Girls U14 Gold wins the 2009 AIM tournament!

The girls worked very hard.  The competition was excellent.  We played the St. Catherine’s Jet’s in the first game and lost 2 to 0.  Even though we lost the first game, we felt we really out played St. Catherine’s in the second half of the game.  In game two we played Amherst and won 1 to 0 but we controlled the play and the score should have been greater in our favor.  Game 3 we played last year’s champions Laconia and we scored a goal (Ellen Plunkett) with 5 minutes left to break the tie.  The girls fought hard and deserved to win this close match, score 1 to 0.

The championship game was again very hard fought.  We played a very good team that had 3 guest players (as did the other two teams we played.)  We played with only our own team.  The team we played was Enchanted Mountain Soccer Club from Olean.  They were big and fast, but we showed how skilled our kids are with the ball.  It was zero –zero after 2 overtimes and our girls won in the shootout.  It was a very exciting tournament and our kids really grew as a team this weekend.   The opposing teams voted for the player of the match for the other team every game.  Mollie Zugger was player of the match in games 1 and 3, Darlene Eckhardt was named in game two and Nicole Thiel our goaltender was most deservingly the player of the match in our championship game.  Ellen Plunkett, Lauren Bugaj, Autumn Padovani and Alex Juliano also stood out in games during the tournament overall.  I was happy with the play and effort of all of our players this weekend.

The team has 7 wins and 1 loss this year and all our wins have been by shutouts.  Our league is 4-0.