The Patrick Henry High girls soccer team charges the field like an advancing army. Up four goals, then five, then six on their opponents, the Patriots still soldier on.
No lead is enough, no score satisfying.
Well, except when their coach tells them to let up.
“The last thing we really want to do is embarrass anybody, so I kind of told the girls to pull back a little bit,” Patrick Henry coach Howie Hawver said after yesterday's 6-0 Eastern League win over Point Loma. “On one, (Emily Brown) just got free, and it was like, 'What do I do?' So I took her out and told her not to score.”
Too late.
Brown had just found the goal for the third time, scoring on a breakaway poke-in. Sometimes the ball just finds the net.
And that's foreign to Hawver.
After Patrick Henry's offense struggled earlier this year to find a rhythm, Hawver did some tweaking to the lineup, and it's paid off for the Patriots (11-3-2, 8-0).
“It took us a little while through the season to find the right combination, the right mix up front,” Hawver said. “We finally found it with Stephanie Ochs – a natural striker – and we converted Emily from an attacking midfielder to a forward. Sarah Ruebel comes out of the middle as an attacking mid, and the three of them are the most skillful players on our team.
“They combine and they move off each other really well. When the outsides attack, it really gives us all we need.”
Going into the season, Hawver didn't think he would have such luxury. Patrick Henry lost several goal-scorers from last year's team, and, though Hawver acknowledged that this is one of his more talented teams, he stressed that the girls lacked maturity.
With 10 underclassmen on the squad, the immaturity combined with the unfamiliarity of playing together caused some early hiccups.
After the lopsided win over Point Loma (9-9, 4-4) as the Patriots seek their seventh straight league title, Hawver believes his team is peaking with the playoffs just ahead.
“Right now, we're starting to find our stride,” Hawver said. “The biggest thing – we're starting to trust each other. That when we make those runs, the balls are going to come where they need to come. The stuff in practice is starting to happen in games, and they're starting to trust it.”
Brown, though, disagrees.
“We had trouble at the beginning, trying to figure out what the team was going to be like from last year,” she said. “We're not close yet. We want (a championship). Bad.”
