Park Hill soccer breaks out offensively

Judging by the scoreboard halfway through last week’s game against Ruskin, you wouldn’t guess at this stage of the season the Park Hill girls’ soccer team is having trouble scoring goals. The 6-0 score which was eventually doubled before halftime to an impressive 12-0 meant a second half was necessary according to the ‘mercy’ rules governing Missouri high school sports. The win came on the heels of a 7-0 victory against North Kansas City earlier in the week to improve their record to 3-4 on the year and serves as a hopeful boost going into the heart of their conference schedule.

“Our goal tonight was to just continue working on the same things we’ve been working on in practice. Good passing, being aggressive, and choosing our shots,” assistant coach Dustin Sollars said. “We’re still kind of shaky scoring goal, which is hard to believe after tonight.”

Hinting at leaning on strength of speed on the outside in preseason workouts, Park Hill is looking to wear teams out with their quickness and what they believe is the advantage of being in slightly better shape than the competition.

“I think we’re more fit than most of the teams we play,” Sollars said. “We just have to use that to our advantages, win the ball, possess a little more, and make the other teams chase us to make them tire out more quickly. We’re in really good shape, just need to work on the soccer specifics more.”

Led by captains Rayci Lee, Holly Maier, and Shelby Blanchard, the Trojans have seen an infusion of young talent from Maggie Lanham up front along with Lyndi Plattner and Katie Hibbeler at midfield. They’re adding depth to their quickness which allows them to rest players at key points in games in order to always have an attack threat.

“It’s coming along pretty well. We’ve got some pretty good outside midfielders and we’ve got several of them so we can rotate them and keep them fresh,” Sollars said.

Bringing that depth at the midfield position to the field for its optimal effect along with continuing to wear down opposing teams is something the Trojans will work to work on implementing as they head into the second half of their season.

“We have to be able to competitively match up against everyone else in our conference that we’ll be playing starting next week against Oak Park and Park Hill South a little later, sure up our defense a little bit, and capitalize on some opportunities in order to be where we want to be,” Sollars said.