Brookings soccer teams split in regular season finale

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BROOKINGS – The Brookings soccer teams split their final regular season games on Tuesday night at Fishback Soccer Park. The girls beat Sioux Falls Washington, 3-1, while the boys fell to the Warriors, 5-0.

Each team will now wait and see who they will be playing in the first round of the playoffs on Oct. 4. As of Tuesday night, the Bobcat boys sit in 13th and the girls are in 14th, with games still to be played on Thursday and Saturday. The top 16 teams make it into the playoffs.

Girls

 Brookings 3, SF Washington 1

If there’s one thing that Elise Lefers is known for, it’s finding her way to the ball. The junior forward has impressed her teammates with her tenacity on the field and a knack for putting the ball into the net and it came in handy as the Brookings girls soccer team rallied for a 3-1 victory over Sioux Falls Washington on Tuesday night.

“She just doesn’t quit,” Brookings head coach Adam Juba said of Lefers. “Once that ball gets played into her area, she just says ‘I’m going to go win this ball, no matter what.’ She does whatever it takes to go win it.”

Lefers’s aggressiveness was on full display in the second half against the Warriors. After the Bobcats trailed 1-0 at halftime, Lefers won a race in the offensive zone, burying Brookings first goal of the game in the 60th minute to knot things up at 1-1. Two minutes later, Lefers won another battle, finding her way to the ball and scoring again to give Brookings a 2-1 advantage.

While Juba credited Lefers’s effort to score on both plays, he also believes part of her secret is her willingness to finish the job for her teammates.

“She knows that she has teammates that will get her the ball and help her go score,” Juba said. “When we did score, our whole team was calm and we worked the ball all the way from our defense to our midfield up to our striker. Elise knows at that point she needs to finish it because it was a whole team effort to get the ball there, so she put it in the back of the net.”

The Bobcats’ effort in the second half came off the heels of a sluggish first half at Fishback Soccer Complex. The opening minutes saw Brooklyn Harpe put the Warriors in front five minutes into the game and Juba noticed his team’s jitters as a part of homecoming week.

“We weren’t calm,” Juba said. “Normally we have this kind of calm composure about us when we get forward on the field and it just seemed like we were a little jittery. But obviously it ended much differently as the girls settled into the game.”

Although the Warriors scored early, they didn’t get many opportunities to expand on their lead. Sioux Falls Washington was held to just one shot during the first half as but the Bobcats couldn’t convert on their own chances.

Maddix Archer sent a penalty shot over the top of the net in the 25th minute and Aubrey Knutzen was stopped by Arianna Schlekeway a few minutes later to send the Bobcats into halftime scoreless but Lefers helped the Bobcats break through and race out to the lead in the second half. One insurance goal from Desirae Johnson later and Brookings was on its way to victory.

Archer and Rylee Briggs also came up with assists in the win while Shae Lefers made four saves in goal for Brookings.

The Bobcats finished the regular season with a record of 4-8-1 and will now head into next week’s playoffs. While their record may not be where they want it, they believe that they’ve shown enough fight to compete with whoever their opponent may be.

“It always feels great to win the last game on senior night, your last home game and your homecoming game,” Juba said. “It gives us some momentum going into the playoffs. We’ll see who we get in the first round but I know these girls are going to fight no matter what.”

Boys

 SF Washington 5, Brookings 0

Shortly before the Brookings boys soccer team hosted Sioux Falls Washington on Tuesday night, Andrew Park was feeling all kinds of emotions. The senior captain was about to play his final game at Fishback Soccer Complex and although he was in front of a sizable crowd, he was holding back tears and trying not to cry.

“I don’t know why I was trying to hold back tears,” Park said after the game. “It’s just nice playing with all of my friends and playing on this field for the last time. Everything goes by so fast. It’s really not a joke.”

Park’s Bobcats would fall to the Warriors 5-0, but that wasn’t his biggest concern. One of the leaders on this team, Park flashed back to playing through the years and his dedication to bring everything he could to the field.

“It’s so much fun,” Park said. “You could tell that this year we just love soccer. Every single one of us. You just want to give it your all.”

For the early part of Tuesday’s game, that’s exactly what the Bobcats did. Brookings played a senior-heavy lineup and the group went back and forth with the Warriors in the opening minutes. Although the Bobcats couldn’t establish themselves in the offensive zone, they were limiting the opportunities for Washington until Nikola Keley scored the first goal of the game in the seventh minute.

“I think getting guys forward was hard for us,” Brookings head coach Steve Binkley said. “We possessed well, especially in those first 20 minutes. We had more time on the ball than they did and the times we looked good, we played it through the middle. I think in the final third is where we felt we lost a little bit of creativity or maybe didn’t take our opportunities in one-on-one situations.”

Things snowballed in the final 10 minutes of the first half, where the Warriors scored three goals in a stretch of three minutes. Evan Johnson’s bender from the top of the box put the Warriors up 2-0 in the 32nd minute before Idriss Badri scored in traffic in front of the goal to make it a 3-0 advantage in the 34th minute.

One minute later, Alembe Sango scored in the 35th minute and the Bobcats went into halftime with a 4-0 deficit.

“We were hanging with them for a while, but that’s just mentally hard to come back from,” Binkley admitted. At halftime we talked a lot about trying to feel like it was a new game and trying to create that kind of playoff type of atmosphere and that’s where it started defensively.”

The new attitude helped the Bobcats limit the Warriors opportunities in the second half, although Keley scored his second goal of the game to expand the lead to 5-0. Despite the tough effort, Binkley was proud of how his team responded to adversity in the second half.

“I think we can feel good about the way we looked for the last half hour of the game,” Binkley said. “We didn’t give them too many chances in the middle of the field either. It was just kind of a stalemate in the second half.”

The Warriors outshot the Bobcats 7-3 on the night and the loss dropped them to 4-8-1 on the season, but that wasn’t much of a concern. Tuesday’s game was all about the seniors and their last moments on the field.

“No matter what if we lose by 10 goals, three goals, [or] five goals, the idea of playing the last couple of minutes with these players…it’s senior year, man. It gets emotional. It’s really tough.”