It was the kind of game that could have gone either way, but Cottage Grove scored two goals while the Huskies scored none on Thursday, giving the Lions the win in the league opener on the Lions’ pitch.
“We played good,” said Coach Rarmiro Santana. “Cottage Grove is a very good team. Either way, it could’ve gone.”
The two teams went back and forth most of the first half, with Cottage Grove scoring in the minute 36.
“They kicked the ball in the goal, everybody piled up on it and who knows who kicked the ball in,” Santana said. The second goal came just before the end of the half When the Lions bounced a corner kick off one goal post then the other. The ball hit and went in.
“The second half, we dominated them,” Santana said. “We looked a lot better.”
In the first half, Kristen Tolle had nine saves, while Sabrina Davis had four in the second. Cottage Grove took about 14 good shots, while the Huskies had about nine.
“We got good ones that could’ve been in,” Santana said. Cottage Grove’s aggressiveness was a key difference in the game.
“It was very aggressive,” he said. “We’re not very aggressive. We play good, but don’t have the pushing, the elbows, the meanness other teams have got.”
The Huskies tend to play cleanly, he said, and he sometimes wishes he had more than three or four Huskies who did play aggressively and physically.
Looking forward, Cottage Grove, Junction City and Sisters will be the teams to beat with Sisters at the top of the list, Santana said. “We have our hands full. We have a competitive league.”
Elmira and La Pine will be competitive too, he said. All are well-coached.
“We’ve got to come out and play,” he said. “You’ve got to want it. You’ve got to come and get the ball. You can’t wait for the ball to get there. You need to want the ball.”
The girls are working hard, and their enthusiastic, Santana said, and he thinks they will be competitive.
“We feel good,” Santana said. “I wish, like the boys, we had more games (before league) to set up, move our girls in positions where we want them to actually play.”
He was planning to continue moving them around and experimenting on Tuesday at home against Elmira, but after that, he’s going to need to select a configuration for his team, which features many forwards, some of whom also make good defenders.