High school soccer: Casey Black was pure gold for Darts this season in earning Deseret News Mr. Soccer title

Davis striker Casey Black keeps the press clipping that describes the beginning of his odyssey from being a really good soccer player to being the state's best player on the last page of a scrapbook his grandmother, Maxine Black, made for him.

"Davis nearly opened the scoring 10 seconds into the match when Hillcrest keeper Chris Jessen denied Casey Black on a breakaway," wrote the Deseret News in describing the opening moments of Davis' 2-1 quarterfinal loss to Hillcrest a year ago.

With star teammate Gentrie Maag, whom Black adored and looked up to, sidelined with a scary back injury, the onus was largely on Black, then a junior, to get his team to the semifinals.

Black did score Davis' lone goal in the game, but he also missed five one-on-one chances, including the early one, and he and his team came up short.

"I choked," Black says much more succinctly.

"That's probably one of the hardest losses that I've ever had because I looked up to Gentrie so much that season, and to have him hurt the last half of the season and to know that I had the chance to make it to the semis for him — and maybe even further — made that just a terrible game."

To his eternal credit, however, Black didn't let the gut-wrenching defeat ruin him as a soccer player. To the contrary, he used it to become a much greater one.

Black fed off what happened to him in that fateful quarterfinal game in 2009 and used it as motivation to make sure he never endured that type of pain again.

He worked extraordinarily hard from the end of the 2009 season to the start of the 2010 season, and once he finally got on the pitch this spring, the results were spectacular.

Black scored at least once in his first 12 games, found the net in 15 of Davis' 16 regular-season games, contributed in the postseason despite sustaining a painful hip flexor, led his team to a state championship and led the state in scoring with 27 goals.

Add it all up, and it's pretty easy to see why, in the eyes of the Deseret News, he enjoyed — far and away — the best individual season of anyone in the state of Utah. As a result, he is the obvious choice for Mr. Soccer in 2010, becoming the third recipient of the award, following in the footsteps of teammate Josh Hernandez, who won it in 2009, and Viewmont's Colton Cook, who won it in 2008.