State title game hero Sedor signs with D1 Marshall
Jack Sedor
The two-time Gatorade Alaska Player of the Year certainly caught the attention of NCAA D1 Marshall University in West Virginia.
The Dimond High senior has signed his letter and will be eligible to play this fall.
“It’s been my goal since middle school to play at a D1 school and make an impact,” Sedor told me. “I had a couple options, but Marshall seemed like the one that would fit me best; the one where I could really make an impact as a freshman if I work hard.”
Dimond coach Barat Killian saw something special in Sedor when he was in eighth grade. Even then, he told me, Sedor carried himself like veteran and stood out among players his age.
He made an immediate impact at Dimond from the first time he touched the pitch.
“He scored the first goal,” Killian said. “It’s not too often a freshman scores the first goal in his first game.”
He ended his prep career by scoring the lone goal as Dimond beat South Anchorage in the state championship game. Now he’s headed to Conference USA, where he gives Alaska a rare D1 men’s soccer player.
Killian said Sedor was always destined to play big-time college soccer.
“Everything he has done has been purely motivated and driven by wanting to play D1 college soccer,” he said. “It was just a matter of where and when, and how he wants to do it.”
Coming from Alaska, though, it wasn’t easy for Sedor to get discovered. So he took the show on the road and made many trips to the Lower 48 for camps and tournaments.
“You really have to put yourself out there because there is no doubt we have the talent up here but I think it comes down to exposure,” he said. “The past three years I’ve been flying out to North Carolina, Oregon and California … they saw me in North Carolina.”
Sedor fell in love with soccer in the family room. That’s where he played his biggest games against his father and older brother Michael, who won Gatorade Player of the Year honors his senior year.
“We make goals out of the cabinets,” he said. “Every single piece of furniture in that family room has been broken at one point.”
It’s where he learned how to play the game and learned how to take his lumps against his brother, who is 3 years older.
“He would always make it tough, like an older brother should,” Sedor said.
Those games against his brother created his fearless, me-against-the-world mindset that defines him today.
“I’m an extremely competitive person,” he said. “I think anybody that knows me will tell you that.”