Coaches from across Alabama have released their All-State boys’ soccer selections for the 2022 season, and players from Baldwin County programs earned a heavy share of the recognition, highlighted by six local athletes named to the Super All-State first and second teams.
The Super All-State roster, which pulls the state’s top players from every classification into a single honor squad, placed three Baldwin County-area players on the first team. Daphne’s Henry McMurphy and Noah Miller joined Davidson’s Kidomo Albert and Baronyi Kengeye among the first-team forwards and midfielders, while Bayside Academy contributed midfielder Joey Jones and defender Ty Ferguson to the first unit.
Being named to the Super All-State team carries extra weight in Alabama high school soccer because it cuts across the AHSAA’s classification system. In most sports, end-of-season honors are handed out within each of the state’s seven classifications, which range from the largest 7A schools down to the smallest 1A programs. The Super All-State list compresses all of that talent into one lineup, so a player from a 1A-3A school competes for recognition against counterparts from the state’s biggest enrollments.
Bayside Academy also placed the most players of any local program on the Super All-State second team, with goalkeeper Blai Cebrian and midfielder Luke Ferguson earning honors. They were joined by Gulf Shores midfielder A.J. Davis, Fairhope midfielder Matthew Stroud, Davidson midfielder Jonah de Lange, and forwards Mason Brown of St. Luke’s and Gideon Garcia of Faith Academy.
Bayside Academy’s dominant season
Beyond the individual honors, Bayside Academy head coach Jamie Ferguson was recognized as Coach of the Year for the state’s private and parochial schools, capping a season in which the Admirals were among the area’s top programs in the smaller classifications.
The school’s presence on both the first and second Super All-State teams, spread across four different players and both units, underlines the depth of the Daphne-based program. Bayside Academy sits on the Eastern Shore and has built one of the stronger small-classification soccer traditions on the Gulf Coast, drawing players from across Baldwin County’s private school community. Its roster this season featured production at every level of the field: a first-team midfielder, a first-team defender, a second-team goalkeeper and a second-team midfielder.
That balance matters, because All-State lists tend to skew toward attacking players who accumulate goals and assists. To land a goalkeeper, a defender and two midfielders on the statewide honors list is a sign that opposing coaches across the classification saw the Admirals as a complete side rather than a team carried by one scorer.
The recognition for Jamie Ferguson adds a Coach of the Year award to a program that has become a fixture in the 1A-3A conversation. Private and parochial schools in Alabama compete across classifications but are honored together in some coaching awards, and the Admirals’ head man earned the nod over peers from across the state’s independent, Catholic and other private school ranks.
Strong showings across the classifications
The classification-by-classification All-State teams reflected similarly strong showings from Baldwin County. In Class 7A, Daphne head coach Heath Burt was tabbed Coach of the Year, with McMurphy, Miller and Stroud joined by Davidson’s Albert, Kengeye and de Lange on that classification’s roster.
Daphne’s double haul — two first-team Super All-State players plus a 7A Coach of the Year award — marks one of the strongest seasons in recent memory for the Eastern Shore program. Class 7A is the state’s largest classification, home to the biggest enrollments in Huntsville, Birmingham, Montgomery and Mobile, so earning Coach of the Year there means outlasting a field that includes some of the most competitive programs in the Southeast. The Trojans’ season also gave Baldwin County a headline presence in the classification where it is hardest to stand out.
McMurphy and Miller’s selection as Super All-State first-teamers put the pair in rare company for the county. The Super All-State first team effectively amounts to a state player-of-the-year-tier list, and two athletes from the same Baldwin County school landing on it in the same season is the kind of result that usually accompanies a deep playoff run.
Gulf Shores’ Davis and McGill-Toolen’s Dominic Piccini were recognized in Class 6A alongside St. Paul’s forward Grayson Myles. The 6A honors give the Gulf Shores program a notable mark, with the Dolphins’ midfield engine A.J. Davis appearing on both his classification’s team and the Super All-State second team.
Faith Academy placed two players, Garcia and Branson Phelps, on the Class 4A-5A team, while Bayside Academy dominated the Class 1A-3A selections with six honorees, a list that included Joey Jones, Luke Ferguson, Ty Ferguson, Hoke Fellers and Zach Smart.
Why Baldwin County keeps producing soccer talent
The concentration of honorees in this year’s lists is no accident. Baldwin County is one of the fastest-growing counties in Alabama, and its youth soccer infrastructure has expanded alongside its population. Club programs based in Daphne, Fairhope, Gulf Shores and the Spanish Fort area feed players into public and private high school rosters, giving local coaches a deeper talent pool than enrollment figures alone would suggest.
The geography matters, too. The county’s communities along Mobile Bay — Daphne, Fairhope and Spanish Fort — sit within a short drive of one another, while the beach communities of Gulf Shores and Orange Beach anchor the southern end of the county with their own growing programs. That spread means Baldwin County schools compete across four different AHSAA classifications, from Daphne and Fairhope in the upper classes to Bayside Academy in 1A-3A, and this year’s All-State results produced winners at nearly every level of that map.
Local soccer supporters also point to the climate and culture of the Gulf Coast. The region’s mild winters allow for longer training calendars than northern parts of the state, and the area’s schools have invested in soccer-specific facilities as the sport’s popularity has grown. The result is a pipeline that has steadily moved Baldwin County athletes onto college rosters and, in this year’s honors list, onto the state’s Super All-State teams at a rate few counties can match.
What the honors mean going forward
For the recognized players, All-State and Super All-State selections serve as credentials that college recruiters and club scouts follow. Alabama’s high school soccer season runs through the winter and spring, with state tournaments deciding champions in each classification, and postseason honors arrive as the summer showcase season begins. For underclassmen like many of this year’s honorees, the recognition often precedes increased recruiting attention in the following cycle.
For the coaches — Ferguson at Bayside Academy and Burt at Daphne — the awards reflect seasons in which their programs set the standard in their respective classifications. The two Eastern Shore schools sit barely fifteen minutes apart along U.S. 98, and between them they accounted for the state’s top coaching honors in both the private school ranks and the state’s largest classification.
The 2022 honors list also highlights the variety of programs succeeding on the Gulf Coast. Faith Academy’s pair of 4A-5A selections, Gulf Shores’ 6A recognition, St. Luke’s and McGill-Toolen’s individual honorees, and Bayside’s sweep of the small-classification team show that soccer excellence in the Mobile-Baldwin area is not confined to one school, one classification or one side of the bay.
As the honorees disperse into club ball, college camps and next spring’s high school season, the 2022 All-State list will stand as the statistical record of a year when Baldwin County players and coaches occupied a remarkable share of Alabama’s soccer spotlight — six Super All-State selections, two classification coaches of the year, and honorees in every classification from 7A down to 1A-3A.
The Super All-State selections also carry historical weight within the county. Baldwin County’s soccer programs have been climbing the state’s honors lists for years, but a six-player presence across the first and second teams represents one of the county’s strongest single-season showings since the All-State system began recognizing a combined Super team. For the schools involved, the list becomes part of the program record, cited in game programs and recruiting materials for years afterward.
Behind every selection is the work of the classification coaches who nominate and vote on the teams. Alabama’s All-State process is driven by the high school coaches themselves, who submit nominations during the playoffs and then vote on the final rosters once the season concludes. That structure means every honor on the list is effectively a peer review — a signal from opposing coaches across the state that a player was among the hardest outs, the toughest covers or the most indispensable pieces their teams faced all spring.
For fans planning to follow these players next season, the county’s schedule offers plenty of chances. Baldwin County rivals meet regularly in region play and in county tournaments, and the Daphne-Bayside corridor in particular produces some of the Eastern Shore’s best-attended soccer nights. With this much returning All-State talent spread among the county’s programs, the coming season’s region races in nearly every classification figure to run through Baldwin County again.