Lourdes’ Fique, Palmer Trinity’s Dieke are Miami-Dade’s Girls’ Soccer Coaches of the Year

For Ifeoma Dieke at Palmer Trinity, this was the pinnacle — so far — of three seasons of work.

For David Fique at Lourdes Academy, it was the start of something new, yet familiar at the same time.

After guiding two of Miami’s top girls’ soccer teams this year, they’re the Miami Herald’s Miami-Dade County Girls’ Soccer Coaches of the Year.

In Fique’s first season as coach, Lourdes reached the state semifinals for the third straight year, finishing as the runner-up in Class 6A. In Dieke’s third season as coach of the Falcons, Palmer Trinity reached the region championship for the first time since 2019, finishing as the runner-up in Region 4-3A.

“This has been really a culmination of what we started in 2019,” Dieke said.

Dieke, who’s the Coach of the Year for Classes 4A-2A, took over as coach ahead of the 2019-20 high school girls’ soccer season and Palmer Trinity didn’t even make it out of the district playoffs. The Falcons were clearly headed in the right direction in Dieke’s second season, but the COVID-19 pandemic left Palmer Trinity seriously shorthanded in the postseason and the Falcons bowed out in the 4-3A semifinals.

In Year 3, Dieke led Palmer Trinity to a pair of wins in the region playoffs while starting multiple eighth-graders. No Miami-Dade team in 4A-2A went further than the Falcons and they’re now well positioned to get back to their tradition of perennial contention. They went to a final four as recently as 2017.

“The team changes every year,” Dieke said. “It’s about keeping that mentality, keeping that hunger, and growing and developing.”

Fique, the Coach of the Year for Classes 7A-5A, spent four seasons as an assistant coach for the Bobcats before jumping into the lead role last year when former coach Ramiro Vengoechea left to take a job with FC Surge of the Women’s Premier Soccer League.

After winning two state titles as an assistant, Fique wanted to keep Lourdes on track and he did.

“I definitely came in with high expectations,” he said. “You’re coming into a position where you’re expected to make it to at least the final four, you’re expected to make it to the state final, so it was a lot of expectations.”

There are differences between him and Vengoechea, Fique said, but the two also work together with Pinecrest Premier Soccer Club, so there are just as many similarities. It’s exactly what the Bobcats needed.

“The expectation was there,” Fique said, ”so, for me, 100 percent we kept a lot of the things that were already implemented into the program.”

This story was originally published April 6, 2022 at 9:00 AM.