First Victory of Season

Well, today our team made its season debut at home against Gonzalez High School.  The Gonzalez High School team was the Division II Champs two years ago, and they continue to field good teams for a small school.  Last year, Alisal's varsity team tied them at their home, 2-2. Tonight, the Trojans took home the victory 1-0.  We scored in the second minute of the game and basically held on to a one goal lead for seventy-eight minutes.  Benjamin Nunez scored the only goal of the game for his first of the young season.  We expect Benji to score a lot more goals as the season progressess.  We had standout performances from senior Bobby Perez, from Juniors Gerardo Vera and Edelmar Medina and Santos Ortiz, and great performance from junior midfielder Julio Tena. 

Gonzalez seldom reached our part of the field as we poured on our aggressive style of attacking the ball and keeping possession.  On our offensive end, we had a ton of shots on goal but could not find the back of the net.  I was really frustrated about this and gave my team a grade of F for this area of the game.  Overall, I rate our performance as a C+ performance.  We made some mistakes and got sloppy and out of control at times in the second half, but overall it was a decent performance for a team with no returning starters and for a team that played its first game together.  The majority of my boys have never played together, and since soccer is a game of team chemistry, we still have some ways to go in this area.  

We will go back to practicing and working on the things we have to.  I was a little concerned about our conditioning, but we looked aggressive and not at all winded.  We have some injuries to address, but we should be ok for the game at home against Watsonville on Monday, Nov. 24.  We look forward to see our fans at our games as we try to bring home a T-CAL Championship.  

On our J.V. front, the junior boys won their second game against the season against Gonzalez's J.V. team.  Alisal routed them 3-0 with a great offensive performance from Christian Hurtado, the junior forward.  The defense really held it down, too, for its second shut out of the season.  I really like the way the kids are working and Coach Marquez is doing a great job of training them and creating chemistry.  

Let's hope we can keep this up.