of the Year.

Statham arrived in Morton in the summer of 2025 to take over as the head coach of the Potters’ boys and girls teams following the retirement of Tory DeLong. He guided Morton’s boys team to a season where they made an eight-win improvement before leading its girls team to its best season in program history.

The Potters finished 26-2-1, won the Mid-Illini Conference championship and tore through the first part of the playoffs by not allowing a goal en route to Class 2A regional and sectional titles. Statham’s group used a second-half surge to beat Waterloo 5-2 in super-sectionals to advance to state for the first time in program history. From there, the Potters defeated Wheaton St. Francis 4-1 in the Class 2A state semifinals before falling 3-1 to Crystal Lake Central in the state championship game.

Statham’s team showed its dominance by going on a 19-game shutout streak during the regular season, which set a new IHSA girls soccer record. The Potters, who boasted strong leadership with seven seniors and plenty of promising young talent, outscored opponents 136-8 on the season. 

Statham worked his way up after starting his coaching career at East Peoria and Monmouth-Roseville, where he led the Titans girls team to a Class 1A regional championship in 2024, just four years after starting the program. Seven members of his 2026 Potters team earned a spot on CSM’s 2026 Girls Soccer All-Area Teams.

Hear more about Statham’s season and his career in our interview with him below. Some responses have been minimally edited for clarity.

What have you been able to reflect on in the days since the season has ended? 

“I gave myself one day this season ended and then we did our junior high boys and girls camp the week after that, then we started boys practice for the summer, and then this week, the Fourth of July week, is the first week I've had to kind of just relax and think about it, so it's a good question,” Statham said. “I just think the belief that the team had in myself, not as a first-year coach but as a first-year coach for them, I just don't think there was really any wavering in the belief of what coaches were trying to do. I think we came in the second day of practice, we were talking about trying to get to state, so I think the coaches had extremely high goals, which I guess forced the players to have high goals as well. But I just think the belief that they had in us and the willingness they had to make some changes from what they were used to was a lot.”

“I kind of couldn't believe, looking back, their absolute willingness to change,” Statham added. “The first year is hard anywhere, and this is the most buy-in from a group right away that I've ever had. We told them early on that we believed in them and their ability to make a deep run. It’s not like they said out loud that belief back to us but at the same time, I think just through their actions, they had a lot of belief in what we were trying to do and didn't really scoff at any of the changes. They just kind of put their heads down and got to work and then the other thing too is just the work ethic of the team was outstanding.”

What were some of the changes the team had to get used to?

“This is the third school I've been at and I had a real clear plan of what I wanted to do,” Statham said. “I’m a little bit younger, but this is still my 13th school year coaching. I just had a lot of time at those other two schools to, honestly, just make a lot of mistakes and I did make a lot of mistakes. I felt like when I got here, I had a really clear plan for boys and girls about what I wanted to do and how I wanted to do it and I think you can give the players that concise plan and say, ‘Okay, if we do these things, we'll be successful.’ I think it helped the girls buy in as well that the boys had a nice season, they kind of saw those same changes.”

“Our formation was totally different than what they were used to before, we lifted every day before practice, mostly for injury prevention, but also just to help us get stronger and we conditioned every day, we lifted every day, we changed this formation, and just built the culture of we were going to outwork everybody,” Statham said. “That's something that we talked about a lot, we just really thought that we could get to a point where if we mixed our hard work with our talent, that nobody could stay with us for the whole game. I think that really showed down the stretch in the playoffs.”

What’s your coaching background? 

“I was an assistant coach at Monmouth-Roseville when I quit playing college soccer, I played college soccer for two years at Monmouth College,” Statham said. “I was the JV boys coach at Monmouth-Roseville for three years, and then I went to East Peoria to be the head coach. It was a big gamble going there to be the boys head coach because I think they'd won three games in three years and I took the job and it was just one of those deals where I just wanted to prove myself and prove that I could do this more to myself. We went through a lot of hard times there and it was very difficult, but we did the best we could. Then, I went back to Monmouth-Roseville when they started a girls program to be the head boys and the head girls coach. I started the girls program at Monmouth-Roseville and my first year there, my first year ever coaching girls, we won zero games. We had no girls who had played high school soccer before, or really any soccer. Then, by the time those freshmen on that first team were seniors, we won a regional championship.”

“[At Monmouth-Roseville], I coached boys there for six seasons, then the girls for five because COVID took one of them; all those jobs, I think, allowed me to make the mistakes I needed to come here and really have a clear, a clear plan of how I wanted to do things,” Statham said. “It's not even more so how I wanted to do things, it was how I didn't want to do things, like learning from your mistakes. I think there's certain things I'm flexible in the things I want to do, but I'm inflexible on the things I don't want to do.”

What helps keep you motivated?

“I've always had a bit of a chip on my shoulder going to those two places that maybe other people wouldn't have, trying to really grind my way to the top and earn my way to the top,” Statham said. “I think that was really fulfilling for me personally, but to make it to state this year, I had a lot of time thinking about it this week and I'm not really happy for myself, I think I find a lot of joy in helping the kids achieve what they want to achieve. I think that the girls were really buying into their goal to make it to state this year. Our goal wasn't even to make it to the championship game, our goal was just to make it to state.”

“I think I find a lot of intrinsic value [and] intrinsic motivation in trying to help,” Statham said. “I'm a teacher as well and trying to help the young people just achieve their goals and their dreams. I told them all the time this year that I'll probably have more runs left in me, but this might be their only one. They've got four years in high school and I'm hoping I've got 30 more seasons left in me. I’m hoping that I can do more, but at the same time when you can help people, especially young people in their limited four years, achieve something they really want to achieve, seeing the joy on their faces, that's just really fulfilling for me personally. I enjoy the grind of the season, I enjoy trying to get better every day. We had better results this year, but I think I find the fun and the value of just trying to help people achieve.” 

“I thought maybe when we made this run this year, I'd be less motivated for the boys season or less motivated for girls next year and I think it's only heightened my motivation to try to do it again. I think I'm just even more hyper-focused, because now, I think the belief that I have in myself and in terms of the girls and the players we have returning next year, we just have so much belief that we can do it again.”

Aside from winning, what’s a fun memory with the team that you’ve had from this past season? 

“The thing that surprises me with the girls is I was always, as a player and as a coach, a little bit like once I get on the bus, I'm a different person,” Statham said. “There's personal life Zach, there's teacher Zach and coach Zach and they're all three very different. I had to switch from teacher mode to coach mode when I got on the bus and I'm just hyper-focused and intense. The boys usually are as well on the bus and most of the girls are too, but [the girls] are the first team I've ever had that will joke around, crack jokes on the bus, be so loose, and then about 90 seconds to two minutes before the game starts, they'll all just get silent and just flip a switch.”

“The part I'll remember the most is just the fact that they're so funny and so goofy, and then they could just flip that switch and go to absolute killers,” Statham said. “It scared me at first, I didn't think they were taking things seriously. I realized that they can just flip that switch and it was not one or two of them, it was so many of them that are absolutely hilarious people in their personal life and would try to crack me up before games…it's incredible. I think that's something I never had at all as a player. And just their willingness to work; I think one of my favorite parts of this group is that, every single day, them wanting to work hard is really incredible. I usually have to motivate people to work hard three out of five days and they just come ready to work five out of five days. They almost get mad at me if we're not working hard enough so they made my job so much easier and made me look so much better than I am.”

What’s a piece of coaching advice you’d give or one that’s been helpful for you?

“Be patient; that's good coaching advice, good life advice and what I tell the kids is just be patient,” Statham said. “I think, especially in sports, young coaches or young players have an expectation that every day is going to go well. You almost don't want every day to go well, because in my coaching journey, my playing journey, in my life journey, I've grown so much more in a positive direction from negative things than I have from positive things. When negative things happen in sports or in life, like that's such a huge chance to grow and I think a lot of people in society and a lot of people in sports especially, they shy away from those negative moments. If you actually want to get better, if you actually want to grow, you almost need the negative moments to happen.”

“I think you see a lot of people place emphasis on wins and losses and things like this and I am super competitive, I hate to lose,” Statham said. “That's a good quality to have too, but from those hard moments in practice, from those hard moments in the game, from losses, I think we grew so much more from our loss and tie this year than we ever did from any of our wins. You have to put yourself in difficult situations if you ever want to get better, so if you shy away from the difficulty of sports, I just don't think any growth is going to happen. I never thought, as a 23-year old boy coach at East Peoria, that at 36, that I’d be coaching Morton girls to second [place] in state, but here we are. There's been a lot of failure along the way, and I think in the moment,I thought it was a bad thing, but looking back, I think failures are the best things that could happen.”