Choosing to change: AF senior Ben Harley’s journey and leadership earned 2024 Utah Valley Boys Soccer Player of the Year award
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- American Fork senior Ben Harley brings the ball down during the 6A championship game against Farmington at America First Field in Sandy on Thursday, May 23, 2024.
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- American Fork boys soccer players celebrate with senior Ben Harley (center) after winning the 6A championship game against Farmington at America First Field in Sandy on Thursday, May 23, 2024.
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- American Fork senior Ben Harley heads the ball during the 6A semifinal game against Bingham at Zions Bank Field in Herriman on Tuesday, May 21, 2024.
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- American Fork senior Ben Harley kicks the ball during the 6A championship game against Farmington at America First Field in Sandy on Thursday, May 23, 2024.
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- American Fork senior Ben Harley battles for the ball during the 6A semifinal game against Bingham at Zions Bank Field in Herriman on Tuesday, May 21, 2024.
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- American Fork senior Ben Harley heads the ball during the 6A championship game against Farmington at America First Field in Sandy on Thursday, May 23, 2024.
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- American Fork junior Lewis Knecht (7) celebrates with junior Preston Osborne (11) and senior Ben Harley (5) during the Region 3 game against in American Fork on Wednesday, March 27, 2024.
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- American Fork junior Lewis Knecht (left) and senior Ben Harley celebrate after winning the 6A championship game against Farmington at America First Field in Sandy on Thursday, May 23, 2024.
If you had talked to American Fork boys soccer player Ben Harley a year ago, the discussion wouldn’t have been about state championships or accolades like being named the 2024 Utah Valley Boys Soccer Player of the Year by the Daily Herald.
At the conclusion of his junior year, he had some serious doubts about his future in high school soccer.
“I just wasn’t playing well,” Harley said in a phone interview on Tuesday. “I wasn’t in good form. It just kept feeding into the idea of me not playing. I had some other friends who wouldn’t play on the team, so we would just not care anymore. We went down a bad road where we all wanted to quit. We were just done. I wasn’t going to play my senior year. It was a really rough year.”
Cavemen head coach Casey Waldron said his staff wasn’t sure what the best thing would be to do for Harley.
“We knew is ability and that his ceiling was really high,” Waldron said. “But he hadn’t come close to reaching it. He needed to adjust his attitude and find his love for the game again. If he didn’t do that, we didn’t know whether it would be right for him to be a part of the team as a senior.”
But as the months passed, Harley began to second guess that earlier decision.
“It was around January that I decided I was going to play,” Harley said. “Last year I didn’t buy in and I didn’t listen to coaches. I was very rebellious. This year, I just decided that I was going to be a team player. I was going to do my part and see where it goes from there.”
He credited his friends for helping to make that commitment.
“It was really a unanimous decision with all my club teammates,” Harley said. “We decided to really lock in. None of us had made it past the second round of the playoffs and we wanted to get past that. So we decided we were going to buy into the system and listen to the coaches. Now I wish I had done that earlier.”
As the 2024 season got underway, Waldron said he saw a complete 180-degree change from the senior.
“He was just off the charts,” Waldron said. “Before practice and after practice, he was the guy cleaning up. He was the guy putting the equipment back in the shed. He was the guy bringing the guys in to get a cheer. He was the guy getting the guys going for warmups while the coaches were setting up for a training session. Without even being asked, he was doing it. He showed that he was so hungry, that he wanted to win and to make his teammates better around him.”
That effort and mentality paid big dividends on the field as well as he built a great rapport with his team.
“I think just having fun with your best was the most important part of being able to win this year,” Harley said. “We always would hang out after practice. I think that truly is why we were able to do what we did, because we had that chemistry and built everything up.”
American Fork played its preseason before deciding who would be captains, but when the question came up, Harley was a clear choice.
“I started asking some of the players, ‘who you think would be a good leader?'” Waldron said. “I wanted to get to their responses and some feedback from the peers on the team. Everyone said, ‘Ben Harley is our guy.’ Some of his friends said that he didn’t want to be a captain. But we chose him because he had changed and was doing the things that a captain would do without wanting the recognition. It was really cool to see that evolution and maturity.”
Harley said that being named as a captain was a special moment for him.
“It was definitely a highlight of the year,” Harley said. “I didn’t even know if they would take me back on the team after how toxic I was during my junior year. It was just truly amazing to see that all my teammates were the ones who chose me and wanted me to be able to lead them as far as we could go. It was just a very emotional moment. I love those guys. It meant a lot to me.”
The pieces were there for the Cavemen to build something special, but there were a couple of bumps along the way. That included a tough 6-2 loss to rival Lone Peak early in Region 3 play which was a moment, according to Harley, where the American Fork took a significant step forward.
“We went into the team room after the game and one of our coaches wrote on the board: ‘We lost. They did not win,'” Harley said. “That really stuck with us, because we knew we could beat anyone. The only way that we were going to lose is if we beat ourselves.”
The Cavemen took that message to heart and played with renewed confidence and determination, winning the rest of their region games (including defeating Lone Peak) and then marching through the 6A playoffs.
When American Fork finally secured the 1-0 win over Farmington in the 6A championship, Harley got to savor a moment that had seemed so impossible not that long ago.
“It was unreal,” Harley said. It was definitely one of the top moments of my entire honestly life. After going through everything from last year, it just makes it so much better. Doing it with my absolute best friends, it was just amazing. I love my school. I love everything about American Fork. Being able to do that for the first time in 40 years, it was just unreal and it couldn’t have been better.”
While winning the title capped this particular part of Harley’s journey, he’s now turning his attention to the future.
His club team will compete in a national competition later this summer, then in August he will leave to serve a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Knoxville, Tenn.
When he returns, he is looking at playing soccer at Snow College and continuing to chase his dream of playing at the Division I level.
But no matter where his path leads, he plans to take to heart the valuable lessons he has learned in the last year.
“It was amazing,” Harley said. “For the rest of my life, I’m definitely going to think about that if you put your mind to it, you can do anything. Just showing that I can go from last year, which was genuinely terrible, to becoming state champions is just going to really help me moving forward in the rest of my life. It shows that no matter what situation you are in, you can really just turn it around if you put your mind to it. You can do turn anything around, no matter what.”
