Julia Peschetti started playing the sport that has changed her life back in fifth grade.
“I guess when I was a kid, I just loved soccer,” said the Secaucus High School senior. “I just loved the thrill of the game, the constant action, the pace.”
Plus, Peshcetti had a family of soccer players.
“My cousins all played soccer,” Peschetti said.
But Peschetti had softball players in her family as well. Her mom, Valerie, was a softball player at North Bergen High School. So was her aunt, Pam Natosi, who was the starting third baseman on North Bergen’s lone NJSIAA state championship in 1987.
So Peschetti naturally played softball at Secaucus. And basketball as well. It’s only natural that if you’re a female athlete at Group I Secaucus, you play more than one sport. It just has to be thanks to school enrollment. Secaucus has led Hudson County in more talented three-sport female athletes than any other school in the past 30 years.
In the 14 years that the Hudson Reporter has presented the Female Athlete of the Year award, Secaucus girls have received the honor seven times. Needless to say, Secaucus has cornered the market on top-flight female top athletes.
While Peschetti does well in both basketball and softball, she totally excels in soccer.
“Playing all three sports keeps me active,” Peschetti said. “It always keeps me in shape. It keeps me moving and keeps me active.”
Peschetti was an impact player in soccer right away, scoring 11 goals as a freshman.
It started a trend, one that certainly caught the eye of Secaucus vice-principal Frank Costello. You see, Costello has a daughter, Cynthia, who was a prolific goal scorer during her days at Secaucus.
“Mr. Costello mentioned to me that I was going to break his daughter’s record,” Peschetti said.
Cynthia Costello scored 55 goals during her Secaucus career that ended in 2009, as Costello led the Patriots to their first-ever state tournament berth. Costello helped bring the Secaucus girls’ soccer program to respectability.
Before Frank Costello mentioned to Peschetti about the record, she knew nothing of it.
But from that point on, it was always a thought, a passing fancy.
Before the 2014 season started, Secaucus hired a new head girls’ soccer coach in Stefanee Pace, the former Rutgers player who knew a little bit about scoring goals from her days as an All-American at Kearny High School, where she broke the Kearny school scoring record with 100 goals and 96 assists.
Pace knew of Peschetti, because several members of her family played in the Kearny Thistle program where Pace coached since she was a teenager.
“I always knew of her, but I didn’t know her personally,” Pace said. “I always knew from other coaches that she had something to watch as a player.”
So the pairing of Peschetti and Pace was one for the ages.
“I feel so blessed to have her as my coach,” Peschetti said. “I know she was a great player in high school. She has brought the program to the next level. She knows the game and loves the game. She’s been a big help to me.”
It didn’t take long for Pace to realize that she was inheriting a special player.
“She’s extremely fast,” Pace said. “She earns her goals. She has the ability to keep the ball at her feet while she’s running down the field. The ball doesn’t slow her down at all.”
Pace also loves what her star brings to the field.
“She’s extremely intense,” Pace said. “She loves to play. You get that vibe from her right away. She loves to play, but she wants to win. She also wants to get everyone else involved. I tell her that she has to be more selfish and take more shots. With the ability she has, I want her to score more. But she has such a strong personality that she wants to try to get everyone else on board with her.”
How unselfish is Peschetti? Try this one on for size.
Peschetti’s teammate at Secaucus, Amanda Visaggio, tore the ACL in her knee that everyone thought would end Visaggio’s season and career. But being the brave senior, Visaggio decided to play on, wearing two knee braces, but she was determined to play, albeit a shell of her usual self.
So before she could think about her own scoring record, she wanted to try to get Visaggio a goal to end her career on a high note.
“I wanted to try to get Amanda a goal,” Peschetti said. “We’ve been playing together since we were in fifth grade. People called us the Dynamic Duo. I knew that if I passed the ball and got it back, I knew it was from her.”
In a recent game against Bergen Charter, Peschetti kept feeding the ball to Visaggio.
“I just kept passing it to her, because I wanted her to score,” Peschetti said. “I had to get the ball to get her a chance to score.”
Sure enough, Visaggio finally got her goal, causing an emotional moment between the two.
“It’s a good feeling to be able to make someone else feel happy,” Peschetti said.
In that game, Peschetti scored two goals again, giving her 56 for her career and the new goal-scoring record. Frank Costello was right on target. He knew the girl who was going to take his daughter’s name from the all-time scoring mark.
“It’s an unbelievable feeling,” Peschetti said. “I’m still in shock that this happened. Cynthia set the standard and I was able to pass her. It has just left me speechless. I hope it sets a tone for our soccer program. I hope that someone will strive to pass this record. I want someone to break the record.”
Pace knows all about records.
“I’ve been trying to tell her that as much as you go on, you’ll always remember this,” Pace said. “She has established a tradition, a history here.”
Peschetti has owned the school scoring record for a week and now wants others to take it. That’s truly unselfish. She now has 19 goals on the season, after scoring two in a 4-1 win over Harrison, improving the Patriots’ record to 8-6, heading into the NJSIAA North Jersey Section 2, Group I playoffs next week.
“I have to thank my teammates for helping me get to this point,” said Peschetti, who plays soccer all year round with the World Class program out of Orangeburg, N.Y. “They’re the ones who got me the ball and gave me a chance to break the record.”
Soccer for 11 months of the year, then basketball, then softball; that’s a crazy, hectic schedule, especially traveling regularly to Rockland County to play soccer.
“All the credit goes to Mom [Valerie], who takes me everywhere,” Peschetti said. “She’s the one who keeps my schedule and she’s the one who keeps me going. It’s not easy at all.”
Peschetti will play soccer in college some place. She has already drawn interest from NCAA Division I programs like University of South Carolina-Upstate and Wagner, while also being pursued by top Division III programs Rutgers-Newark and Penn State-Brandywine.
Peschetti is also an excellent student, compiling a 3.5 grade point average and a score of 1520 on the Scholastic Aptitude Tests.
She would like to pursue a degree in biology or chemistry and wants to explore the medical field, possibly as an anesthesiologist.
“We went on a field trip to the Liberty Science Center and saw a surgery being performed live,” Peschetti said of watching the knee surgery via closed circuit television. “I really enjoyed watching the surgery. After that, I knew that’s what I wanted to do. I’ve always been good in science and math.”
Peschetti is not the only stellar athlete in her immediate family. All three of her younger sisters compete in sports, namely Jenna (age 16), Gianna (age 12) and Daniela (age 10). It means that assigned driver Valerie Peschetti gets a lot of workouts running the daughters around.
Pace already has her eyes on Daniela, who is a three-sport standout like her older sister.
“She’s going to be something to watch,” Pace said of Daniela. “She’s already a great soccer player.”
Peschetti got her just rewards last week, when one of her teachers, Michael Kelly, approached Peschetti and congratulated her.
“He said that he’s going to tell all his students that he knows Julia Peschetti,” Peschetti said. “When I first came into his class, he said, ‘Aren’t you the one who broke the record?’”
She most certainly is the all-time leading goal scorer in Secaucus girls’ soccer history. No one is going to take that away—for now.
Jim Hague can be reached at OGSMAR@aol.com.
You can also read Jim’s blog at www.jimhaguesports.blogspot.com.