Another strong week for girls’ soccer team
Published 10:28 pm Thursday, October 2, 2008
The Mount Si girl’s soccer team showed its offensive strength last Tuesday night, Sept. 12, at Liberty and scored a victory.
Sophomore Nikki Stanton scored three goals, known as a “hat trick,” and added an assist as the Wildcats took home a 5-1 victory over the Patriots. Mariah Stevens and Jessica Oliver added the other Mount Si tallies in the contest.
The “trick” was Stanton’s first at the high school level, and it propelled the forward into the early Kingco goal-scoring lead with four on the season. “I was on. I had my teammates pass me the ball. I shot, I scored,” Stanton said. The star is no stranger to hat trick efforts; she has had them in the past at the club level.
The Wildcats welcomed back two key players in this contest: defender Katie Woolsey, who was out due to illness, and goalie Jessica Blessard, out due to a groin injury. Blessard, in her first action, stopped seven Liberty shots. Woolsey’s return should help shore up a defense that demonstrated some weaknesses in the early part of this season.
Last Thursday, Sept. 14, Mount Si welcomed in Bellevue to town. The two teams were meeting for the first time since last season’s winner-to-state playoff game, which the Wildcats won. Just like that night last fall, Mount Si took care of business and posted another victory.
Kirsten Mills and McKinna Little each scored a goal and assisted with one another’s goals as the Wildcats bagged a 2-0 shutout of the Wolverines. “We were ready for them,” said Mount Si coach Darren Brown. “We were really prepared coming into this game. We knew how strong Bellevue was. We respected them, but the girls were up for this game. We all remember last year and we knew that they were going to come out with fire and wanting to take us out. The girls were 110 percent mentally ready for this game.”
Mills’ goal came in the 34th minute, a one-timer shot into the lower left corner. Little’s came just as stoppage time was starting in the first half on a similar shot. There were many nice opportunities for both sides to score in the second half, but Blessard and her Bellevue counterpart, Jenika Swanson, stood tall at the nets and kept the balls out every time.
Little credited team play with the victory. “Our center was really, really strong. Our defense was really strong; our outside midfielder’s made those runs really fast and they were just working really hard,” the sophomore said.
The Wildcats have scored the first goal in all their games thus far, and that is a big help to Brown. “I always tell the girls, ‘First five, last five.’ What that means is the first five minutes and last five minutes you’ve got to be giving 115 percent. What happens is if we score first, we kind of create the tempo of the match and that’s always our goal, going in to get the first one right away,” Brown said.
On Thursday Mount Si hosts Interlake at 7:30 p.m. Another offensive threat joins the Wildcat arsenal this week, as Mariana Zanella makes her season debut after missing the first couple of weeks due to lack of practices. Fans can look for a new style of play, called a “Dutch 4-3-3.” “Really with the Dutch 4-3-3, what I’ll be doing is sliding an extra forward piece up top and using my flanks to play the widths,” said Brown. “It’s really possession controlled and we have the talent on this team this year to do it.”
The depth has created a large stable of role players, and that also will be on display. Brown likes what he’s seen so far. “Every single game, we’ve had a different girl step up. We had Marika [Loudenback] coming out early as goalie. Tonight we had McKinna Little, role player, who had a goal and an assist. She was huge and my defense in the back, Kara Clearman, Jordyn [Wilson], Vica [Falcon] and Monica [Nelson], were awesome tonight, and a big hats off to them,” Brown said.
