Early Days See Potential
Brewster Home 9/20/23
After playing together for only one week, the JV1 boys’ soccer team met Brewster Academy on Grenier field yesterday for our home opener. The weather was perfect: 67, sunny and with a slight breeze.
This year we have a large team so Coach Custer and I decided to split the group up into two squads. In this way they can get comfortable with each other’s style and begin to anticipate movement on the field. Because we had a few players on the DL (Solomon Holton, Eric Chung, Devon LeBlanc, Lucas Mandel) we had to modify this a bit for yesterday’s match.
Within the first minutes of the game, we used the entire field. We earned the first goal kick from a wild pass, but Brewster followed up with the first shot of the game. Thankfully Henry Steffen was there to skillfully stop this attempt at a goal. Minutes later, Mickey Winham sent a pass in to Jorden Garfar who then forced the keeper to dive for his shot. Then Michael Jung deked a defender and his shot is stopped. Aiden Bean took a long shot from outside the box, but this too was stopped.
The at the six-minute mark, Brewster got into the middle and up-close. A screaming grass-burner was sent toward the far post and into the net. And suddenly, Brewster’s on the board.
We bounced back quickly and saw shots by Yiyi She and Michael, but both were deftly saved by the keeper. Then to our shock and frustration, Brewster, again, got close and inside and sent another ball to the far post and in the net. The defensive line of Cho Man Bian, Sebastian Keen, James Lee, and Ryan McPhee quickly recovered and made sure that these two mistakes would not happen again in this game. Our midfield line of Mickey, John Guillemot, Aiden Bean, and Matt Fussteig helped with this and continued to send passes up to the strikers. Before we switched lines, we saw one more great combo. Mickey beat past two defensemen before sending a cross to Jorden. Jorden trapped the ball and sent a shot that looked like a sure goal. Unfortunately, it hit the top corned and deflected out.
At the twenty-minute mark, Theo Korhonen, Anderson Coe, Harry Hutton, and Carter Freund took over the full-back line, Bryson Tucker, James, Aiden Bean, and Aidan Gracey filled in the midfield, and Adi Lesbek and Marek Girard jumped in as strikers. We saw great hustle from everyone. Aidan kicked a sweet pass up to a rushing Adi who quickly got his head on it. Sadly, this one also failed to enter the net. However, with fourteen minutes left in the half we saw one of the best plays of the whole game: When James received a goal kick from our end, he turned and sent a lead pass to Aiden. Aiden passed it to Adi, Adi passed it back to Aiden, and Aiden set Adi up with a great opportunity. Adi gained control and sent the ball into the net and us onto the board.
As the minutes ticked down, Harry proved his worth in the back field shutting down the offensive drives. Matt deked a defender before sending a pass up to Adi, but his shot just missed. And Theo demonstrated his grit by taking the ball from our end, dribbling by three defenders before sending a pass that resulted in a corner kick. Matt sent his corner kick into an awaiting Michael whose kick went just wide of the net. We were taking the shots, but our aim wasn’t true.
In the second half, we had several more opportunities but just couldn’t earn the points. Then at the thirteenth minute, Henry hustled out of the net to shut down an offensive shot inside the box. In his attempt to grab the ball, he hit the striker and the referee decided it was worthy of a PK. Brewster took advantage of this opportunity and scored their third goal of the day.
For some teams this would have broken their will. It’s awfully hard to come back from a two-goal deficit. Yet, we did not see a lack of drive. Michael made a full field run up and around three players before getting a shot that went high. Harry was a force to reckon with in the back and Bryson hustled in the middle.
At the two-minute mark in the game, we were still down by two. Then with seconds left there was a mele in front of the Brewster net, Michael took control of the ball and sent it up to Theo. Theo spun around and turned the match into a one goal difference.
Although we didn’t win this match, we saw some good work and solid potential for the season. We look forward to meeting Brewster again next Wednesday, but before we can really think about that game, we will meet Dublin at home this Saturday.
