The Estevan Elecs girls’ soccer team lost 6-0 to the Yorkton Raiders Thursday at Dana Quewezance Memorial Field in a feel-out game for the two clubs who are slated to renew hostilities this weekend at the Regional Championships in Yorkton.
“We played to the best of our ability,” said Elecs’ co-captain Carlee MacCuish. “We played our game, not theirs. We did a pretty good job for ourselves.”
MacCuish said the game gave the Elecs a chance to see what the Raiders’ playing abilities are, so they’ll now be able to better match up against them. She said they need to continue to play their positions well at the Oct. 23-24 Regional Championships and with a little work before the game they should be well prepared.
“We’re going to figure out how to communicate with each other to pass better, like where everybody is on the field,” added fellow co-captain Megan Pippus. “That makes it easier to play the game.”
The Yorkton victory started off with tight defensive play by both teams. After the Raiders got onto the board in the middle of the first half, their speed and striking ability showed itself with Roma Zulyniak, Leia Zulyniak and Dianna Kitzul all netting two goals each.
Raiders head coach Michael Chapman said the team has gone a couple weeks without a game, which led to the rusty start where they weren’t able to move the ball very well. He said once they got into the game their passing came around, they used the field really well and the goals started to come.
“We’ve been working a lot on give and go’s and playing through balls,” said Chapman. “The girls really put a lot of pieces together today and just really started to play a good team game, so I was really happy with their performance. Estevan put a lot of pressure on them. They played really good defense. They were pretty aggressive and I thought we handled it pretty well.”
Stacy Murphy, head coach of the Elecs, said her charges played well in the game, but they have to learn to communicate better on the field. She said the feel-out game against Yorkton should work to their advantage as it gives them an idea of where their strength on defence lies and they’ll be working on coming up with counter-attack plays to help them get scoring.
“We have practice lined up for (this) week,” said Murphy. “We’ll make sure we work on building those skills again and work on certain techniques and aspects and drills that will help us get that ball past the last defender and go from there.”
Murphy said the Elecs exhibited good shielding of the ball and maintaining possession during the game, which is something they have been working on in practice. She said implementing more lessons learned on the practice field into their game, while also getting outstanding goaltending from Jessica Shebaylo-Lajoie again, should set them up nicely for Regionals.
“Her coming out and cutting off the angles…that makes them shoot wide instead of having a direct shot on net,” said Murphy. “She did really well with that.”
