West Holmes girls soccer zooms past Lady Hawks
West Holmes’ freshman scoring sensation Charli Murphy works her way past Hiland keeper Bryn Yoder. Murphy scored twice in the WHHS win, but this one wasn’t one of them, with Murphy getting whistled for being offside.
Speed was on the menu for the Hiland Lady Hawks when they faced a talented West Holmes Lady Knights soccer team on Tuesday, Oct. 3 at Hiland High School, and Hiland struggled to deal with the experience and quickness and the aggressive style of WHHS in the Lady Knights’ 5-1 victory.
The game stood at 1-0 on an Allie McMillen goal through the game’s first 20-plus minutes, but McMillen would strike again before the half, and freshman sensation Charli Murphy would add another to give WHHS a 3-0 half-time advantage.
A nice header by McMillen off a corner from Murphy lifted the Lady Knights to a 4-0 lead through 50 minutes, and the defenses settled in. West Holmes dropped into more of a passing mode than attack mode. Hiland began to find some alleys to the net but couldn’t finish off any of their several opportunities, and with two minutes to play, Murphy netted her second goal, and Italie Mullet connected 30 seconds later to produce Hiland’s lone goal.
“We’ve got a dynamic scoring duo with Allie and Charli up front, a strong player in the middle in Avery Arnold, and plenty of support on the outside with players like Casey Ogi and Aveona Yoder, and we can present some dangerous combos for teams to defend,” Schuyler Snyder said. “It’s really been fun to watch the duo of Allie and Charlie develop some chemistry because they are both extremely exciting players. They continue to mesh.”
Snyder said she wasn’t certain, but she thought that with tonight’s performance, Arnold may have broken the team’s assist record for a season, a record she already holds.
“She’s the glue,” Snyder said of Arnold.
West Holmes’ consistent pressure throughout the first half put the Lady Hawks in a hole from which they couldn’t recover, although the second half proved to be a better showing for Hiland over the final 30 minutes in particular.
“I asked our kids to make some adjustments in the second half, and we accomplished that, and I thought we played much better in the second half. But hats off to West Holmes. They played really well and have a strong offense, and their speed is tremendous, and that’s been a weakness for us this year,” said Conner Lee, Hiland’s coach.
Lee said at this point in the season, his 5-8-1 team has had stretches where it looks very competitive, but lapses in play have been an Achilles’ heel for the Lady Hawks.
Lee said in order to achieve what they want to get out of this team, the time has come that his crew needs to put a solid 80 minutes of focused play on the pitch.
“We’ve had lapses on defense for five-minute stretches that have come back to haunt us,” Lee said. “Our main goal now is to put a full 80 minutes together, and I think if we can do that, we can be dangerous, but it hasn’t happened yet.”
As for Snyder, she said she knew coming in that this season was going to be a strong one based on the experience and talent throughout the lineup. With the Lady Knights’ lone three losses on the year coming against very talented Ohio Cardinal Conference foes, she is pleased with the production and feels good heading toward the tournament.
“We are going in as hopefully the top seed in our district, but we aren’t going in with the assumption that we’re going to blow everyone out,” Snyder said. “We aren’t taking anything for granted. We are going to continue to stay organized and play our game the way we have all season long. That’s what got us here, and we know we will have to do the work and put the numbers on the board.”
She said she has talked at length this season to her players about simply playing the game, not overthinking things and making things as simple as possible.
“When we go out relaxed and just play the game, it helps us stay organized and makes it really beautiful to watch the flow of play,” Snyder said.
With both teams in different places at the end of the regular season, the nice thing about tournament play is slates are wiped clean, and whether a team is banging on all cylinders like the Lady Knights or on the edge of finding the right mix of ingredients like the Lady Hawks, anything is possible.