When your father is a member of your school’s athletic hall of fame, making a name for yourself can be difficult.
That might not be a problem for Naperville North juniors Taylor and Madison Korosec.
The twins had an auspicious varsity debut Thursday. Taylor, a forward, scored two goals. Madison, a defensive midfielder, meanwhile held Neuqua Valley star Brooke Miller in check as the Huskies won their season opener 3-2.
Taylor and Madison are the daughters of Bill Korosec, a 1991 Naperville North graduate who was a three-sport standout. Bill was the 1990 Naperville Sun Football Player of the Year and went on to play at Eastern Illinois.
Korosec is now an assistant football coach at North, where he coaches his freshman son, William.
“He’s very excited Madison and I are both playing for North now,” Taylor said. “He still has a lot of friends that live around here, so they like to tell tall stories.
“Some of his friends played soccer, and he played soccer with Jay Konrad (brother of North assistant girls soccer coach Jim Konrad). They like to tell us a lot about how the different Konrad brothers played, so I feel like I have lived through a lot of their high school experiences.”
Taylor Korosec’s high school experience, of course, has been challenged by the coronavirus pandemic, which wiped out her 2020 season. But she teamed with fellow varsity rookie Cameron DeCook on the first goal for North (1-0, 1-0).
DeCook, a sophomore forward who just missed scoring her first goal when she hit the crossbar with 9:00 left in the first half, sent a perfect cross in front to Korosec for an easy tap-in at 21:45 of the second half.
“It was a good cross,” Taylor Korosec said. “We would have both been playing on the team last year, so it was something that for the past two seasons we’ve been working on a lot in practice.
“We were waiting for it.”
DeCook went to the same middle school as the Korosec sisters. She said Taylor will be a force to be reckoned with in the future.
“She definitely will be,” DeCook said. “We have a really strong front line, so it’s going to be exciting to see. I think we’ll get a lot of goals and assists together.”
Senior forward Megan Cablk scored on a breakaway off a pass from Cameron Dinkla and Taylor Korosec made it 3-0 on a header off a long free kick from Lucy Iverson with 3:41 remaining.
The host Wildcats (1-2, 0-1), however, made things interesting, scoring twice within 25 seconds.
Xavier-bound senior midfielder Katelyn Nardulli converted a 23-yard free kick, and then a cross from sophomore midfielder Grace Anderson deflected in off a Naperville North defender with 2:26 to go.
“We didn’t quit,” Neuqua coach Joe Moreau said. “That was a positive. I like that we stayed with it. We could have dropped our heads down 3-0, but we kept fighting.”
It wasn’t enough as Miller, a junior midfielder, was a nonfactor thanks to Madison Korosec.
“Madison was fantastic,” North coach Steve Goletz said. “Brooke Miller is one of the best players in the state of Illinois, and to go pound for pound with her and to limit her to very little influential chances is great.
“With a kid like that, all you’re trying to do is slow her down. Madison did every bit of that. That was a huge highlight that will probably go unnoticed.”
The Korosec twins will not go unnoticed, and not just because of their surname.
“It is some pressure to perform,” Taylor Korosec said. “But it is really fun having the whole family part of Naperville North.”
Matt Le Cren is a freelance reporter for the Naperville Sun.
