Varsity Girls Soccer defeated Prospect High School 4-3 on Thursday, Dec. 7, marking its first win of the season. Although PHS quickly scored two goals within the first 10 minutes of the game, MVHS made a comeback in the second half, scoring four goals in a row followed by PHS’ last goal.
Following a series of losses and a tie in the past four games, junior and centerback Dylan Hwang believes that this win will help the team’s confidence going into future games. She hopes that this win will help the team regain its footing and set the stage for the rest of the season.
“I feel like it was good to get our confidence up, and I think that this game will just show that we can actually win,” Hwang said. “We connected a lot more passes and found through balls to our wingers which helped a lot and the forwards got a lot of goals on the through balls, which was good.”
Despite allowing two early goals and three in the overall game, Hwang says that the defense did a good job of getting the ball out of the defensive third and sending it to the other side of the field. Compared to allowing a total of 15 goals in the first two games of the season, the team has allowed just five goals in the most recent three games, building a 1-1-1 record compared to its 0-2-0 start.
Despite a challenging beginning to the season, Head Coach Jose Vargas emphasizes that the team’s goal is to finish at the top of the league standings. He says that even after falling 2-0 in the beginning against PHS, the players kept the momentum going and played a decent game, demonstrating that the team is improving. However, Vargas and Hwang both agree that to achieve this goal, the team must bring a higher level of intensity going into future games and work on fixing their mistakes. Specifically, they highlight how the team needs to stop making sloppy passes and be more aware of the other team making runs behind the last line of defenders.
“Every practice and every game, I look to set levels,” Vargas said. “Once we meet those goals, that’s our minimum, so then we shoot for the next level. Today we beat the goal that we had, which was to improve off the last game, so now we work towards the goal to finish up in the top area of the league.”
