STARKVILLE — There is good news for the soccer fan who hasn’t seen the Starkville Academy boys soccer team play: The Volunteers will close the regular season with six matches in eight days.
The marathon sprint opened Tuesday afternoon with a 1-0 win against archrival Heritage Academy at the Starkville Sportsplex.
“We are playing much better as a team these days,” Starkville Academy senior Michael Temple said. “We have to play with intensity and focus. That is going to be extremely important in the week ahead. We sure do have a lot of soccer left to be played.”
Weather issues have plagued Starkville Academy for a good part of the season. Any type of rain can prevent the Volunteers from playing at the Sportsplex, so they have been in a holding pattern. Tuesday marked the squad’s first home match in 2012.
“It felt great to finally play at home,” Starkville Academy coach Robert Gardner said. “It was a good performance. We had to grind it out. Heritage defended well. We didn’t create (offensively) as much as we would have liked. However, we stuck with it and grinded out a good result.”
Starkville Academy (3-6) will play host to Hillcrest Christian on Thursday, Copiah Academy on Saturday, and play a doubleheader Monday at Parklane Academy. It will travel to Heritage Academy for the regular-season finale next Tuesday.
“We are in a tough stretch,” Gardner said. “The main thing is keeping our legs. We have to take time off when we can. We were a little winded at the end today. We were hoping to get one more goal there in the second half because we had several chances.”
Anyone stuck in traffic missed the scoring, as Temple converted a give-and-go from about 10 yards out less than two minutes in.
The Volunteers held the better of the attack for most of the first half. However, a couple of crossers sailed wide. Starkville Academy withstood a couple of late threats by Heritage Academy and led 1-0 at halftime.
“Our defensive backline was great today,” Gardner said. “Our goalkeeper (junior Colby Henderson) was fantastic. You really can’t say enough about the job he has done this year. To be able to step in after the captain (Davis Pigg) got injured and do this job this well is quite the compliment.”
The teams battled in the midfield for most of the second half and had a scattering of scoring opportunities. Henderson preserved the shutout with a couple of nifty saves in the final 10 minutes.
“We practiced really hard this week,” Temple said. “It was a rivalry match, so it was a big effort game. We just needed to give effort the whole game. That was the key to the victory.”
For Heritage Academy, the end result was a disappointment to coach Joe Asadi.
“We will practice hard tomorrow and be ready to play them again on February 7th,” Asadi said. “If you don’t play good, you will lose. Everybody played terrible today.”
Meanwhile, the Volunteers hope to build on one of their best defensive efforts of the season.
“Our backline has been playing together since we grew up,” Temple said. “Colby did a great job today and made some really big saves. We just have to keep this defensive effort up and find some more offense.”
Gardner thought the offense might manifest itself in the second half, but the Volunteers failed to convert three corner kicks.
“We worked on our corner kicks on Monday in practice,” Gardner said. “We did a much better job of defending them today, but we couldn’t get one on offense and had our chances.
“We talked about having a fast start to the match. We were happy about that. In the second half, we stretched ourselves a little too much. To start, we weren’t challenging the 50-50 balls. Credit goes to Heritage Academy for being up for the game. They were much more aggressive on the 50-50 balls and the tackles.
“As the match progressed, we played better and better on offense but couldn’t convert some of the chances that we will have to make later this week.”
Scott was sports editor for The Dispatch.
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