Girls Soccer: Neuqua Valley breezes past Plainfield South
Mary Beth Nolan~For Sun-Times Media
Updated: May 15, 2012 9:38PM
Neuqua Valley more than lived up to its expectations as the No. 4 seed in the 16-team Naperville North Sectional.
The Wildcats seized command of the Class 3A Waubonsie Valley Regional opener in Aurora with an 8-0 win over 13th-seeded Plainfield South on Tuesday.
Neuqua Valley junior forward Zoey Goralski had a hand in her team’s first three goals of the afternoon, scoring on the first one in the 16th minute and adding assists on goals by Olivia Schmitt (16th minute also) and Talise Romain (22nd minute). Goralski would later add a second-half goal.
The big sequence in the game came when the Wildcats (15-4-2) scored twice in an 11-second span in the first half.
“It definitely gave us a boost and kind of momentum to score more goals, so it helped a lot,” Goralski said.
That same sequence haunted the Cougars.
“That’s not the first time that’s happened this year,” Plainfield South coach Kevin Allen said. “Our heads went down when we gave up a goal. It was a similar pattern that we’ve seen all year long with just our mental toughness.”
Hope D’Addario scored the final goal of the first half with 17 minutes, 10 seconds remaining.
The Wildcats didn’t stop scoring there, though, as Goralski tallied her second goal in the 42nd minute off an Abbey Mazur assist. Schmitt scored in the 48th minute on an assist from Gianna Dal Pozzo.
Molly McInerney assisted Hannah Nelmark in the 59th minute to make it a 7-0 game, and Kiley Czerwinski capped the scoring at the 9:52 mark with help from Nelmark’s pass.
The game afforded the Wildcats a chance to gauge their progress from earlier in the season.
“I thought we possessed the ball (and) on our goal-scoring opportunities we one- , two-touched it,” Neuqua Valley coach Joe Moreau said. “And then there were some times we were carrying the ball too much. There are things we’ve got to work on and things we’ve been working on that we benefitted from goals from them, but then we started to just get into trying to play everything through and we can’t do that.”
Hannah Parrish did not face a shot-on-goal for the Wildcats while Plainfield South keeper Taylor Schwebke made nine saves among the 17 shots-on-goal she faced.
Neuqua Valley will play sixth-seeded Waubonsie Valley Friday in the regional championship. The Warriors were 5-0 winners in a lightning-shortened match Tuesday evening against 12th-seeded Oswego East.
“We definitely need to focus, we need to work on our combinations,” Goralski said. “The grass is a little thick, so (we have to) keep the pace on the ball and stuff like that. Just the little things, because I feel like we have good ideas; it’s just (a matter of) accomplishing them.”
The Cougars finished the season 6-12.
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