BW boys soccer rolls past Rams in District debut, 5-1

By ERIC CLINE

For The Sun­bury News

Tour­na­ment time is enough to make any team tense, but the Big Wal­nut boys soc­cer team rebounded after some first half jitters.

The Golden Eagles scored four goals in a span of just over six min­utes in the sec­ond half to break a 1–1 half­time dead­lock and defeat the vis­it­ing White­hall Rams 5–1 in a Divi­sion II Cen­tral Dis­trict sec­tional semi­fi­nal match Tues­day night at Big Wal­nut Soc­cer Stadium.

“We were flat, and I wasn’t happy,” Big Wal­nut coach Brett Weiss said. “Some­times you get going and try to hit the per­fect pass or the per­fect shot right away and you for­get about the lit­tle things, but we came out in the sec­ond half and got it going. The tour­na­ment is all about sur­viv­ing that one bad game, and that was my mes­sage to the boys — ‘Make sure this is your one bad game’.”

Big Wal­nut (10–6-1) scored first when senior mid­fielder Shane Face­myer sent a long ball from near the mid­field stripe to senior for­ward Austin Foor, who broke away from the White­hall (4–9-1) defense and sent the ball past goal­keeper Jon Lunsford just 3:45 into the match.

But White­hall didn’t back off, despite giv­ing up sev­eral shots on goal. The Rams would pull even with 7:13 left in the first half, when Sam­son Edessa sent a shot toward the upper left cor­ner of the goal mouth just over the out­stretched arms of Big Wal­nut senior keeper Alex Bravender.

The Golden Eagles con­trolled the first half, get­ting 14 shots to Whitehall’s three, eight shots on goal to Whitehall’s two and all eight first-half cor­ner kicks, but the teams were still tied at the break.

Weiss could have bawled his team out, but saw instead only minor adjust­ments were necessary.

“We’re so young, and you can’t give them a rol­lick­ing every time, but by the same token you can’t be a cheer­leader,” Weiss said. “You have to pick and choose those moments. We could see them tense up, so we just had to do a cou­ple sim­ple things, and if we did that, we could get our game back and get some confidence.”

What the Golden Eagles needed most was to get more shots on goal and keep the ball out of their own end, which they did to per­fec­tion in the sec­ond half. Big Wal­nut had 21 shots in the final 40 min­utes, includ­ing 14 on net, while allow­ing White­hall no shots at all. The Eagles also had 11 cor­ner kicks in the sec­ond half and 18 for the game.

“We tried to keep the ball down in their area, keep basic pres­sure on them and put more balls on goal,” Weiss said. “The sim­plest thing we told them is don’t let (the ball) bounce. On their kicks and on those long balls out of their end, don’t let them bounce and put them right back in there, then we pick it up and start going.”

The reward came with 28:18 left in the match, when sopho­more for­ward Bobby Bogantz sent a long pass from the left side into the 18-yard box, where Foor put it on his foot and past Lunsford for the tie-breaking goal.

But the Golden Eagles were far from fin­ished. Bogantz sent a cor­ner kick in from the left side to Face­myer in the six-yard box, and the senior headed the ball past Lunsford with 24:29 left, putting Big Wal­nut up 3–1.

Less than two min­utes later, the White­hall keeper bat­ted a ball away only to have Foor sprint in, inter­cept the ball and put it past him again with 22:52 left in the match. Just 38 sec­onds later, sopho­more mid­fielder Adam Car­ifa dropped a ball in front of Foor on the left side of the box, slipped past Whitehall’s Lunsford and tapped the ball into the net for his fourth goal of the game.

“We wanted them to get their tails up,” Weiss said. “You want them to get back in the game and be suc­cess­ful, and we just weren’t doing that. When you get them going full out, that’s when you know things are work­ing and you’re suc­cess­ful. That’s a good feel­ing when that happens.”

Foor’s four tal­lies led all scor­ers, while Face­myer added the other Golden Eagle goal. Bogantz had two assists, Face­myer one and Car­ifa another. Juniors Bra­dyn Drons­field, Max Den­ton and Dominic Zumpone played well on defense, keep­ing the ball out of the Big Wal­nut half, giv­ing junior keeper Tyler Sholl an easy sec­ond half in net.

“Austin needed the game he had tonight,” Weiss said. “Shane did a nice job set­tling things down in the mid­dle and Bra­dyn did a nice job in the cen­ter and being patient when he had the ball.”

The Golden Eagles don’t have long to pre­pare for their next match. Big Wal­nut trav­els to the south side of Colum­bus to face another Mid-State League team, the Hamil­ton Twp. Rangers, at 7 p.m. Thursday.

Posted by Gary Henery on Oct 17 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.