The Bluejay soccer girls made a solid debut when they played Green Bay East to a scoreless tie for nearly the entire contest before giving up a 1-0 loss in Saturday’s Rapids Invite.
Oshkosh North prevailed 6-0 in the second game.
MHS coach Steph Nelson felt her squad could have pulled out the opener.
“We definitely were the better team, we just couldn’t execute both offensively and defensively and we struggled connecting good passes. We had three extremely promising goal scoring opportunities that were put wide, then the first 25-30 minutes of the second half we just couldn’t seem to do anything right.
“The first 15 minutes of the game and last 5-10 minutes of the game we played extremely well. We had awesome ball movement, communication and movement off the ball. The last five minutes we really pressured hard, but they came back at us and with 45 seconds left in the game they got a well-placed shot on goal and scored.”
East out-shot Merrill 22-5 (8-1 in on-goal shots) and held a 4-1 margin in corner kicks.
“They may have looked like they dominated us by the stats, but really, there was only the 25-30 minutes where they controlled the game,” Nelson said. “The rest of the game we actually possessed the ball and moved it around well. Gabby Schlegel kept the score down with 7 nice saves and many other nice plays that stopped them.”
Following a short lunch break, the Jays faced Oshkosh.
“North is a much better team than East was,” Nelson said. “They had very nice ball handling and passing, but I don’t know if it was our legs or just not having enough recovery time, but we just let them come at us like we were standing still.
“Gabby snuffed out 13 shots and a lot of other opportunities.”
North held a 25-4 advantage on shots (19-3 on goal), and 9-1 margin in corners.
Nelson was happy to have extra early competition.
“At least we got to play two games before playing DCE on Thursday, which is normally our first time outside for the season,” she said. “So right now we’re really hammering good passes at practice because that was our biggest downfall of the weekend. If we would have had better passes, we would have been able to get more goal scoring opportunities. We had a ton of great ideas, you could see that the intent was there, but now we just need to get the touches on the ball that will allow us to execute the ideas.”