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LEHIGH VALLEY WEATHER

Girls soccer ties Easton in opener

When your season opener is against a defending league and district champion, you know you're opening with a tough assignment. The Lady Hornets had that challenge Saturday and were able to come away with a 2-2 tie with Easton, even after two overtime periods didn't produce a winner.

The Red Rovers were the final Lehigh Valley Conference champions and then moved on to capture the District 11 championship.

"That's a game that we think is winnable and we're not happy that we didn't win it, but I just told our kids that I don't see anything in that game that makes me disappointed in their effort," said Emmaus head coach Rob Rooney. "We had two defensive breakdowns; the thing that cost us the goal in the first half, we fixed almost immediately and we didn't have any other issues with that."

Emmaus had to come back from behind a couple times in the game, after Jordan Luciano gave Easton a 1-0 lead with 27 minutes remaining in the first half and later when Shyra Cardwell scored to give her team a 2-1 lead.

Less than 10 minutes after Easton took a 1-0 lead, Carli Marcks answered with the first goal of the season for Emmaus and after Easton came out strong in the second-half and scored just 1:50 in, Megan Snyder scored to tie the game 2-2. Freshman Sophie Pickering picked up an assist on the first goal for Emmaus.

The Hornets had nearly tied the game a few seconds earlier when Jenny Fritz fired a shot that bounced off the crossbar.

While both Emmaus goals were scored by seniors, Rooney is pleased with how his young players contributed in the game for the Lady Hornets.

"Three freshmen, two starting for us, Kristi Schmidt and Sophie Pickering, both started and got a lot of minutes," he said. "Sarah Schuster didn't start, but got a lot of minutes off the bench and those are three freshmen that featured prominently for us in our scrimmage and we're thrilled.

"We believe they're talented kids and we're happy how deep we could go today. We got good performances from players off our bench and depth is going to be a factor."

Rooney was also very pleased with how his team responded to a tough, physical team that showed them some wrinkles that his team won't often see and hasn't really prepared to play against.

"We don't see too many teams that play with three forwards and we certainly hadn't talked a whole lot about their three-forward system," he said. "It took us a couple minutes to figure out how we wanted to play it. That second goal, I can't be upset about that, that's a good goal by that kid."

Rooney wasn't happy that his team had to keep battling from behind and believes they have a lot of work to do to fix some issues that were exposed in the game. Because they were down, Rooney had to change some of the playbook and go to some formations that he didn't want to have to roll out.

For the season opener though, Rooney is pleased that his players were up to the challenge and were able to stand up to the physical play of Easton and didn't allow the game to get away from them.

"We need to be better in every part of the game," said Rooney. "We made a defensive mistake that we don't think we should generally make. We had a lot of chances late in the game. I wouldn't call them really golden chances, but we had chances to put this game away. We certainly don't want to have to chase the game twice the way we did. We were fortunate.

"We don't want to put ourselves in a position where we need to change our game tactics late in the game to pull out a win, so we need to get better in every part of the game. We can't be satisfied with where we are right now.

"We fought back from being a goal down twice and in my world, that shows some resilience and we built some character; life is good and we're happy with that."

PRESS PHOTO BY CHUCK HIXSON Emmaus' Emily Pennell beats an Easton player for a ball during both teams' season-opening game.