HINESBURG – During a drill where only two touches were allowed — one to trap; the other to pass — Champlain Valley players lost their concentration and the half-field game began to lose its initial purpose.

First-year coach Katie Mack, following a quick huddle-up, corrected the team’s lapse, and the drill resumed with better pace and precision.

“They were not focused and being goofy. I try not to say a lot because when you are on the field, soccer is a game of problem-solving,” Mack said. “You need to empower kids to be problem-solvers on the field, on their own.”

The first woman to lead CVU boys soccer, the state’s premier high school program, Mack has made a smooth transition since replacing T.J. Mead after the 2013 season concluded. A team meeting, shortly after Mack’s hire in December, struck a chord with the players.

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“Once she was chosen, we got down to business right away and she laid down the law and we were all OK with it,” said Patrick McCue, a co-captain and one of the team’s returning starters. “We just look at (Mack) as our coach. She tells us what to do and we do it and try our best.”

While Mack is a trailblazer — she was the first documented woman to lead a Vermont boys varsity team sport during her BFA-Fairfax tenure — her players aren’t concerned about their coach’s gender.

“It shouldn’t matter in this day in age. The (CVU) girls have a man coach, it’s not that big a deal,” co-captain Zach Akey said.

A social-studies teacher at CVU since 2012, Mack said the program’s annual expectations as ‘Soccer Central’ and replacing Mead, a former CVU star, are her biggest worries. Mead won four Division I titles in six title-game appearances and collected 115 wins from 2006-13.

“I think it was more about a different coach. T.J. had been here for a long, long time and some of the guys have been on the team for three years,” Mack said. “The anxiety is less about gender and more about just carrying a legacy of excellence.”

Continuing that tradition started with a hiccup in Thursday’s 2-1 defeat to Division II title contender Rice at Essex’s kickoff tournament.

During a practice last week, Mack brought up other challenges: Finding the right system — 4-3-3 or 4-5-1 — and replacing senior leaders like Zack Evans and Joe Castano. A cast of 12 seniors, including McCue, Akey and Richard Baccei, the top returning scorer, should keep the Redhawks as viable contenders.

“We have 12 seniors and that’s a critical mass of players and for a long time they have relied on Joe and Zack and before that (Shane) Haley,” Mack said. “So I think we are trying to cultivate that leadership.”

After claiming six 1-0 victories and pitching 13 shutouts a year ago, Mack hopes a system change ignites a scoring splurge. Akey, Baccei, Chris Reiss and Cooper O’Connell have the speed while McCue, Ollie Choiniere and Max Brown have shown the technical ability and soccer IQ in the middle to perhaps make the new formation play to CVU’s strengths.

“I want to get more than one or two on the scoreboard in addition to playing really good defense,” Mack said. “I think that’s a testament to our defense last year, they minimized the goals-against, but we just want to be producing more of an attack.”

New coach, tweaks to the system, it’s all good says McCue, who, like his teammates, still feels the crush of last year’s title-game loss to Colchester.

“I would say everybody, even the non-returners, are motivated because they all saw our reactions after that (defeat),” McCue said. “We expected to win and we just came up short and Colchester surprised us.

“We know the feeling of being on top and we want that feeling again, especially in our senior year.”

Contact Alex Abrami at 660-1848 or aabrami@burlingtonfreepress.com. Follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/aabrami5