Trigg County’s McCormick Inks Line For Brescia Soccer

Truth be told, Trigg County’s Cameron McCormick thought he was going to play football for the Wildcats.

One day, just before entering high school, he was lifting weights — working to be an offensive lineman — when varsity boys soccer coach Kyle Bleidt walked into the weight room, plucked the 90-pounder from his workout, and put him on the pitch.

Five years and three Fifth District Championships later, McCormick inked the dotted line for Brescia men’s soccer in Owensboro Friday afternoon — a proud family, a proud team and a proud coach surrounding him in the Little Theatre.

An electric goalkeeper for the Wildcats, he snagged the full-time job midway through his freshman season and never relinquished it — along the way collecting more than 550 career saves and eight total shutouts, at times erasing breakaway offense and keeping his team in games.

“During this [past] season, I had a lot of people — coaches, family around me — that have been encouraging me to, you know, reach out to colleges and play at the next level, because they thought I was good enough,” McCormick said. “And so I did. I started reaching out, and eventually found a place I thought was good for me.”

This is a guy, mind you, who admittedly is “bad with his feet.”

But not with his hands.

“I wasn’t even sure I wanted to play soccer at first,” McCormick laughed. “But I ended up going to a practice, just to see if I liked it, and I did. Bleidt quickly realized I wasn’t very good with my feet, so he said ‘let’s try you out at goalie.’ So, the next practice, he brought me some gloves, and that same day, I went to play an indoor game in Hopkinsville with them, and I just kept on practicing…until I just fell in love with it.”

“Great with his hands, terrible with his feet,” Bleidt laughed, himself a Brescia soccer alumnus. “But the way he improved over four years, I’ve never really seen another player do that.

“He’s super special and a great kid. We’re going to miss him dearly. Not just from a goalkeeper standpoint, but just of how good of a kid he is. He’s a goofy kid. We loved having him in practice. A leader by example. Obviously, he kept us in games that, at some points, we had no business being in.

“There were times he just made some saves that guys are making in college.”

Trigg County’s 2025 campaign was a memorable 8-7 for several reasons.

It was the first winning calendar since 2020, when former skipper Josh Nichols and star scorer Will Jolly finished 6-5-2 with victories against Hopkinsville, Christian County, as well as Lyon County in the Fifth District title game.

Secondly, McCormick had 22 saves in a 1-0 home loss to Murray, one of the state’s top teams, in the Class 2A sectional, and he bagged another 13 saves in a 2-1 season-ending loss to a Nichols-coached University Heights Academy team in the Second Region quarterfinal.

And those Blazers went on to win the regional title.

“I’m going to miss my teammates, of course, because I’ve made friends that will probably last my whole lifetime,” McCormick said.

Spalding, Freed-Hardeman and similar programs were also in contact with McCormick, but Owensboro, he said, made the most sense for he and his family, as did this newly-minted coaching staff.

An NAIA program in the River States Conference, Brescia finished 3-10-4 in 2025, and conference opponents include WVU Tech, Rio Grande, Oakland City, St. Mary-of-the-Woods, Midway, Shawnee State, IU Columbus, IU East and Kentucky Christian.