The Lady Colonels soccer team suffered defeat at the hands of the Southeastern Louisiana University Lady Lions in their conference opener on Tuesday.The Lady Lions defeated the Lady Colonels 2-1 in a physical match.
Head coach Cindy Piper felt her team played together with emotion.
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It’s probably the best game we’ve played as a unit yet,” Piper said. “They actually played with a little bit of emotion today. You saw them all fired up and smiling and encouraging each other. ”
Southeastern head coach Blake Hornbuckle said his team played well today in what he terms “a complete war”.
“I think our team played a full 90 minutes today,” Hornbuckle said. “We pretty much followed our tactical game plan, and we got a great result today. Nicholls State has an extremely tough team. They fight very hard, run hard on challenges and put pressure on the ball. We just found a way to relieve that pressure and get behind them and put the ball in the net twice.”
The only score of the first half came in the final five minutes when Southeastern’s Aimee Davis, a forward, netted a goal.
In the second half, Southeastern increased its lead to 2-0 on a second chance penalty shot. The original shot by defender Rena Carillo deflected off Lady Colonel goalkeeper Lindsay Bartlett. However, the ball stayed in-bounds, keeping it alive, which allowed Carillo a second shot that she scored.
The Lady Colonels scored their only goal at the 31:29 mark of the second half when sophomore midfielder Tori Priddy found the net on a penalty kick.
Priddy said the goal got her team excited to play inspired soccer.
“It definitely got us back in the game,” Priddy said. “It made us realize that we had about twenty minutes (left). It gave us some confidence to try to fight back to tie it up.
The Colonels came very close numerous times in the closing minutes to scoring the game-tieing goal, but each time just seemed to fall short.
According to Piper, everyone was focused on the game until the very end, and it will be a tough rematch if the Lady Colonels continue to play as well as they did today.
“We had everyone in the game until the buzzer went off,” Piper said.
“Everyone was fired up and knew that goal was coming. (If we were given) another five minutes, we score, we tie it and we go into overtime.
