Commentary
By Eric Charbonnet @ECHARB10
The league is officially on notice; The Lady Hawks are crushing it.
Going into their next game on the 28th the team sits at 9-3-1 with three of the wins coming against conference opponents.
It would appear that the emphasis put on fundamentals and the trip to Hawaii this summer to build team strength and unity have paid off as The Lady Hawks haven’t skipped a beat since last season.
In their eye popping campaign of 2015, they scored 72 goals and won twelve games, eight of those coming against conference opponents.
The team saw many departures from last year’s squad including their leading goal scorer Maddie Umidon who packed her bags and headed of to Saint Mary’s.
One would typically think this kind of loss would leave a team in an offensive predicament, but The Hawks have found life on that side of the ball.
They have been able to do this with a bevy of players participating in a season long scoring onslaught that has seen the team amass 60 goals through thirteen games.
Last year’s second leading scorer, Yesica Morales, is again second on the team this year with eleven goals while Britni Myhre has a team leading twelve.
A whopping fifteen players have scored for the Lady Hawks this season and there’s a solid chance that by the end of the season the team will have four players in double digits for goals scored.
On top of Morales and Myhre, who are already past the double digit mark, Camila Foncesca and Paulina Gonzalez are knocking on that door with eight goals scored a piece.
All of this offensive output doesn’t mean the team has been lacking for defense though.
As the Lady Hawks are scoring lots of goals, the games are not your typical high scoring shootouts.
The women’s soccer team has forced five shutouts this season, three of those coming consecutively against Skyline, Sequoias, and De Anza, as well as not allowing any more than three goals in a single game all season.
That three-game-stretch of shutouts, fans who turned out to support the Lady Hawks receive an action packed set of games where a staggering twenty goals were scored.
After that impressive stretch of performances, the team would tie against San Francisco City College.
San Francisco City College is a huge school that gets a lot of love by way of recruits coming to play from around the Bay Area, so even though a win would have been preferable, not losing a game that’s sure to have playoff implications is much better.
The team will hope to keep things rolling as they head into the home stretch and, with only a couple of games left, you’re running out of chances to catch them playing in the regular season.
The season is set to expire on November 11, and the last home game against Chabot on November eighth.
With the season coming down to the wire, the team needs only to follow the same course they’ve run along all season and continue to focus on the things that they can control like their focus and their effort.
Doing so will hopefully result in a playoff berth and a ranking that they like, but as Coach Sapsford will tell you, he doesn’t pay attention to things like that.
“Obviously you have plans, but you always have to be ready to adjust.”
But I’m not buying it, the aspirations have to be flying high with how the goals have been soaring off of the team’s feet the way they have been.