Sweet Home girls soccer struggled against Sisters on the road, losing 6-0, but came back nicely two days later by earning a 0-0 tie at home versus Stayton, a team they had lost twice to last season, by scores of 5-0 and 2-1.
Against Sisters, despite the lopsided loss, Head Coach Ramiro Santana still said that his team “played pretty good.”
“They’ve got a pretty fast team,” he said of Sisters. “But our passing got better in the game.”
He noted that his girls struggled with fatigue.
“They wore us out on the grass field, which is a surface we’re not used to playing on,” he said. “It was like playing on a carpet or something cushioned. You sunk into it. It was pretty heavy on our legs.”
“But we gave them a good fight,” Santana noted. “It was probably one of the best games we’ve ever played, even though we lost.”
He noted that the program has added three new girls that weren’t there when the season began, so there are now 26 student athletes on the roster.
Santana said this is enough to field a junior varsity squad as well as a varsity team, so the program will have their first JV contest of the season this Thursday against Newport.
Sisters scored three goals in the first half and three in the second on the way to their 6-0 win.
Speaking on the Stayton match on Thursday, Santana said that last year the Eagles “beat us pretty bad both times. I really thought that they were pretty good, and that they were going to come and do the same thing this year. But our girls played pretty tough.”
Santana said that his girls had more shots on goal than Stayton in the 0-0 tie.
“We probably had better opportunities to score, we just didn’t,” he said. “We had better chances.”
“It was a pretty fun one,” he said of the game. “The girls played amazing. We handled everything they threw at us physically. We got bumped a lot and took a lot of hits.”
He mentioned that his team “went after the ball instead of waiting for the ball or waiting for passes to get in.”
“It was a fun game to coach,” he reiterated. “It was the best I’ve ever seen us play.”
He said that he thinks his team would have had a chance to perform even better in the game had typical starters Rylee Markell, a midfielder, and Kami Hart, a defender, been on the field.
Markell is still sitting out from a concussion she suffered last week, while Hart was absent from the game because she was participating in a wrestling tournament.
The team suits up next against Newport, hosting the Cubs at 6:30 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 30.
“That will be a tough one,” Santana said. “They have a lot of good soccer players. We have always had good games with them. They’re pretty good, and fast. I’m excited to play them.”
Sweet Home is 1-4-1 on the year, while Newport is 2-3.