PCM names Drabek new girls soccer coach

Prairie City-Monroe named a new girls’ soccer coach recently, and Rick Drabek will take over the Mustang program.

It will be the first high school varsity coaching position for Drabek, who has spent several years coaching soccer at the club level.

“My kids are moving out of the club level, but I still wanted to coach the sport so I decided to look around for some open high school jobs,” said Drabek, who lives in Bondurant and is an alum of Bondurant-Farrar. “I love coaching kids and am looking forward to this opportunity.”

Drabek has spent the past 10 years coaching club soccer. He was the Bondurant-Farrar High School girls and boys soccer fall coach the past two seasons. He also coached basketball at Dows High School 20 years ago after graduating from Simpson College.

“We have our first team meeting this weekend,” Drabek said. “Then we will start doing some open gyms up until we start practice on March 18.”

Drabek will work with girls from PCM and Colfax-Mingo, like in past seasons. His first order of business to create good team chemistry and getting the squads working together as a team.

“We need to develop that core of team chemistry,” Drabek said. “That can be hard with girls from different communities so I plan on doing some team building events. We need to get to know each other and make sure we have some fun this season.”

Drabek will likely share several athletes with Colfax-Mingo girls’ track coach Zach Tomas. He has already met with Tomas and set up a plan to execute throughout the season.

“We have talked about a plan for the season,” Drabek said. “He highlighted a few meets that he definitely wanted his track athletes at, but luckily right now there is only one night where we overlap on one of those nights.”

Drabek replaces Bill Sowder, who resigned this past fall after serving five seasons as head coach. Drabek’s assistant coach will be Katie Platts, who teaches math at PCM High School.