Girls’ soccer dominates Robbinsdale Cooper in 2-1 victory
Park’s new mentality breaks losing streak
Junior captain Alma Beaton dribbles the ball around a Robbinsdale Cooper player during the match Oct. 6. Park won with a final score of 2-1.
October 7, 2020
After the 2-1 victory against Robbinsdale Cooper, senior Claire Bargman reflected that the girls run into trouble when they don’t stay in the game psychologically. But in this game, they maintained their concentration.
“We’ve had a hard time staying in the game mentally because we work hard and sometimes we score, but then we let the other team score and that happened today,” Bargman said. “We worked really hard to get another one. From then (on), we came back.”
According to head coach Benjy Kent, this game was the most productive of the season, and it showed the girls the improvements they made throughout the season.
“It was our best game of the season by far. We really didn’t get that many dangerous looks at the goal. We handled the wind in our face well in the first half, and we defended them incredibly well. It took us a while to figure out how good we were,” Kent said.
Junior captain Alma Beaton said that at halftime, the team created its plan to win, and the girls executed the plan well.
“We started to attack more in the second half, and the other team got really frustrated with themselves. We wanted to keep the ball more than we did,” Beaton said. “After (the goal), we focused more on defending the ball instead of attacking it.”
According to Bargman, they focused on communication in the final third of the field in practice, resulting in the victory against Robbinsdale Cooper.
“We can improve on connecting more up top and getting a final pass in. We worked really hard on connecting all the last passes in practice,” Bargman said. “So that showed through today, but we can still work on it, especially since we’re playing Chanhassen on Thursday.”
According to Kent, they are going to be focusing on holding the ball and pressing the opposite team’s defense for the next game.
“Offensively, we have to be able to keep people under pressure,” Kent said. “This kind of segues right into getting more possession and taking care of the ball.”
The girls’ next game is at 5 p.m. Oct. 8 at the St. Louis Park High School Stadium against Chanhassen.
