Up 7-0 in the second half, the girls varsity soccer team was feeling the energy. Senior Valeria Romero took the opportunity to shoot the ball and score her third goal of the night, earning a mercy ruling. Then it hit her—she had finally played in, and won her senior night game versus East River.
“After I scored my second goal of the night, I think it really started to sink in that we were going to win,” right-wing striker Romero said. “Especially because it was senior night, our confidence as a team was really up, and we were able to be aggressive with the ball and really take this win for ourselves.”
Senior Katherine Smith also led the way with goals during the East River matchup, with two goals scored; sophomores Mali Burke, Sienna Stafford and freshman Madison Tobey followed with one goal each. Senior captains Emma Roberts and Olivia Cachat, along withTobey, assisted six goals each.
While both the offense and defense have been successful this season, a focus for the team has been rebuilding and adding underclassman players to the starting lineup, as they lost eight seniors last year.
“We started the season a little slow being that we are a young team, but have started to learn each other’s strengths and weaknesses and have built from it well,” captain and defensive midfielder Chaney Mauer said. “I have definitely seen an improvement with possessing and moving the ball together down the field, but we always want to continue to improve and become more efficient at scoring.”
The team got off to a rocky start with a 1-0 loss to Monteverde Academy as their first game of the season. However, the team was able to quickly bounce back for their second game of the season versus Lyman with an 8-0 win, and has stayed strong with a 5-2-1 record so far.
“Monteverde was a good game to learn from being that we have a lot of young people stepping into big roles,” Mauer said. “Though we didn’t get the result we wanted, we knew everyone had each other’s backs and were able to use that confidence as we played Lyman to connect and play our more aggressive style of soccer.”
A standout game for the team thus far was the rival game against Oviedo, but this year, the team tied during the matchup. Despite the outcome, senior Brynn Waddell believes that this game highlighted their strengths as a team, and hopes that they can continue to develop those skills for their next games against Seminole and Lake Brantley.
“While we’ve been playing pretty well this season, our best game overall was against Oviedo. We didn’t get the outcome we hoped for, but I think we were really able to show off our off the ball movement and cleanliness with the ball, which I hope we can display well during our games moving forward,” Waddel said.
