From Coach Ed Berberich: The Lady Aces soccer team lost their first home match of the season Monday, hosting the Mt Vernon Lady Rams and losing 0-9. The Lady Aces also lost 2 matches in the Olney tournament, losing to Monticello 0-4, and to Olney 0-6.
The Mt Vernon game was a rematch from our first game of the season, where we also lost 0-9, but outside of the final score this game looked quite different. The Rams are a good team but we held up better in the rematch whereas in the first game it was out of hand by the midway point of the first half. This game was tough as it was the Monday after spring break week, and you could see that in the players. It’s always a struggle for them to come back from the break and be ready for a match immediately, but they did their best to play through that against a strong opponent. We were a little disjointed defensively all over the field, but we looked a bit better on the offensive side. We were able to string some passes together and gave ourselves a few chances for goals, which were more limited for us in the first game. Unfortunately we came out of this game with a injury to one of our key starters, so it’s another thing we’ll have to work to overcome moving forward.
We also played 2 tournament games back-to-back in Olney at the beginning of spring break after some players had already left for the week, so we had to play with 1 less player on the field than the other teams. At one point we were even playing with 2 less players for about 20 minutes, but the girls played extremely hard and held up particularly well in the 1st match. In the 2nd match we started to wear down but our effort never waned. It was a really impressive showing by these girls, going in knowing they had no subs and were going to be outnumbered.
The Lady Aces next play against Centralia, also at home.