SOCCER GAME SUMMARY

The Tigers were traveling to face Bad Axe for their first conference confrontation. 

On the Caro side, the coach assessed the injury status of his players and academics performance: about 4 players were around 30% and 50% of injury health condition, 1 player was ineligible to play because of poor academics performance, and 1 player was playing a football game since it is his primary sport as a dual athlete. 

The coaches had to realign the positions on the field right before the game on the bus to come up with the most reasonable squad to face the players from Bad Axe.

First half started with the hosts setting up the tone with the visitors from Caro defending pretty decently to contain the opponents. Then, on a unthreatening shot and after 5 minutes of play, goalie and junior Klayton Clish let the ball slip through his gloves to give again another gift to his opponents. Small and undesirable mistakes like this one somehow affects the morale of the whole team as the hosts took advantage of this state of mind to add another goal due to poor defending and marking.

The coaches, led by assistant coach Jacob Daniel, kept reminding their players to go back to basics and keep working on our system. Fair enough, sweeper and Junior Josiah Anderson sent a long ball to the forward real estate to find right winger and Sophomore Brady Rigg who without hesitation cruised past the defenders to score the first goal for his team.

With a 1-2 score, now the Tigers were coming back slowly to regain confidence to come back to the game. The talented, conditioned and disciplined players from Bad Axe were playing such a simple passing game with confidence that left the visitors with no choice than make more mistakes and struggling with marking and settling their own system. Lack of marking and poor communication in defense and midfield allowed the hosts to score 3 goals before the end of the first half.

With a 1-5 trailing score for the Caro team, the coaches were still assessing the injury status of their players and the second half did look promising. However, the coaching staff made some positive comments of some good passing and attempts to score more than one goal in the first half, which gave the players hope to perform better in the second part of this game.

Second half was announced by the referees and the hosts kept pressing in the Caro defensive zone. Basically, the few attempts to threaten the Bad Axe goalie was not enough to limit the damage and avoid the mercy outcome with 4 goals scored in the second half for a final score of 1-9 for the hosts.

The coaches will be back on the soccer pitch tomorrow night to figure out how to improve on marking a player, create space and make those triangular passes in motion. One thing to realize was that the Bad Axe had about 20 players who were Seniors and Juniors as opposed to 1 senior and 4 Junior players for the Caro team. The Tigers are in a development phase with 8 sophomore and 5 freshmen players out of 18 players which makes it a very young potential team for the years to come!

The MVP award was presented to right winger and sophomore Brady Rigg who scored the only goal of his team and played a solid game and worked really hard to create scoring chances.

Next away game will be this Wednesday, September 23rd in Memphis at 5:30 pm.