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NWC Travels To Utah
The hunger wasn’t enough to sustain the Northwest College men’s soccer team through the weekend.
The Trappers fell 3-0 at Western Wyoming a day after an excuse- me 3-2 win at Sheridan on a road trip during which the men’s team did not play to win, according to head coach Rob Hill.
“They’ve got to realize it’s not easy to win. Easy is losing. But winning the game, it takes work,” Hill said. “I said to the guys this week, ‘We’ve yet to have a performance where we set the standard.’ We have not had one game where we’ve had a complete performance from start to finish.”
A scoreless first half at Western gave Northwest a realistic shot at a 2-0 weekend, but Western righted its aim and scored a trio of goals in the 58th, 74th and 83rd minutes as the Mustangs (8- 2-2 overall, 4-2 Region IX) took first place from the Trappers (6-3, 4-2).
“They may have shot themselves in the foot, they may be looking at a road game in the playoffs now,” Hill said of the Trapper men. Northwest was eliminated in the first round of the 2014 Region IX Tournament by Trinidad.
Northwest still has a shot to climb the standings, but it will take one, if not two, elusive road wins.
“We’ve never won at LCCC and we got beat last year at Western Nebraska,” Hill said. “We’ve got very mixed results down there so we have to be at our absolute best.”
The Trappers were anything but during a shutout at the hands of Western Wyoming.
“They absolutely tore us to pieces,” Hill said of the Mustangs. “Honestly, they could have been up 4-nil at halftime. They created some unbelievable chances.”
The Trappers played 110 minutes of soccer the day before, and fatigue may have factored in to their play, though the Mustangs were also ending a busy week.
“We did look like we were tired, but I don’t think that’s any kind of excuse,” Hill said. “That was Western’s third game of the week and they looked fresh as a daisy.”
The Trappers put four shots on goal and played without a sense or urgency.
“I sometimes feel this team has to go 1-nil down before they start playing,” Hill said.
But when Landon Jacobsen scored the game’s first goal, the Trappers didn’t respond. Instead, “the flood gates opened,” according to Hill.
Freshman keeper Nate Snyder stopped four of the seven shots he faced in a full 90 minutes of play.
Snyder played all 110 minutes against a Sheridan team that Hill called more motivated than his own.
“They were hungry,” Hill said. “They lost three in a row and they needed to win that one to give themselves a chance at being in the playoffs.
“They certainly had more desire than us. They beat us to the ball and put the ball in the back of the net.”
Conversely, Northwest’s goals occurred almost by happenstance, including Danny Mort’s game-winner in the 109th minute.
Freshman Mitchell Pinney sent a ball to Mort, who benefitted from a Sheridan keeper focused on starting a counter attack.
“We fed a ball into Danny, he cut the ball inside and hit a soft shot ... unfortunately for the keeper, it slipped through his fingers and it dropped in,” Hill said. “It was more luck than anything else.”
Mort scored his first goal of the game on an unassisted shot in the 47th minute.
Camdin Hinkel put the Trappers on the board with a goal off of Javier Sanchez’s corner kick.
Sheridan had its chances to win the game in overtime, but the luck that lifted the Trappers was missing from the home team’s side.
“They could have quite easily scored,” Hill said. “They missed a header from a corner kick. They hit the bar as well.”
Northwest hopes to raise the bar during this week’s Utah road trip. The Trappers play at Utah State University Eastern at 3 p.m. on Friday and then against a club team on the campus of Salt Lake Community College at noon on Saturday.