The Pagosa Springs High School Pirate boys’ soccer team won two games last week, leaning on a pair of strong second halves against Alamosa and Bayfield to improve to 4-1-1 on the season.
The Pirates played two league opponents in four days and picked up two more wins. Now at the halfway point in the season, the Pirates have only lost one game and sit ranked 19th in 3A.
The first of the two games was a home game against the Alamosa Mean Moose on Friday, Sept. 18.
Alamosa came into the game with an 0-3 record and the Pirates won the game 4-1, but the score doesn’t tell the whole story, emphasized coach Trevor Gian.
“The league games, you know, it’s easy to try to look at someone’s record and judge how things are going to turn out by that,” he said. “But, you know, that game was a tough one. No result shows what it shows.”
Rain from earlier in the week made for some sloppy field conditions which transitioned into a slower start for the Pirates, Gian noted. The Pirates put one in the back of the net to start the game off with a 1-0 lead.
Ryder King had a chance to give the Pirates a two-goal lead with a penalty kick, but the Alamosa keeper made the save. Still, the Pirates found the back of the net later in the first half to take the 2-0 lead.
Despite the two-goal lead, the Pirates were still struggling with the Mean Moose’s counterattack, emphasized Gian.
Before halftime, Alamosa was able to get on the board and make the score 2-1 as the whistle blew for the break.
After halftime, the Pirates squad was able to adjust and flip the momentum, Gian noted.
“We just sort of found that second gear again,” he said. “We were able to clean things up. We were able to find some momentum.”
The Pirates scored two goals in the second half and held the Mean Moose scoreless on their way to the 4-1 victory.
On Monday, Sept. 21, the Pirates were back in action.
The Pirates traveled to Bayfield for a rivalry game against the Wolverines.
Despite shutting the Wolverines out 4-0, Gian once again emphasized that the score does not tell the full story of the game.
“We were wanting to build off of that Alamosa game,” he said. “We’re wanting to build off the games that come before, kind of string together a performance, an all-around effort like we’ve had at times, and going into Bayfield, we knew it would be tough.”
The Pirates scored just two minutes into the game off of a one-touch upper-90 finish from Xavi Sanchez.
That would be all the scoring for either team for the rest of the first half, though, as both teams battled hard for the final 38 minutes of the half, Gian emphasized.
“And, once again, [we] talked at halftime about what kind of quality team I think we are, what I know and what I expect,” Gian said. “I hold our players to a pretty high standard. They’ve shown me why I can hold them to that and, man, the response was, that second half was really fun to be a part of it as a Pirate coach, as a Pirate supporter [and] as a Pirate player.”
The Pirates netted three more goals and held the Wolverines scoreless, winning their fourth game of the season 4-0.
Up next, the Pirates will play two straight games against the Montezuma-Cortez Panthers.
The first game against the Panthers will be in Pagosa Springs beginning at 4 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 24, and the second game will be in Cortez on Saturday, Oct. 3, beginning at 1 p.m.
The Panthers are 7-2 and ranked 13th in 3A.
Like the Pirates’ last two opponents, Montezuma-Cortez is a league opponent that is going to pose a unique threat, Gian noted.
He added he knows that the Panthers are going to come after the Pirates in both games.
The Pirates will have over a week in between games, though, which Gian noted will be good for the growth of the team.
“We’re just going to go in and try to mentally prepare, draw up a good game plan that we want to go out and execute, really build off of what we’ve [done],” he said. “We’re looking at really five games on the field together only and we’ve got things we still need to work on. We’ve got things we want to grow into.”
jsellner@orourkemediagroup.com
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